Yield of dreams: Marching west and the politics of scientific knowledge in the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa)

•Historicizes science and technology in the expansion of industrial agriculture.•Writes Brazilian agricultural research into the narrative of the Green Revolution.•Based on interviews at Embrapa in Brazil and historical archives in the U.S.•Situates knowledge production within the geopolitics of agricultural modernization.

Over the past forty years, Brazilian agriculture has rapidly industrialized elevating the country as the world's first tropical agricultural giant. Much of the credit for this transformation has gone to the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) for their work in the center-west region of the country. This area, known as the Cerrado, industrialized rapidly starting in the early 1970s with the introduction of chemical fertilizers to fix its acidic soils and the development of new seed varieties adapted to the tropics. This paper historicizes the political and social relations behind the industrial transformation of the Cerrado by focusing on the establishment of Embrapa. I argue that US political relations and corporate interests helped to lay the scientific and institutional groundwork for public research in Brazil to ensure long-term industrialization of the Cerrado. The case of Embrapa, and their work in the Cerrado, expands the geographical, political and economic understanding of the deployment of US scientific experts and expertise during the Green Revolution. I show how US and Brazilian scientists, technocrats and investors collaborated in the making of “the Miracle of the Cerrado” in the post-WWII era. This research is based on interviews conducted at Embrapa headquarters and field research sites in Brazil as well as historical archives in both Brazil and the US.