Public Research Organizations and Agricultural Development in Brazil: How Did Embrapa Get It Right?

One of the most extraordinary events in Brazil in the past 30 years has been the country’s “agricultural revolution.” In the 1970s, food scarcity was a concrete risk in a country experiencing rapid urbanization and middle class expansion. Food scarcity concerns reemerged during the following decade when short-lived spikes in real wages temporarily increased households’ demand for those goods. One of the government’s initiatives to address Brazil’s stagnant agriculture sector and food scarcity was Embrapa (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária). Embrapa has succeeded in adapting, creating, and transferring technologies to Brazilian farmers for the past 30 years, helping transform Brazil into one of the world’s largest food exporters. How did Embrapa get it right when similar organizations failed?