ABSTRACT
Due to the country's vast agricultural production and its sizeable influence on globalised markets, the Brazilian experience has major academic and socio-political implications beyond the country's borders. The acclaimed triumph of neo-liberalised agribusiness in Brazil hides a systematic attempt to conceal structural risks and uncertainties. The material and symbolic complexity of agro-neoliberalism provides fertile ground for further academic work, but this will require from the scientific community the capacity to creatively connect the abstract face of neoliberalism with the concrete and lived reality of rural and regional changes. The advance of neo-liberalised agribusiness in Brazil is essentially the embodiment of both the most progressive and the most regressive elements of capitalism in the country's history. The easy escalation of corrupted agro-neoliberalism benefits from pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities inherited from earlier developmentalist, Keynesian models of agriculture, but agro-neoliberalism itself now contributes to the reinforcement of corruption in other areas of social and economic activity.
