Eve E. Buckley's study of twentieth-century Brazil examines the nation's hard social realities through the history of science, focusing on the use of technology and engineering as vexed instruments ...of reform and economic development. Nowhere was the tension between technocratic optimism and entrenched inequality more evident than in the drought-ridden Northeastsertao, plagued by chronic poverty, recurrent famine, and mass migrations. Buckley reveals how the physicians, engineers, agronomists, and mid-level technocrats working for federal agencies to combat drought were pressured by politicians to seek out a technological magic bullet that would both end poverty and obviate the need for land redistribution to redress long-standing injustices.Scientists planned and oversaw huge projects including dam construction, irrigation for small farmers, and public health initiatives. They were, Buckley shows, sincerely determined to solve the drought crisis and improve the lot of poor people in thesertao. Over time, however, they came to the frustrating realization that, despite technology's tantalizing promise of an apolitical means to end poverty, political collisions among competing stakeholders were inevitable. Buckley's revelations about technocratic hubris, the unexpected consequences of environmental engineering, and constraints on scientists as agents of social change resonate with today's hopes that science and technology can solve society's most pressing dilemmas, including climate change.
Eve E. Buckley’s study of twentieth-century Brazil examines the nation’s hard social realities through the history of science, focusing on the use of technology and engineering as vexed instruments ...of reform and economic development. Nowhere was the tension between technocratic optimism and entrenched inequality more evident than in the drought-ridden Northeast sertão, plagued by chronic poverty, recurrent famine, and mass migrations. Buckley reveals how the physicians, engineers, agronomists, and mid-level technocrats working for federal agencies to combat drought were pressured by politicians to seek out a technological magic bullet that would both end poverty and obviate the need for land redistribution to redress long-standing injustices.
This article considers the impact of social inequities on technological diffusion in an impoverished region of Brazil. It examines the anti-revolutionary aims of infrastructural improvements (dams, ...road networks, and irrigation canals) that were intended to mitigate suffering during droughts while preempting radical social transformation in northeast Brazil’s semi-arid sertão . It argues that the political moderation of engineers, agronomists, and the public-works agencies they staffed during the early and mid-twentieth century, combined with the self-interested priorities of regional power brokers, produced a pattern of federal investment that reinforced northeast elites’ control over land and water resources and human labor in the sertão . Instead of reducing social inequities that made landless agricultural workers vulnerable to starvation during droughts, technological-development efforts exacerbated the economic and political distance between landowners and the landless poor. The article emphasizes the technological determinism that informed the work of northeast Brazil’s civil engineers in particular, a perspective they shared with their counterparts in the United States and elsewhere during this period. Brazilian agronomists and economists adopted more culturally and sociologically sophisticated analyses of sertão poverty, which led them to criticize the engineers’ development recommendations.
In 1952, Brazilian nutritionist Josué de Castro published a scathing critique of American conservationist William Vogt’s 1948 book Road to Survival, in which Vogt warned that curbing population ...growth was an urgent priority for developing nations. Vogt’s dismal depiction of hunger and poverty in many regions of the world, translated into eleven languages, was highly influential in shaping overpopulation discourse and related philanthropic actions in the United States over the following decade.¹ De Castro’s critique of Vogt’s work, entitled A Geopolítica da Fome (published in English as The Geography of Hunger), was translated into over twenty languages during the 1950s;
Climate and Culture EVE E. BUCKLEY
Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil,
09/2017
Book Chapter
Odprti dostop
Drought and the human suffering that accompanies it have been central to popular images of Brazil’s northeastern hinterland since at least the 1870s. Yet the designation of the Nordeste (Northeast) ...as a distinct region emerged only after Brazil’s federal government established the first drought works agency in 1909 to address the periodic affliction in its semiarid zone. Prior to that time, the usual geographic designation for the states from Bahia to Ceará was simply “the north.” The brief economic flourishing of the Amazon basin during its rubber export boom led to the widespread adoption of different terms for the two
Patronizing the Northeast EVE E. BUCKLEY
Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil,
09/2017
Book Chapter
Odprti dostop
In the final years of Brazil’s First Republic, a widely acclaimed novel presented a very different picture of sertanejos than that offered a quarter century earlier by Euclides da Cunha.A ...Bagaceira(1928) was written by José Américo Almeida, a thirty-year-old native of Paraíba state. Almeida subsequently headed the federal Ministério de Viação e Obras Públicas (Ministry of Transportation and Public Works)—which had jurisdiction over the federal drought agency—twice under President Getúlio Vargas.A Bagaceirawas a watershed in Brazilian literary history because of its evocative use of regional vocabulary and customs and its focus on harsh circumstances
Modernizing a Region EVE E. BUCKLEY
Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil,
09/2017
Book Chapter
Odprti dostop
The 1950s witnessed a rigorous rethinking of rural development in northeastern Brazil, guided by new federal agencies. These agencies were directed by economists rather than engineers. Two droughts ...at the beginning and end of the decade revealed that the efforts of the Departamento Nacional de Obras Contra as Secas (DNOCS; National Department for Works to Combat Droughts) over the prior half century had done little to reduce the human tragedy caused by the climatic scourge. This discredited the capacity of engineers to oversee regional development. In the midst of growing accusations that the federal drought agency had failed, economists were
