Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xvii and 451 pp., maps, tables, figures, notes, bibliography, index. $32.99 paper (ISBN 9781108460972), $94.99 cloth (ISBN 9781108473095), $26.00 electronic (ISBN 9781108641876).
Antonio Augusto Rossotto Ioris. New York, NY: Earthscan from Routledge, 2018. xiii and 218 pp., tables, figures, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 paper (ISBN 9780367248765), $140.00 cloth (ISBN 9781138744660).
Feeding the World and Agribusiness and the Neoliberal Food System in Brazil aim to tell the story of one of rural Brazil's most complex and pressing issues in the past half-century: What are the causes and implications of the dramatic increase in agricultural and livestock output that made Brazil an agricultural superpower? Feeding the World asserts that the “rise of Brazil as an agricultural powerhouse is one of the most important developments in modern world history” (p. 1), and Agribusiness analyzes “socio-ecological contradictions of neoliberalised agribusiness” in Brazil (p. 6). All of these terms—“powerhouse,” “feeding,” “world,” “contradictions,” and “neoliberalised agribusiness”—are highly contested and fraught with multiple meanings and implications when applied to a globalized, politically powerful, and significant economic sector.
Klein and Luna, who have credentials as historian and economist, respectively, use Feeding the World to show how Brazil became a “powerhouse.” For them, powerhouse means Brazil's spectacular rise in agricultural productivity and exports, becoming “one of the world's most important granaries” (p. 1). The authors include an overwhelming amount of data in tables, offering an encyclopedic synthesis of Brazil's increases in output of crops and animal products. Feeding the World summarizes Brazil's significant post-1960 achievements in agricultural production and exports—the country is the world's leading exporter of several crops and animal products and agriculture makes large contributions to Brazil's trade balance—before analyzing institutional, organizational, and technological causes. The authors devote significant attention to three states (Mato Grosso, São Paulo, and Rio Grande do Sul) that offer insight into particular aspects of the agricultural sector. An “agrarian question” chapter describes the trajectory of Brazilian agriculture on either side of the 1964 coup d'etat that ended attempts for land reform in favor of the conservative modernization policies that took hold in the 1970s during the military regime.
In synthesis, Feeding argues that Brazil modernized agriculture in the 1970s and 1980s without land reform (“conservative agricultural revolution”), but instead pursued modernization through subsidized credit, price supports, investments in research, and land colonization support while excluding farmers unable to modernize. Significantly, the military regime started these conservative reforms immediately after a civilian government had taken steps toward agrarian and rural labor reforms. Some successful farmers entered international markets for products and inputs during the period of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s, which further encouraged modernization and productivity growth.
By contrast, Ioris uses Agribusiness to explore “some of the underlying chaos that pervades the modernisation and expansion of capitalist agriculture” (p. 3). For Ioris, agro-neoliberalism is “an economic and technological project and a politico-ecological phenomenon that relies on the ideology of market-based solutions to old and new production and commercialisation problems” (pp. 4–5). Agro-neoliberalism “reconfigures old agriculture practices and relaunches them in the circles of transnational capitalism … [resulting in] increased concentration of power and transactions into the hands of just a few” (p. 69).
Ioris recognizes the “significant results” of agribusiness in expanding agricultural area and achieving market integration—the phenomena that motivate the authors of Feeding the World—but he is far more concerned with multiscale “contradictions, failures and protests” that Brazil exemplifies (p. 6). Ioris, a senior lecturer at the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University, outlines a useful political ecology of agrifood systems that he applies to agro-neoliberalism, and its expression in Brazil as agribusiness, focusing on “renewed public-private alliances, novel techno-economic strategies that intensify socio-ecological exploitation and the containment of critical reactions” (p. 49). Through insightful analysis of Mato Grosso, rents, and place-making processes, Ioris argues that Brazilian agribusiness has produced “uneven, unstable and transient” outcomes, the positive features of which are overshadowed by many negative results such as “socio-ecological degradation and a highly hierarchical social order” (p. 197). Rather than seeing agriculture adjusting to, and benefiting from, globalized markets, as Feeding does, Ioris sees neoliberal agribusiness as “the most recent expression of the dynamic and cruel frontier of Brazil's hierarchical and unequal society” (p. 210). The book's conclusion (pp. 197–210) alludes to “fields of empty grains,” suggesting the failed promise of agribusiness.
This initial summary of the two books leads to some rather simple comparisons: Feeding the World reifies the neoliberal agricultural project that Agribusiness critiques; Feeding tells the story of a project that should be replicated outside Brazil to satisfy growing global food demands, whereas Agribusiness identifies problems with agriculture that should be corrected; Feeding praises increased output and production, whereas Agribusiness discovers the secrets of rents than enrich few at the expense of many. Feeding and Agribusiness also offer several interesting areas of comparison, though, that help illuminate current thinking about Brazilian agriculture and outline some lacuna that might challenge researchers to probe new areas.
In both books, Mato Grosso state exemplifies broader processes of Brazilian agriculture. Mato Grosso, as an exemplar, is both simple and complicated. It is simple because of the state's current position in Brazilian agriculture, producing nearly 30 percent of the country's soybeans, nearly two thirds of cotton, and 24 percent of maize. Mato Grosso is also the country's largest beef producer and generates billions of dollars annually in farm exports. It is complicated, though, because of Brazil's continental dimensions and the specific underlying assumption that processes in Mato Grosso are replicated elsewhere in Brazil.
In Agribusiness, Mato Grosso is the epicenter of agro-neoliberalism, whereas Feeding the World uses Mato Grosso as one of three states chosen for closer analysis. Both books summarize government-facilitated private colonization in the 1970s and 1980s, which involved thousands of farmers leaving Brazil's southern states in search of land and opportunity in Mato Grosso, Goiás, and Bahia states. Feeding the World argues that some undefined percentage of these settlers became “entrepreneurial” farmers who seized on opportunities of global markets in the 1990s, whereas Ioris argues that “the agro-neoliberal agenda was responsible for redeeming the agribusiness frontier and catapulting it to national prominence” (p. 94). In Feeding, farmers somehow find the entrepreneurial spirit from within, whereas in Agribusiness, farmers in Mato Grosso become critical to generating rents that accrue, ultimately, to transnational corporations. Agribusiness also suggests a cynical discursive ploy at work: Neoliberalized agribusiness in Mato Grosso is “presented as the undisputed redemption of the agricultural frontier” because it shows “efficiency, competence, and autonomy from government” (p. 106). By contrast, Feeding the World discusses Mato Grosso's rise to prominence as a case of the migration of “well-funded farm families” from southern Brazilian states who “brought with them modern agricultural techniques, a knowledge of the market and a commitment to producer cooperatives” (p. 233).
Agribusiness, however, goes beyond a simple reading of Mato Grosso's development as a major agricultural player in a chapter focusing on rents. Ioris deserves credit for reinserting rent into political ecology and for placing large-scale commercial agriculture on political ecology's research agenda. For Ioris, rent in the agribusiness context accrues to landowners from interactions among the state apparatus, private property regimes, and labor power and socionature. He focuses on the production of rents in three periods (agricultural frontier, 1970s–1980s; transition to neoliberalism, late 1980s–1990s; consolidation of neoliberalism, 2000s–present). In the latter period, agroindustrial firms linked to global markets play an increasingly important role in generating and appropriating agribusiness rents. This is useful analysis, but I wonder about the role of technological production. What role(s) do local or regional elites play?
What happened to the private colonization firms (and their significant human and social capitals) that were so important in earlier phases of rent production? Is the model for rents in Mato Grosso applicable elsewhere?
A second theme for comparison is the type of environmental omission committed in both books. Major topics in the literature, such as land change, policy compliance, agricultural intensification, and chemical use, somehow elude authors of both books. In Feeding, environmental questions are lumped unhelpfully into “sustainability” concerns. The authors assert that they will not analyze the “the dismantling of the Amazon” (p. 4); nor do they analyze Cerrado (savanna) destruction, which has a far higher rate of conversion to crops and pasture compared to the Amazon rainforest. With this claim, the authors jettison a large set of issues normally included in discussions of sustainability. Feeding also devotes minimal attention to a highly polemic topic when they claim that Brazil's “agricultural revolution has occurred and continues to evolve without the need for more land expansion or for the continued dismantling of the rainforest” (p. 4). Here, the authors reproduce the discourse of the agricultural lobby, rather than engaging in the current literature. In another attempt to analyze “sustainability,” Feeding focuses on low-carbon agriculture and presents superficial discussions of ecoregions and monitoring of land conversion, failing to mention forest law debates or compliance programs, both of which have been well discussed in the literature. Finally, no analysis follows a claim that Brazil is “one of the world's largest consumers of pesticides” (p. 189).
We might expect deeper environmental engagement by Ioris, who promises analysis on “socio-ecological contradictions,” but we do not get much, apart from acknowledgment that socionature is a component of rent production (p. 134), even if the analytical contribution of nature (or socionature) is minor to the rent analysis. Ioris interprets environmental policies applied to agriculture as attempts to create environmental cover, calling out neoliberal agribusiness for “appropriation of the environmental agenda … and its conversion into new business opportunities” (p. 68). Policies encouraging farmers to comply with Brazil's Forest Code, some of which originated in Mato Grosso, have attracted several rigorous studies that confound simple characterization of the policies. Feeding and Agribusiness are isolated from the conclusions of these scholars, however.
Individual agency is a third point of comparison between Feeding and Agribusiness. The “entrepreneurial farmer” occupies an important but poorly developed category in Feeding. Klein and Luna describe this group as “an extraordinarily entrepreneurial class of farmers who came to dominate national agriculture mostly under the leadership of southern and southeastern farmers who had to overcome a harsh economic and competitive environment, lack of government support and would do so by creating what has been called their own ‘value chains’” (p. 91). “Entrepreneurial farmers” are the people “who have responded to all the new incentives both in their traditional areas and by opening up enormous new frontiers like the Cerrado to modern commercial farming” (p. 138). By the end of the book, we have more clarity on this polemic cultural argument as the authors note “the unusual role of well-educated and experienced Southern and Southeastern farmers” (p. 409) who “opened up this previously backward region [Center-West] to modern commercial agriculture.” Klein and Luna argue that these “modern farmers have created numerous producer cooperatives, farmer associations and lobbies which have come to exercise major economic and political power, with representation in Congress, where they fiercely defend their interests” (p. 409).
On this point, Agribusiness is not far off, although with the inclusion of the concept of hegemony the argument is more complex. Ioris argues that neoliberalized agribusiness maintains “political hegemony” (p. 56), offering evidence that includes the entrenchment of agribusiness under the Lula and Dilma administrations (2003–2010, and 2011–2016, respectively), the country's strong reliance on primary commodities for export revenue, and the idea that agribusiness is a “green anchor” (p. 61) necessary to manage Brazil's public debt. For Ioris, elites use the positive results of agribusiness to “unify the interests of rural conservative groups and renew processes of political hegemony and class domination” (p. 62). He writes that “agro-neoliberalism has become so hegemonic in Brazil that it seems naturalized and beyond the sphere of criticism, having secured support from a great majority of politicians” (p. 70). Although I appreciated the inclusion of hegemony as a concept, greater attention to its definition would have allowed Ioris to be more forceful in applying hegemony elsewhere in his analysis.
Returning to “entrepreneurial farmers,” and putting aside the complex question of whether they represent political hegemony, Feeding never tells us about these people beyond an abstract category. During field work I have met many people who may fit Klein and Luna's definition of entrepreneurial farmers. These people navigate Kafkaesque bureaucratic processes to get (and refinance) loans. They have told me about relatives killed in land disputes, about fortunes (and land) lost in market swings and bad decisions, about risk-taking that generated big rewards, about how they struggled to maintain their farms during difficult times, and about how they try to make the right environmental decisions even when market signals offer different pathways. These people are nowhere in the book because the authors prioritize crops, institutions, and organizations over the stories of individual farmers.
Ioris provides more analysis, not least because he is up front with his own perspective: His family and relatives moved from southern Brazil to frontier regions of Mato Grosso in the 1970s, where he observed the difficulties and hardships experienced by thousands of other families (p. 17). Agribusiness is both a personal and a scholarly project; perhaps his own firsthand observations and experiences encouraged him to see processes of agricultural expansion in terms of personal costs and human suffering. For example, Ioris writes that “when an operator [worker] turns on a tractor or any other farm machine, he or she is not only earning a living or producing commodities to be exported, but also an anonymous, miniscule chapter of a much wider narrative [that] is being further and further enriched” (p. 106). This comes closer than Feeding to personalizing the experience of Brazil's dramatic increase in agricultural output, but it is also not entirely satisfactory because it is not supported by narrative.
Agricultural technology is a fourth point of comparison between books. Feeding offers an important and useful analysis, mainly a synthesis of dozens of Brazilian scholars, of Embrapa, the country's agricultural research agency that was critical to agricultural technology development. Klein and Luna provide an extended discussion of Embrapa's large investments in human capital and, repeating standard triumphalist claims, argue that technological investments helped turn the Cerrado from a large area of “degraded land” into its present status as a “previously abandoned zone [that] accounts for almost 50% of national grain production” (p. 163). The authors put more explanatory weight on “tremendous investment in education and research” than “entrepreneurial farmers” for having “made Brazil into one of the more advanced agricultural producers in the world” (p. 189). Describing the Cerrado as “degraded” and “abandoned” is inaccurate, but fits broader claims in Feeding about how technology and “entrepreneurial farmers” created an “agricultural powerhouse.”
By contrast, Agribusiness offers only minimal analysis of technological production and dissemination, in general and with respect to Embrapa in particular. In his analysis of agribusiness rents, Ioris emphasizes agroindustrial firms linked to global markets, which play an increasingly important role in generating and appropriating agribusiness rents. We only get superficial attention to technological production during earlier periods by Embrapa, when the state played a relatively large role in producing rents. Embrapa then disappears from discussions on rent generation through markets. This state–market dichotomy, when seen from the lens of technology development, seems too simple to account for the many partnerships and interactions between agronomic scientists working for Embrapa but working on partnerships with Brazilian and transnational firms.
Exclusion is the fifth and final theme for comparison in this review. Feeding the World makes little analytical progress beyond citing work indicating that 3.7 million farm units (accounting for approximately 11 million people) are at the bottom of the income distribution scale. The incomes of these families are supplemented by conditional cash transfer programs such as Bolsa Família and Bolsa Escola. What is the fate of this group of farmers? For Klein and Luna, these farmers are a “socially negative sector [that] seems unable to advance” (p. 404). They suggest that the solution appears to be “a rapid rural exodus with a continuing loss of rural population that has been typical of all rural regions in the last fifty years” (p. 404). It is unclear how effective this solution will be in a context of stagnant economic growth, urban violence, and urban unemployment, making this analysis disappointing.
In Agribusiness, Ioris approaches exclusion primarily through analysis of place-making processes. Ioris identifies and describes displacement, replacement, and misplacement, which he applies to analysis of the specific types of territories. The idea of misplacement refers to people literally out of place in the agribusiness landscape, either because they are struggling to maintain their desired lifestyle or the power of agribusiness as a “normative” project that has produced a particular social order and sense of place (p. 161). Leftover territories include nonagribusiness farms and ranches with relatively lower productivity, at the margins, literally, of globalized soybean and cotton farms. These concepts certainly go further than the limited discussion of exclusion that Feeding provides, but they remain abstract and descriptive.
Feeding and Agribusiness provide the outlines of a debate on a highly significant phenomenon that has been apparent to specialists for several years. On the one hand, elites have portrayed Brazil's agricultural sector as the country's economic salvation, stepping in for a manufacturing sector that had difficulty adapting to global competition; in this view, agribusiness has provided economic opportunity to individuals and supported the country's macroeconomic position. On the other hand, critics allege that agriculture in Brazil is a cause of social and environmental dysfunctionality, generating inequality, perpetuating uneven land distribution, and creating negative impacts on flora and fauna through insatiable demands for land, nutrients, and chemicals. Specialists will also find plenty to disagree with, such as tired repetition of the “degraded” trope in Feeding, in addition to the quick dismissal in Agribusiness of environmental policies aimed at regulating socionature contradictions.
A final observation about both books is that we seem still distant from bridging analytical scales, linking global processes and personal struggle, sacrifice, accomplishments, and tragedies. Brazilian agribusiness is about production, entrepreneurs, rents, and exploitation (and, perhaps, even “feeding” the world). These processes and concepts, however, could be analyzed from the perspective(s) of the personal struggle and toil required to create and maintain Brazilian agribusiness through narrative forms that would weave family stories with national and global processes of elites, states, and firms extracting rents from soy farms carved out of forest and Cerrado. This narrative-analytic approach is but one of many opportunities to analyze the multiple dimensions of Brazilian agriculture between the triumphs proclaimed in Feeding and the “empty grains” of Agribusiness.