Esteemed co-authors Klein and Vidal Luna have added one more outstanding book to their previous important volumes that exhaustively explored the economic and demographic history of Brazil, slavery, the Cold War, and the period of the military dictatorship, 1964–1985. Feeding the World traces the change in Brazilian agriculture from a long-standing colonial legacy of reliance on single exports (sugar and coffee), based on low-technology and the continuing incorporation of new lands on the internal frontier, using unskilled labor and few agricultural inputs. By contrast, today Brazil is one of the top five world producers of thirty-six agricultural products, and the first- or second-largest exporter of dozens of crops including oranges, sugar, beef, chicken, corn, and soy, using highly mechanized production techniques, advanced agricultural research, and highly developed systems for agricultural credit and inputs.
How did this thoroughgoing transformation happen over the past fifty years? The aim of the book is...