EMBRAPA: CIÊNCIA E TECNOLOGIA PARA A ACUMULAÇÃO DE CAPITAL NO CAMPO

Abstract

Since its institution, the Brazilian Agricultural Research (Embrapa) has exerted a primordial function in guaranteeing the necessary scientific-technological apparatus for capital accumulation's expansion. This process materialized itself through not only the creation and adaption of products and processes suitable to the Brazilian region's edaphoclimatic conditions but also the absorption, production, and organization of a set of speeches capable of justifying, in different moments of Brazil's conjuncture, the urgency of transforming the agricultural conditions in the country through state intervention in agrarian space - for example, agricultural research and rural extension and credit - as a way of propelling national's development. To investigate these tensions, we utilize bibliographic and documental research as methodological instruments, analyzing the material through the mediations between totality, universality, and particularity. That said, the investigation allows us to affirm that science and technology produced by the State via Embrapa have mostly served to increase capital's control over the Brazilian field - whether by research that contributed directly to monoculture's expansion or by agreements and conventions realized with companies or even by the propagation and creation of speeches that conceal the classes contradictions and the country's public agricultural research beneficiaries.