Foreign Policy and Technical Cooperation for Agricultural Modernization in the Post-Second War

The Case of the Technical Agriculture Office (Brazil-USA)

Abstract

This article analyzes the creation of the Technical Office of Agriculture (ETA) based on a technical cooperation agreement between Brazil and the United States. Created in 1953, the ETA came from a set of general technical cooperation agreements that marked the relations between the two countries since the 1940s and aimed to “facilitate the development of agriculture and natural resources in the United States of Brazil”. So that we can understand the main points of this agreement, we will present the history of technical cooperation in the post-second war period, as well as some guidelines of Brazilian foreign policy in the period. Having overcome the pragmatic equidistance, which marked the direction of foreign policy in years of war, the Americanist paradigm, which was decisive in the post-war period, was adapted to the national developmentalism of the second Vargas government, in which the modernization of sectors such as agriculture assumed a fundamental role as state policy. As a methodology, exposed historical and theoretical questions about foreign policy and technical cooperation in the post-second war, we will present, in an expository way, the main elements present in the referred agreement, as well as its supposed effectiveness as a development instrument.