In 1909, the Brazilian government established an Inspectorate for Works to Combat Drought (now DNOCS) in the country’s semi-arid northeast interior. This was the federal government’s response to the recurrent humanitarian crisis caused by droughts and harvest failure, when many residents of that region died from starvation or disease. Over its century-long history, DNOCS has overseen the construction of numerous roads, reservoirs and irrigation networks, all theoretically aimed at reducing the human suffering caused by droughts. As many critics have noted, the selection and placement of these infrastructural investments have aided landowning elite ranchers and farmers far more than they helped the landless poor. Development funds provided by DNOCS and related agencies have been justly maligned as a “drought industry” that takes advantage of the sympathy engendered by the climate crisis to funnel resources coveted by regional politicians (and their well-placed clients) into the federally underserved sertão.

This paper examines analyses of the drought crisis and its human costs made by agency technocrats who worked on the front lines of federal infrastructure projects in the interior northeast. Such projects employed male heads of refugee families who constructed reservoirs, roads and irrigation canals largely by hand. In return for this backbreaking labor, their families received daily food rations deemed just sufficient for survival.

The civil engineers and agronomists who managed such emergency public works projects developed an understanding of the drought problem focused on many factors other than climate. Civil engineers sent to the parched sertão to confront desperate poverty and epidemics around worksites often came to view the crisis as resulting from power imbalances and inequality as much as from any natural factors. This was echoed forcefully by development economists engaged in regional planning from the 1950s on. Agronomists, employed by the agency since 1932, focused on the cultural impediments to climate cycle adaptation among the sertanejo poor. They agonized about the lack of discipline and cooperative community spirit that hampered their establishment of irrigated smallholder colonies throughout the sertão.

These technocratic cohorts strove to assert their scientific authority in order to reorganize sertanejo society in ways they believed would make the region less vulnerable to drought and reduce the suffering of the very poor. They were frequently thwarted by both elite and popular sectors who rejected the scientists’ expertise in favor of their customary social organization. Many elements of this history are relevant to contemporary debates about adaptation to the realities of climate change and its resulting natural disasters.