The need for urgent, structural transformations to dominant food systems is increasingly recognized in research and policy. The direction these transformations take is in great part influenced by how the problem is framed and what future pathways become seen as plausible and desirable. Scientific knowledge and the organizations producing it hold considerable authority in suggesting what alternatives are or are not worth pursuing, ultimately shaping frames and in turn being shaped by them. This paper examines Brazil’s federal Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), a major contributor to technological advances that made Brazil into an agricultural powerhouse. We examine the ways in which Embrapa’s leadership has framed sustainable agriculture in its public communication and the wider implications for food systems transformation. Drawing from Embrapa news articles in the period 2015–2020, we identify four interrelated frames forming Embrapa’s prevalent position on sustainability. Our results show that while Embrapa promotes practices based on alternative approaches such as agroecology, its deeper framing often reflects the core assumptions driving dominant industrial food systems. This framing reinforces underlying logics of control, efficiency, and competition aligned with the productivist paradigm and excludes divergent perspectives that exist within the organization.

研究和政策日益认识到对主导粮食系统进行紧急结构性转型的必要性。这些转变的方向在很大程度上取决于问题的框架以及未来的路径被认为是合理和可取的。科学知识和产生科学知识的组织在建议哪些替代方案值得或不值得追求方面拥有相当大的权威，最终塑造框架，反过来又被框架塑造。本文探讨了巴西联邦农业研究公司 (Embrapa)，该公司是技术进步的主要贡献者，使巴西成为农业强国。我们研究了 Embrapa 领导层在其公共传播中构建可持续农业的方式以及对粮食系统转型的更广泛影响。根据 2015 年至 2020 年期间 Embrapa 的新闻文章，我们确定了构成 Embrapa 在可持续发展方面的普遍立场的四个相互关联的框架。我们的结果表明，虽然 Embrapa 提倡基于农业生态学等替代方法的实践，但其更深层次的框架往往反映了驱动主导工业食品系统的核心假设。这一框架强化了与生产力主义范式一致的控制、效率和竞争的基本逻辑，并排除了组织内部存在的不同观点。