The Changing Structure of Brazilian Agriculture, 1920–2017

Brazil has undergone an extraordinary change in its agriculture in the past half century in terms of output, land use, and productivity. It has also gone from being primarily a coffee exporter to becoming one of the world’s largest agricultural exporters in dozens of agricultural and pastoral products. It is one of the most dynamic parts of the national economy and accounts for just under half of the value of national exports and generates the most surplus income of any major agricultural exporter in the world. This extraordinary growth has led to changes in land usage and the number of productive farms, in best practices, and increased human capital in the rural area, but all these changes have occurred with little change in land ownership. While large farms have changed profoundly in this period, this still remains a highly distorted agricultural system. Only one tenth of all agricultural producers account for over eight tenths of the total value of agricultural production, and close to half of the farms are incapable of generating an adequate standard of living. The aim of our essay is to examine this paradox in the recent evolution of Brazilian agriculture.