Agriculture is my Business: the Participation of the Rockefeller Foundation in Techno-Scientific Exchange Projects of the Ministry of Agriculture of Brazil (1930-1955)

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the formation of a bureaucracy with a technical profile in the construction of a new type of agriculture oriented to the overcoming of concepts and methods considered traditional in rural production in Brazil, in the period between 1930 and 1955. The investigation focused on analyzing the nature of the professional training of technical personnel of the Ministry of Agriculture (MA) and on understanding how the State reverses itself in the educational development of its own agronomists, veterinarians and agricultural technicians, agents whose work was oriented to transcend poverty, reach the modernity and guarantee the national prosperity. Through the analysis of the Rockefeller Foundation's Archive concerning the professional records of at least 21 agrarian experts, it was possible to find out about the participation of some technicians, their professional trajectories and the agrarian development projects that were impelled by the MA and/or his fellows regional institutes, material that contributes to the formation of networks of technical knowledge at a global level, in historical contexts in which converge the completion of techno-scientific practices in the countryside, the diversification of agrarian companies at national level, the creation of international commodity markets and in fight hunger in the international arena, material that encourages new study themes on the Green Revolution in a Brazilian way.