<p>This paper reveals how the Arenito Nova Fronteira Program, a Brazilian rural development initiative, produces a subjectivity of marginalization among small-scale farmers in Umuarama, Paraná. Drawing on life history interviews with five farmers, we analyze how technological, market-oriented, and economic discourses embedded in the program do not merely exclude smallholders materially, but constitute them as “incapable,” “insufficient,” and “precarious” subjects. Engaging with Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and subjectivation, we show that development policies operate not only through material interventions but through the internalization of failure: farmers come to see their marginality not as a result of structural inequalities, but as a personal or ontological condition. The phrase “that’s the life of the poor,” recurrent in the narratives, encapsulates a truth regime that naturalizes exclusion. We argue that such policies enact a form of neoliberal governmentality that promises inclusion while reinforcing symbolic and existential dispossession. The findings challenge dominant models of rural development and call for critical attention to the ways in which development itself becomes a technology of subject formation.</p>