Feeding the World

Feeding the World chronicles the rise of Brazil as a world agricultural powerhouse during the second half of the twentieth century. Tracing the history of Brazilian agricultural development, Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna focus specifically on how Brazil came to be the largest net food exporter in the world. Brazil was always an agricultural export country, but it was traditionally an exporter of a single crop. However, the country's agriculture underwent significant changes after 1960. Since then, Brazil has become one of the top five world producers of some 36 agricultural products and is now the world's primary exporter of such agricultural goods as orange juice, sugar, meat, corn, and soybeans. Drawing heavily on historical and economic social science research, this book not only details how Brazil became an international leader in commercial agriculture, but offers careful insight into one of the most important developments in modern world history.

'This is a superb study about the emergence of Brazil as a global leader in the agri-business. Based on careful empirical research, Klein's and Luna's book provides a comprehensive and balanced analyses of the social-economic and environmental impacts of an extraordinary transformation that led Brazil to rank among the top-3 exporters of various grains and animal proteins. A transformation that dates back to the final quarter of the last century and is still in motion, in a country of continental scale.' Boris Fausto, Brazilian Academy of Sciences, 'Not only do Klein and Luna chart Brazil's stunning emergence as an agricultural giant with global reach, they also explain how it happened. Richly detailed, and drawing from an extraordinary array of data, the book blends aggregate analyses and enlightening case studies to uncover the factors accounting for sustained advance in agriculture and agri-business in Brazil s southern and western regions. Klein and Luna provide the definitive study of Brazil's dramatic agricultural modernization over the last sixty years.' William R. Summerhill, University of California, Los Angeles

Herbert S. Klein is Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and Research Fellow and Latin American Curator at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California. Francisco Vidal Luna is Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Economics and Administration (FEA) at the Universidade de São Paulo.