Embrapa at 50 should be a celebration of its fringe heroines
By: Lídia Cabral (she/her/hers)
This year the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) commemorates its 50th anniversary. Embrapa is well know for driving the Brazilian Green Revolution, centred on soybean and the power of science to conquer nature and push through agriculture modernization. This celebration should not be about nostalgic and partial recollections of the organization’s trajectory. Embrapa should instead accept and celebrate the growing diversity of its research production and embrace a more plural stance toward agricultural science.
In this article, I suggest that inspiration is drawn from the situated knowledges emerging from Embrapa’s fringes, and, specifically, the contributions of female scientists who have been exposed to condescending attitudes and discrimination. I refer to these women as “fringe heroines” as they adopt research agendas that are at odds with the prevailing technoscientific paradigm.
My analysis is guided by feminist technoscience studies and its interrogation of gendered power relations that shape (and are shaped by) knowledge production and that produce social and environmental injustices. Building on Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘situated and embodied knowledges’ and Sandra Harding’s ‘standpoint of the subordinate’, feminist technoscience argues that knowledge production is never neutral but is always entangled with political positions, societal interests, and power dynamics.
“Without feminism there is no agroecology”, Aracaju, November 2019.
Picture credit: Lídia Cabral
I focus on three women scientists working at Embrapa – Isaura, Gabriela and Eunice (not their real names), with whom I conducted life history interviews. These interviews juxtapose their personal and career trajectories with the history of Embrapa.
Isaura is an agronomist, with specializations in biometeorology, soil science, vegetal biology, and agroecology. Gabriela is an agronomist and ecologist whose work focuses on genetic resource conservation and ethnoscience. Eunice is a social scientist whose work focuses on family farming systems, socio-environmental dynamics, and agrobiodiversity.
In their accounts, they invariably described the challenges that they have faced throughout their careers, particularly in the early stages. Gaining acceptance in a male-dominated world, and combining work with family responsibilities (including availability to travel abroad or flexibility to relocate to remote locations) were recurrent themes.
The three women also conveyed a strong environmental conscience. Their life histories started with childhood memories that placed them in nature. Gabriela and Isaura went on to pursue environmental studies. Eunice engaged with the subject it through her encounters with the struggles of family farmers and specific social groups (such as women gathering wild fruits) whose identity and livelihoods are entangled with their ecological setting. Besides their personal experiences, these women referenced the awakening to environmental issues in Brazil, beginning since in the 1980s, as providing the backdrop for their lives.
The three women also described their drive for social justice, which developed through different formative life experiences. Gabriela recalled her “thirst for action” as a student in the late 1980s (in the aftermath of the military regime) and her aspiration to contribute to a better world for agricultural labourers. However, her most transformative experience with injustice came later, through interactions with Indigenous people. For Eunice’s, her personal background, and the hardships that she faced as a young woman (working from a very young age to make ends meet) bolstered her felt sense of unfairness and discrimination. Her life history account emphasized class divides and inequities in Brazil, which she experienced first-hand. For Isaura, the sense of discrimination is based on gender rather than class. The daughter of a chemistry professor, she was part of the generation of Embrapa pioneers recruited in the mid-1970s, when female agronomists were uncommon and often treated with contempt.
My analysis emphasizes how these women’s direct and indirect experiences with discrimination help to shape a feminist epistemology centered on practice and marginalized ways of knowing. This epistemology challenges and resists the top-down logic of scientific production that has prevailed since the dawn of Brazil’s agricultural modernization and has resulted in environmental destruction and social inequities, particularly in agricultural frontier zones.
Rooted in their lived experiences of discrimination based on class, gender, and ethnicity, and a deep environmental and social conscience, the three Embrapa women direct their work towards vulnerable social groups and territories, in spite of the obstacles that they face. Their commitment to marginalized social groups is instrumental to occupying a niche and establishing a position of respect inside Embrapa. Though operating on the fringes, these women are therefore using their positions in the organization to build an agricultural science that is situated in peoples’ struggles and subaltern standpoints. These are not only women’s struggles but also the struggles of Indigenous and other social groups in conditions of marginalization.
My analysis shows how these women’s personal experiences intersected with the changing political context, helping them to develop a self-critical sense of their place in a patriarchal organization and society, and become determined to challenge the status quo. Their emphasis on practical experience and field contact echo Haraway’s call for situated knowledges. Their own experiences of disadvantage and deliberate efforts to work with marginalized social groups make them see science in ways that align with Harding’s standpoint epistemology. These women’s accounts reveal what I argue to be feminist struggles for more equitable and pluralistic agricultural sciences and practices.
These fringe heroines experienced a short-lived moment in the limelight during a period of progressive politics in Brazil. In recent years, particularly during the Bolsonaro Presidency, they confronted an unfavourable context and retreated to behind the scenes. They maintained, however, their resolve to swim against the tide in their unyielding quest for justice and intellectual reproduction.
Embrapa’s 50th anniversary happens against a more promising context in Brazilian politics, as Lula da Silva returns to the Presidency with pledges to reinstate progressive policies. The time is ripe to reflect on Embrapa contribution to Brazilian agriculture and its duty towards society as a publicly funded body. This should draw inspiration from the work of these fringe heroines who are well equipped to understand the standpoint of the subordinate in Brazilian agriculture. They should therefore have the support and recognition they deserve for more inclusive, pluralistic and equitable agricultural sciences.
Read the full article here: Fringe heroines: situated struggles of women scientists in Brazilian agriculture
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Lídia Cabral is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK. She is a social scientist working across disciplines. Her work centres on the politics of food, South-South relations, and the power of discourse in driving policy and constructing social identities. Her latest research focuses on the histories of the Green Revolution in Brazil, India and China, exploring how narratives about the past shape the international circulation of knowledge and contemporary technology transactions in the global South. She is also interested in researching equity, justice, sustainability, and territoriality in relation to food systems.