Resumen

PACHECO TROCONIS, Germán. Ciencias agrícolas, modernización e inmigración en venezuela,1908-1948. Agroalim [online]. 2006, vol.11, n.23, pp.85-100. ISSN 1316-0354.

The modernization of Venezuelan agriculture was a substantially notorious process from the beginning of the 20th Century up to the 1970’s. The Venezuelan intellectual elite looked at it as an indispensable phenomenon for repositioning the Venezuelan economy within the world context through improvements in agricultural competition and that impressed upon this the dynamic demanded by the internal market. Establishing changes in the relations of agricultural techniques was assimilated in the prevailing concept and was oriented to establishing the so called rational agriculture. The development of Agricultural Science required a set of public works, financial and human resources severely restricted in Latin America in the first decades of the 20th Century. Among them was the availability of qualified human capital for confronting modernization in the strategic agricultural era, whose requirements were covered through contracting scientists and foreign agricultural experts through management by the State including the Venezuelan case. The modernization of Venezuela’s agriculture went through importing this resource whose entry into the country obeyed to a public policy action that led to building a technical elite. In the first phase, the State designed ad hoc commissions for transferring the qualified work force, which had been contracted for outside the country, even if some immigrants with very particular professional attributes arrived spontaneously. The objective of this article is the historical analysis of the first contributions made by foreign scientists to Latin America during the beginning of the Venezuelan agricultural modernization process, while reconstructing the process of making the technical elite in this country, the national and international context that makes possible the contribution of experts, their form of arrival and the role it has played in Venezuelan agricultural modernization.

Palabras clave : agricultural sciences; research; immigration; Venezuela.