An ethnography of the Instituto Pensar Agropecuária

Abstract

With growing setbacks in climate and indigenous issues in Brazil, specialists on socio-environmental themes have sought to identify the factors and agents that give support to this situation. One of the main actors mentioned in the scientific literature is the agribusiness caucus (FPA), a multiparty bloc with rising power in the Brazilian National Congress. This article is an ethnography of the strategic nucleus in which the official positions of the FPA are negotiated and defined: the Instituto Pensar Agropecuária (IPA). Its initial aim is to analyze the three sets of actors that operate in the IPA: business organizations, technical agents and parliamentarians of the FPA’s board of directors. The second aim is to examine how this tripartite political dispositif is put to work. The article is based on participant observation at the IPA and the National Congress, on interviews with private, technical and political agents who are part of the institute and on corporate and state documents. The results indicate that the consolidation of the IPA significantly altered the representation of interests of the elites of the food systems that operate in the country.

Keywords:
Instituto Pensar Agropecuária; Agribusiness Caucus; Food Systems; Representation of Interests; Legistative Branch