Eve Buckley, University of Pennsylvania

The expansive backlands of Northeast Brazil are a semi-arid region plagued by recurrent drought. In 1909, Brazil’s recently restructured federal government established an agency to address the problem of drought in the Northeast. During its initial decades, this agency was staffed primarily by engineers. Using the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation as their model, Brazil’s drought engineers engaged in an ambitious program of dam building throughout the Northeast region. Yet a severe drought during the early 1930s revealed that dams had little positive impact on the humanitarian crisis provoked by the volatile climate. Federal officials and national politicians thus pressured the agency to shift its focus from dam-building to irrigation works. Regional reformers hoped that smallholder agricultural colonies settled around federal reservoirs would begin to shift political power in the hinterland Northeast away from ranchers and export farmers, who held title to most of the region’s land. However, political pressure to reform the drought agency waned once the drought episode subsided, and the agency returned to its primary focus on dam construction, much of which took place on private land.

During the 1950s, two droughts caused many thousands of rural Northeasterners to flee their homes in search of food and water, and engineers’ credibility as regional developers declined. This paper focuses on a series of changes in the Brazilian drought agency’s management and agenda during this period, influenced by international trends in regional planning. Economists, who comprised a new professional cohort in Brazil following the Second World War, entered the vacuum created by the engineering model’s demise. Aided by foreign advisors, economists offered a strategy for regional planning that looked beyond the specific problem of drought and its aftermath. Their new development institutions were supplied with technical assistance from the U. S. State Department’s Point IV mission and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Most prominently, Stefan Robock, former chief economist for the TVA, worked in the Northeast from 1954 to 1956 under U. N. auspices. Robock established an office within Northeast Brazil’s new development bank that conducted numerous analyses of the region’s climate, economy and social organization.

This paper aims to examine the symbolic and material impact of the TVA on approaches to regional planning in Brazil. It is an attempt to uncover the global significance of the TVA as a widely exported model for economic development guided by technical experts. I consider the influence of Robock’s (and other American technical advisors’) experience as a regional developer in the United States on his work in Brazil. I am particularly interested in the American technocrats’ observations of differences between political institutions and social organization in Northeast Brazil and the United States that they believed might affect the impact of their technical recommendations on the Northeast region. I also look at the willingness of Northeast Brazil’s most prominent economist in this period, Celso Furtado, to adopt the Americans’ proposals for regional planning. Furtado began his career as an economic historian and was keenly attuned to national and global power dynamics that had shaped the Northeast’s economy since the colonial period. He promoted changes to land ownership as one essential element in regional economic restructuring, and eventually found himself exiled from Brazil as a result of this proposal (following a military coup in 1964). American technocrats were caught between their own enthusiasm for smallholding as a route to increased productivity and the State Department’s reluctance to anger conservative political allies in Brazil.