Rural extension and North American hegemony in Brazil

Abstract

After World War II and in the beginning of the Cold War, a new rural education paradigm emerged, based on President Truman’s Point IV Program. One of its axes was a re-signification of that concept, emphasizing non-school educational practices designed to increase the consumption of new technologies created in the world’s capitalistic epicenter. This article analyzes the new practices of agricultural education perpetrated in Brazil on the basis of cooperation agreements signed by the American government and Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture. It stresses the role played by rural extension as a conveyor belt between big capital and Brazilian rural workers, discussing the mechanisms of persuasion used by extension agents with the goal of inculcating among rural workers values, habits, practices and rudiments of a technical culture which theoretically would bring them out of underdevelopment and integrate them into the commercial circuits of hegemonic capitalism. For this purpose, the article compares the discourse and the practices of extension, in order to demonstrate the excluding character of the criteria established to define the potential beneficiaries of the so-called “new educational practices” and their political-ideological profile. Based on documents published by the Ministry of Agriculture and on a vast North American official documentation, it analyzes the mechanisms through which the American project assumed the dimension of a broad public policy at the national level in the 1950s.

Key words: rural extension, State, Brazilian-North American relationships.