Month: January 2024

To evaluate the extent to which this assumption affects my results, I build 30 individual, small-scale, tractable models of grain storage and trade with full rational expectations in which harvests and world prices are stochastic. For the purposes of these models, I collapse all months, all grains, and all markets in each country into a single annual national harvest for which I calculate a sample mean and variance over my 10 year period of interest. For 20 countries with ports or direct access to Johannesburg, South Africa, I build a model for each country with just that country and the world market. For the remaining 21 countries, I build 10 models each consisting of a landlocked country, a coastal country, and the world market39. I choose a centrally-located major city in each country and use my trade cost estimates to compute a single representative trade cost between each landlocked and coastal country and between each coastal country and the world market. I use my estimated demand parameters for each country as well as my estimated monthly storage cost parameters aggregated up to the annual level. For world prices, I compute a single annual world price index for each coastal country based on its harvest year and demand share parameters and calculate the sample variance of the month to-month change in price of these indices over my 10 year period of interest. Putting all of this information together, I use the RECS solver in MATLAB to solve each of the 30 models and run simulations using actual observed harvest and world price shocks to solve for equilibrium storage, trade, price,hydroponic bucket and consumption in every country in every year under full rational expectations.

I then re-solve each model under counterfactual low trade costs. Despite volatile local harvests and high baseline trade costs, my results from this exercise indicate that inter-annual storage in Africa is limited even under full rational expectations, likely due to high storage costs and the position of most countries as net grain importers. Under existing high trade costs, an average of 2.0% of the grain harvest is stored inter annually, and there is positive inter-annual storage in only 50 of the 400 total country-years in my 30 models. Under counterfactual low trade costs, an average of 0.3% of the grain harvest is stored inter-annually, and there is positive inter-annual storage in only 7 of the 400 total country-years in my 30 models, as cheaper trade serves as a partial substitute for storage. The use of my assumption about trader expectations does appear to lead to underestimates of annual storage, but adjusting for these underestimates does not affect my main results. In my main model, under existing high trade costs, an average of 0.3% of the grain harvest is stored inter-annually, and there is positive inter-annual storage in just 1.5% of total market-crop-years, while under counterfactual low trade costs there is no inter-annual storage in any market-crop-year. To determine how allowing for full rational expectations affects my results, I re-solve my main model under both existing and counterfactual trade costs while restricting traders’ choice of inter-annual storage of each grain in each market to equal the percentage of grain stored inter-annually in equilibrium for that country for that year in the results from my individual full rational expectations models. The percentage changes in net agricultural revenues, the average grain price index, expenditure on grains, and welfare are all within two tenths of a percentage point of my baseline results, and the results for all indicators in table 1.12 are well within 95% confidence intervals constructed using the standard errors reported there.

Thus I conclude that my assumption about trader expectations does not have a statistically significant effect on my results. Given the fact that inter-annual storage is limited, it is reasonable to ask to what extent my results would change if I used a more parsimonious model with no storage at all. In recent trade papers dealing with the agricultural sector , it is common to use annual data on production and farm-gate prices, the prices farmers receive when they sell their produce immediately after harvest. Using annual data, one can avoid having to deal with harvest cycles and intra-annual storage, which is necessary for there to be positive consumption in non-harvest months. To better understand the differences between this approach and the one I have used in this chapter, I use the harvest month price for each crop in each market from my baseline estimated model as the annual farm-gate price and build a new static model with all variables aggregated up to the annual level and no storage. I re-estimate trade costs for this new static annual model using the same approach as for my dynamic monthly model and then solve for equilibrium with both my new trade cost estimates and counterfactual low trade costs. Trade cost estimates converge in 6 iterations for the static annual model, and each iteration takes only 2 minutes . However, my trade cost estimates are 23.4% lower on average using the static annual model, and the overall welfare gain from lowering trade costs is 32.9% smaller than under the dynamic monthly model with storage. These differences can be explained by the pattern of equilibrium storage and trade described in Proposition 1. When production is widespread, trade between markets almost never occurs at the beginning of the harvest cycle when farm-gate prices are measured. During this period, local production and storage is used for consumption, spatial arbitrage conditions do not bind, and equilibrium price gaps are narrower.

Instead, trade occurs primarily at the end of the harvest cycle once local stocks have been depleted,stackable planters which is when equilibrium price gaps are wider and spatial arbitrage conditions bind. Using monthly data and a dynamic model with storage to identify more precisely when agricultural trade occurs thus seems important to avoid underestimating trade costs and their effects on welfare, particularly in developing country contexts with large seasonal price fluctuations. Further details on this exercise with graphical examples are contained in the appendix. Having confirmed the robustness of my main results to the relaxation of several of my key assumptions and explored alternate approaches, I next turn my attention to two extensions in which I run additional counter factuals to further explore the consequences of high trade costs in sub-Saharan Africa and the options for reducing them. Reducing trade costs everywhere in Africa to match transport costs elsewhere in the world is likely not feasible in the short run. However, it may be feasible to reduce trade costs along certain high-priority routes. This section considers the extent to which some routes matter more than others for achieving the welfare effects of the main counterfactual. Even if a long-term goal of reducing trade costs everywhere is maintained, trade cost reduction will not be simultaneous, so the results in this section also shed light on welfare effects during the potentially long transitional period from a high trade cost to a low trade cost regime. I start by looking at the effects of reducing trade costs along the 413 overland links within Africa while holding port-to-world-market sea trade costs constant and of reducing port-to-world-market sea trade costs while holding overland trade costs constant. Results in the second and third columns of table 1.16 indicate that while overland trade cost reduction accounts for over 70% of the overall welfare gain, nearly half of the overall welfare gain is achievable by just reducing sea trade costs between African ports and the world market.Overland trade and sea trade are partial substitutes as both can reduce prices in grain-deficit markets.Since reducing port-to-world-market sea trade costs is likely more feasible than reducing overland trade costs everywhere in Africa, I start with this scenario and then look at whether adding trade cost reductions on a few key overland routes can substantially narrow the gap with my main counterfactual. I select key routes by first identifying the markets with the biggest welfare gaps between the “just sea” scenario in column 3 and the main counterfactual in column 1 and then identifying the most important overland links connecting these markets to their trading partners. In columns 4 and 5 of table 1.16, I show that adding trade cost reductions on just 30 overland links to the “just sea” scenario allows for over 70% of welfare gains to be achieved, and adding trade cost reductions on 75 overland links allows for 86% of welfare gains to be achieved. These results are encouraging for policy-makers and multilateral donors who may have limited resources to invest in trade cost reduction. Generally speaking, the results suggest that investment in “trade corridors” of the type promoted by the African Development Bank and other institutional donors may be worthwhile.

Although it is likely that the specific corridors I identify might not be the most important ones when other goods besides grains are considered, my corridor selection exercise, which is detailed in the appendix, suggests that certain types of corridors may be particularly beneficial. First, reducing trade costs from the world market all the way to “dry ports” in densely-populated inland areas like Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Kinshasa, D.R. Congo can achieve major welfare gains even if trade costs from the dry ports to further-inland areas remain high. Second, reducing trade costs along inland corridors with imbalances or fluctuations in production and consumption can lead to large gains without significant involvement of the world market. Third, targeting those inland areas isolated by extremely high trade costs can lead to very large welfare improvements for those areas. In 2013, African cereal grain yields averaged 1.4 tonnes per hectare, compared to 3.1 in South Asia, 4.2 in Latin America, and 7.3 in the US. Low productivity in African agriculture is primarily due to the low use of inputs like fertilizer, and institutional donors and organiza adoption to narrow this productivity gap. This section uses my estimated model to look at the effects that widespread technology adoption in Africa would have under existing high trade costs and counterfactual low trade costs. A complete model of technology adoption is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, I estimate what would happen if productivity everywhere in Africa doubled, i.e. if African cereal grain yields increased to 2.8 tonnes per hectare, which is much closer though still below levels elsewhere in the world. In the context of my model of production, this is equivalent to a doubling of all Bimt, which would double agricultural production in the short run . Practically speaking, I implement this counterfactual by doubling the harvest in all markets and all time periods while keeping all other exogenous variables and parameters the same40 . Table 1.17 compares results for key aggregate indicators from my main counterfactual , counter factuals with technology adoption under high trade costs and low trade costs , and a combined counterfactual in which trade costs are lowered and technology adoption occurs 41. Under high trade costs, technology adoption leads to a collapse of prices and agricultural revenues, as high trade costs confine much of the increased production to local markets with inelastic demand. Only 39 markets experience an increase in agricultural revenues, 37 of which are net importers for which increased production primarily serves to replace imports so that the price does not fall as much as in other markets42. In contrast, under low trade costs, agricultural revenues increase on aggregate and for 184 individual markets , as much more of the increased production can be exported to deficit areas and the world market. Low trade costs are thus a prerequisite for widespread technology adoption to increase the incomes of African farmers.The net welfare effect of doubling productivity through technology adoption is similar in magnitude to the net welfare effect of lowering trade costs43. Although lower trade costs and productivity improvements are partial substitutes as both lead to lower prices in most markets, the combined welfare effect of both represents 92% of the sum of the effects of each intervention on its own . These findings suggest that agricultural policy in Africa should give as much weight to trade cost reduction as to technology adoption and prioritize comprehensive approaches that include both.

These mapping efforts are constrained to variables that can be quantified at a large scale, and they typically define abandoned agricultural land as land that was previously used for agriculture but where intensive human management appears to have ceased . Some definitions specify a minimum of 2–5 years of observations of non-use, whereas others specify observations of successional processes resulting in the natural establishment of forests or other secondary vegetation. Certain agricultural uses, such as recent fallow or pasture lands, make these types of observations difficult to detect in large-scale land cover maps. Definitions of abandoned agricultural land based on remote observation of land cover changes over time often overlook the complexity of landholder decision-making and how landholder choices affect the cessation of agricultural use and potentially its later recurrence . These definitions result in overestimation of the available land area for reforestation for climate mitigation and other purposes, as well as of the permanence of newly established forest cover . We suspect that this is why Crawford et al. find such variation in abandoned land estimates. Moreover, these definitions and the semantics of the term “abandonment” imply a decline in land utility for agricultural livelihoods and a ceding of land rights to others. Using a definition that assumes away local residents’ landholding rights may inadvertently create social vulnerabilities in localities where there appear to be opportunities for reforestation. Without attention to landholding status and associated livelihoods,hydroponic nft system reforestation projects on abandoned agricultural land risk overstating their impact and sustainability. We propose a new conceptualization of abandoned agricultural land that incorporates changes in landholding status over time into determining whether land should be considered as abandoned.

While challenging to implement empirically, this conceptualization offers an improved approach to understanding the significant heterogeneity in land use changes—not simply land cover changes. Whereas land cover changes can be observed directly through remotely sensed imagery, land use changes cannot always be inferred from changes in land cover. For example, land that exists under “forest” cover could be used for selective logging, shade grown agroforestry, or biodiversity conservation, each of which confers different environmental and socio-economic outcomes. These changes in land use ultimately derive from landholding status because landholding status affects landholders’ planning horizons. For example, medium- and long-term availability of abandoned land needed to sequester carbon and achieve other desired reforestation benefits depends on secure landholding that can only be known through incorporating information about landholding status. We focus on land that was originally forested but then converted to an agricultural use that has currently ceased . We identify the decision points that determine whether this abandoned agricultural land follows pathways that lead to a persistent transition to forest, either natural forest cover or woody tree plantations sensu FAO . After a period of deforestation driven by agricultural expansion, economic development creates sufficient off-farm employment that the agricultural labor force shrinks, agricultural labor costs rise and profits fall, and some land shifts from agriculture to uses that are less labor-intensive, including secondary forest or tree plantations ; often the land has low agricultural productivity. Forest transitions may also result from a rise in the price of wood rather than just a change in the relative return on labor .

This land is then commonly considered to be “abandoned” in terms of agricultural use, and it is assumed that forests will grow back on it through either natural regeneration or tree planting. This process has been documented in Europe, the eastern United States, Japan, Mexico, China, India, Brazil, and other regions worldwide . In fact, abandoned agricultural land results from a series of land-use decisions that are influenced by complex biophysical, demographic, and socioeconomic processes . This means that land that is currently “abandoned” from agricultural use will not necessarily result in a persistent, net increase in forest cover . To begin, the current landholder might have ceased agricultural use only temporarily, leaving the land fallow for multiple years to allow soil nutrients to accumulate, pathogens to subside, or market conditions to become more favorable . Even if the current landholder’s intention is a permanent cessation of agriculture, the land might not be biophysically suitable for reforestation, either because it is highly degraded or is in a biome where grassland or another low tree cover ecosystem is the naturally occurring vegetation . Considerations of land tenure, namely the landholder’s and potentially others’ formal or informal rights to own or use the land and how these rights are enforced, add complexity when the current landholder “abandons” agricultural use of land that is suitable for forest regeneration. By ceasing agricultural use, the current landholder may or may not abandon their rights to the land. In some locations, ending agricultural use necessitates relinquishing land rights because land that is not cultivated or grazed is considered “idle” or unassigned, but this linkage of use abandonment and rights abandonment is not universal . If no new landholder acquires rights to the land, then natural succession will likely result in forest regeneration .

However, if a new landholder acquires the rights to the land through voluntary sale or reassignment by a governmental or communal authority, then they, in turn, will decide whether to increase forest cover on it or revert to using it for agriculture or another non-forest purpose, such as urbanization . Forest regeneration is similarly not assured if the current landholder retains their rights to the land, as they too could decide to convert the land to a non-forest use . In cases where the original or new landholder decides to increase forest cover on the site, then they also must decide whether to regenerate the forest using natural or artificial means, which entails considering a mix of ecological, silvicultural, and socioeconomic factors . A fourth possibility is that the current landholder’s rights are not enforced, in which case an involuntary land transfer occurs against the current landholder’s wishes: a “land grab.” For example, Ugandan villagers report that Norwegian investments in forest carbon plantations caused “forced relocations of agriculture, grazing, and other livelihood activities” . A non-forest land use, typically some form of commercial agriculture, could also follow a land grab . Even if the landholder initially decides to establish forest cover on the land, the forest cover might not persist for a host of reasons. Changes in agricultural prices and technologies, off-farm employment opportunities, wood scarcity, political instability, and government policies and subsidies can prompt landholders to reverse a decision to retain forest cover . For example, some of the extensive area of agricultural land abandoned in eastern Europe following the fall of the Soviet Union has been re-cultivated in the past decade,nft channel mostly due to increases in agricultural subsidies and commodity prices . Whereas it is commonly assumed that forest cover will increase as opportunities for non-agricultural employment increase and people migrate to cities, there are examples of reverse migration to rural areas when economic opportunities or personal situations change . Climate change also decreases the likelihood of sustained forest cover increases in some locations due to changes in disturbance regimes and migration of both forest species and humans to more suitable climatic conditions. Finally, forest cover changes must be evaluated at sufficient scale to determine whether there is a net increase over a region or the globe, given documented cases in which ceasing agriculture in one location has led to displacement of agriculture to other locations , with any increase in forest cover in the first location being partially or completely offset by deforestation elsewhere . This displacement of deforestation can be challenging to quantify, as it may happen far from the study region given the ever-increasing globalization of the trade of forestry and agricultural products .

In sum, landholding status and land rights are complicated core factors affecting the net increase in persistent forest cover that ultimately results from abandoned agricultural land . Although agricultural and forestry policies, also mediate the use of abandoned agricultural land, we argue that landholding status and land rights are fundamental factors that cannot be ignored when implementing reforestation programs. Despite the challenge of mapping complex land-use decisions, there are important policy reasons to estimate how much land is potentially available for reforestation in the future. To that end we suggest the following. First, those undertaking these efforts should clearly state how they are defining “abandoned” land and other related terms , including the temporal and spatial scale of those definitions. We recommend using more specific terms such as fallow , agroforestry or silvopastoral systems , timber plantation , or secondary forest. We also advocate evaluating the persistence of these different land uses. These definitions are best defined regionally, given differences in production systems by locality and ecosystem. Likewise, it is important to more transparently acknowledge the complex suite of factors that affect forest transitions and reversals that are likely to bias estimates of land available for reforestation . Second, more attention should be paid to who owns and has rights to use the land when mapping global land uses and looking for investment opportunities for carbon or land purchase. In some regions of the world, land ownership maps exist that could be included as part of mapping efforts. In other regions, this can be challenging given issues of unclear land tenure . In general, local stakeholders want tenure mapped and formally recognized, but tenure and land claims are often unclear or contested . Mapping tenure and resolving contested claims can hinder or complicate landbased projects and programs , but is critical to their success. Further, absence of legally recognized tenure due to incomplete or partial mapping processes may invite land grabbing and induce conflict, particularly in common property systems . Participatory mapping is a technique that can help illuminate and resolve potential conflicts but using this approach at broad geographic scales remains a challenge . Ultimately, it may not be possible to accurately map “abandoned” land in regions where land tenure is particularly contentious. Third, a promising approach to developing more realistic and inclusive maps of abandoned agricultural land and potential forest cover is to combine remotely sensed data with household/stakeholder surveys to understand landowner motivations for not cropping lands. For example, Zhang et al. combined remotely sensed data of forest cover change with household surveys and focus groups to elucidate factors affecting increases in forest cover in northwest Yunnan Province, China. They found that forest cover increases were not greater on lands receiving payments from the Grain-for Green program, in contrast to the reported net positive effect of the program on forest cover at the national level . Instead, the surveys and focus groups revealed that forest cover changes in the study area were influenced by a suite of factors that cannot be remotely sensed, including off- farm labor opportunities, changing energy sources, and tree crop planting for income . We realize this combined approach is time consuming and necessarily will need to be done at a regional or local scale, but this is the scale at which most policy decisions are made, and the estimates of land area available for reforestation will be more realistic. Furthermore, attention to these details prior to major investments in reforestation will reduce the likelihood of significantly diminished, net zero, or net negative returns. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, the governments of the central and eastern European Countries all aspire to join the European Union . These aspirations were given strong encouragement at the EU’s 1993 Copenhagen Summit, at which time associated CEECs were told they would eventually gain membership. Along the path to accession, however, lie difficult policy choices and delicate negotiations concerning the pace and terms of economic integration. Of these, among the most challenging are those affecting the fate of agriculture in the emerging market economies. Accession to the EU has historically implied the integration of the new member into the community’s Common Agricultural Policy , a complicated system of interventions whose most prominent and expensive features are designed to support prices of program commoditiesl through intervention purchases, and to shield markets from external competition through tariff barriers.

The experimental dispositif therefore commanded how actants were to be organized and made to relate to each other within well-defined limits of space and time. This was done so that vitalities within its scope were channeled according to a predetermined notion of what desirable elements were to be made to flourish, and what undesirable ones were to be allowed to wither away or be forcibly diverged to its exterior. Incidentally or not, dispositif is the same word Foucault chose to name the apparatus through which power flows in society. Like most of those that followed on his wake, in his oeuvre Foucault was concerned mostly with the government of human life. The experimental dispositif is also a manipulation of relations of forces, but of a non-human kind. Other than that, the similarities are remarkable. Like the Foucauldian dispositif, it is sustained by a particular kind of knowledge, manifested in the three expertises concerned here. This manipulation is also strategic, in the sense that it had a clear direction: what it did was to translate normative parameters that were external to the experimental domain into a technical, either quantifiable or discreet , form. These parameters came from the upper scales of context previously outlined: from global trade to the filière, to assumptions about the peasant environment, these were scaled down, at the micro level of the dispositif, into a central concern with yields as the core experimental parameter. Even conservation – as explained in Chapter 4,nft hydroponic the chief purpose of no-till – becomes important inasmuch as it helps sustain productivity in the long run, and does not significantly undermine it in the short run.

The experiments sought to strike a balance between short-term, economistic demands for high productivity, and long-term demands for soil conservation. In all three project components, brought together into the dispositif’s nested structure, experimental adaptation ultimately converged towards this end: increased yields became the ultimate sign that the system was working and thriving in its new environment. Thus, in their experiments, entomologists were chiefly concerned with mapping out and anticipating potentially significant pests – that is, insects that could cause sudden and sharp decrease in yields . In the project parcel, standing just above the layer of cotton at regular intervals there were white triangular boxes; these were insect traps, the only visible artifact of the pest control component in the parcel. The boxes, brought from Brazil, sheltered cards smeared with pheromone for attracting male insects, meant for a survey of insect populations in the area – a preliminary work to devising a biological pest control strategy appropriate to local conditions. During the first year, as the Malian entomologist explained, “there were observations, not results. For scientific results, it is necessary that a statistic dispositif be put in place”. The entomology dispositif proper was assembled in 2011 on the vitrine simultaneously with the varietal assay. In this trial, technicians observed and registered the magnitude and kind of damage inflicted to the different cotton varieties so that the behavior of the Brazilian ones would be compared to their control counterparts across two treatments: one consisting in zero chemical control, the other consisting in pesticide spraying according to recommendations for the milieu paysan. In the varietal test on the vitrine, yield, measured as a projected amount of kilograms per hectare, was the main parameter for comparing the ten cotton varieties introduced by Embrapa among themselves and to their local counterparts .

In the first season, productivity was also the main criterion according to which the head breeder from the Malian institute selected the two best performing Embrapa varieties to move further into the no-till fields the following year, where they would join the local varieties acting as controls. Performance of the different cotton varieties was also observed and compared according to other factors: level of damage by insects and disease, plant development , and the technological criteria listed above. In these evaluations as in genetic improvement research at large, breeders strived to strike a compromise between competing external demands on the cotton plant: farmers preferred bolls with heavier grain, as they got paid by kilogram of unprocessed cotton; ginners were concerned with the proportion of lint in seed cotton weight; the textile industry had its own standards of quality and color. Whiteness and brilliance of the fiber, for instance, were emerging from the trials as traits with the potential to improve local cotton varieties through cross-breeding with the Brazilian ones. But these and other parameters only became important provided that the concerned variety was also productive compared to the others. Similarly, in the no-till trial, most measurements were geared towards evaluating the impact of this new crop management system on the yields of different cotton varieties and the cereals grown in association or rotation with it, as compared to the control situation . Thus, the dispositif aimed at figuring out the best possible balance between biomass and yields: while cover crops intercalated with main crops were expected to produce as much biomass as possible in order to keep the soil covered during fallow, they also competed for nutrients, water and sunlight with the main crop, therefore potentially impacting its yields.

This trial was therefore principally concerned with estimating the best sowing date for each combination of plants: one treatment prescribed sowing the cover crop on the same day as the main crop, the other fourteen days afterwards. Other factors measured in this experiment addressed physic-chemical characteristics of the soil, and indexes of plant vitality such as leaf analysis, plant height and density, and germination. Yields and productivity, the focus of the economy of vitalities managed by the dispositif, depended most fundamentally on the right amount and quality of nutrients to feed the crop plants . In this respect, agronomists explicitly deployed in their experimental work a suggestive foreign trade-like idiom of nutrient export and import. Export is a normal part of agriculture, as much of the biomass that is nurtured inside the fields leaves them along with the harvested crop; the challenge is to make sure that these lost nutrients are replaced by equivalent import, in the form of mineral or organic fertilizers. Chronic soil degradation becomes a problem when more nutrients are being exported than imported over the long run. In West Africa, as we saw, not only was there excessive export of nutrients through leaching, runoff and the cattle that feeds on crop residues, but there was far from sufficient import of nutrients through fertilizers. As a result, peasant cotton farms developed, so to speak, a serious “trade deficit” in nutrients with their surrounding environment. The inevitable outcome is reduced productivity. As with the territory of nation-states, this idiom was predicated on the delimitation of a bounded space in-and-out of which elements travel: not just the nutrients,nft system but actants that carry them or dis/enable their action such as water, insects, weeds, and the crops themselves. Much like in customs and immigration, this movement had to be registered, quantified and controlled . As represented schematically in the picture below, this bounded space was geometrically delimited and internally organized according to the dispositif: size and form of the overall area , number and arrangement of internal sub-divisions , distance between blocks , number of lines in each sub-block , number of plants per line . Import of nutrients through inorganic fertilizers focused on primary minerals indispensible to plant development. In the entire parcel, these were typically brought in along the lines of the complexe coton distributed in the milieu paysan: the elementary tryad NPK plus sulphur and borum, followed by a second dose of nitrogen through urea. Part of these nutrients left the parcel in the form of harvest – along with cotton bolls, maize ears, or sorghum heads. The rest of the biomass was measured by cutting out from the soil and weighing a square meter sample; it was then left on the fields, to be reabsorbed and made available for the next season’s crops.

Measured and registered every day on a black board in a common area in the research institute, rainfall was an uncontrolled variable – in fact, the only significant one – that the project fields fully shared with peasant farms. Rains commanded the opening of the season in both sites, since only after a first significant stint of rain has fallen it is possible to sow. In the project parcels, however, sowing did not always occur simultaneously with peasant farms: at points, cotton and cover crop seeds did not arrive from Brazil in time due to the ever-present bureaucratic hurdles discussed in the previous chapter. This did not compromise the realization of the experiments, but recombined the dispositif in terms of a sowing date different from the one practiced in peasant land. Unplanned constraints could be turned into useful trials, since the sowing date to be recommended to farmers was itself one of the problems local researchers had been struggling with, given the growing unpredictability of rain patterns in the region. Towards the end of Phase I, this date was purposefully anticipated in order to demonstrate how no-till dispensed with waiting for a significant stint of rain in order to be able to till and then sow. In testing how the new technologies responded to local rainfall, researchers were gradually adjusting the tests so that an appropriate combination of variables – seed varieties, sowing date and depth, spacing, combinations of crops – would make up as best as possible for the irregular rain patterns found in the West Africa savannahs. Insects were another kind of external actant that would come and go freely. The entomologists’ protocol involved observing and comparing the damage inflicted on the different cotton varieties according to two treatments: spraying on the calendar, as recommended to the milieu paysan, and no spraying. Like their fellow agronomists, the work of entomologists was ultimately concerned with controlling the flow of nutrients. But more than the foreign trade idiom found in the soils component, or the kinship framing typical of breeding science, the entomologists’ task was most often conveyed according to a militaristic language of warfare: to “defend” crops from “natural enemies” through different “fight methods” . It basically involved protecting the crops from external threat: to make sure their vitalities were not significantly exported, or diverted away from the cotton plants, by insects and other undesirable actants such as viruses, bacteria, or fungi. Other such entities – the nitrogen-fixing rhizobium bacteria, or insects that could act as natural enemies in biological control – were being recruited in the opposite direction: into the experimental effort. Therefore, whether these and other actants would be allies or enemies, depended on their relation with the target plants and on their effects in the economy of vitalities configured by the experiments. Plants other than the main crops such as weeds were discouraged or removed, while cooperative species such as cover crops were nurtured in a controlled manner. Even water and the mineral nutrients themselves could turn from friend to foe, if present in excess: they could cause, for instance, runoff or toxicity. In all cases, the ultimate parameter was their effects on crop productivity. Besides mediating transactions with the surrounding environment, internally to the parcel the dispositif organized a whole domestic economy of nutrients and vitalities. Spatialization prescriptions based on statistic models oriented how plants were supposed to be distributed in the area, linearly organized by forced settlement and displacement schemes of intercropping and alternate sowing. Spatialization was not just horizontal; researchers also looked at the plot according to a vertical axis where cotton and the other crops stood between two domains, one subterranean and one above the ground. The plants mediated much of the traffic between them, and were themselves regarded as segmented in terms of subterranean and aerial parts . For no-till, as remarked, what happened under the ground was as much or more important as what happened above it: soil was the ultimate repository of nutrients responsible for bringing about higher yields. A chief concern was to make sure that fertilizers were effectively captured by the roots and utilized by the rest of the plant so that they would not be “wasted” . Soil was itself regarded as a segmented domain: mineral elements accumulate and move differently across various its strata; while some tend to stay in place where it is applied, others are more mobile and tend to sink into greater depths.

As importantly, cotton breeding looks beyond the farm to the post-harvest scales of industrial processing and global trade – the so-called technological or industrial parameters, such as ginning out turn or quality of fiber . According to my interlocutors, cotton is not that complicated a plant to breed. In fact, the commercial varieties found on both sides of the Southern Atlantic are “kin”, ultimately coming from a common genetic poll. Although both South America and the African continent are origin centers of cotton species, the ancestors of most cotton grown in both places today came from the United States.Like so many other elements in the cotton production systems in both Brazil and West Africa, this common ancestry comes from a shared scale in the industrial and global origins of modern cotton remarked above. In fact, the scientific breeding of cotton varieties predated by a few decades the mid-twentieth century Green Revolution and its focus on germplasm exchange and variety improvement for high yields. U.S. upland cotton was introduced in Africa during colonial times for a practical reason: by the late nineteenth century, American cotton was the world standard according to which European spinning machinery was normally calibrated . Much of the work undertaken in the colonial research institutes and botanic gardens consisted in adapting these foreign crop varieties to the environmental conditions found in Sub-Saharan Africa, on the one hand, and to the demands and standards required by the global textile industry, on the other.

After independence, breeding remained a privileged research field in the national institutes,bato bucket which today develop and distribute their own improved cotton seeds to farmers. But in colonial times as today, to develop new varieties “drawing on the best of imported and local cotton” was not enough. Improved seeds required that rural extension programs be simultaneously implemented in order to change farmers’ traditional practices into “‘modern’ plowing, planting, and harvesting skills” . This is because, failing to transform the context into which improved varieties were to be introduced, these seeds would not be able to actualize their full productive potential: the more technified the seed, the tighter and more specialized has to be the socio-technical network sustaining it. This project component therefore faced the same basic challenges of the other two, concerning the availability of proper agricultural inputs, labor, and rains in peasant fields. But while the others, especially no-till, could be transformed more rapidly according to this new context, conventional improved seeds can only be changed through cross-breeding, which is an extremely slow, statistically oriented process. As with the other project components, in breeding the enrollment of human and nonhuman actants also went beyond cotton itself. Its annual capacity-building cycle also targeted breeders working with other plants commonly intercropped with cotton locally, such as sorghum, maize or rice. They were generally well trained and had good basic technical knowledge; several of them, especially the senior ones, had received college and graduate training abroad, in France and other European countries, the United States, or the former Soviet Union.

More than the other two project components, the breeding workshops dwelled largely on abstract technical topics such as genetic resource conservation, genic flow, and quantitative genetics – the more advanced stages of the latter, I must say, I had difficulty following up, even with the rudiments of this field I had learned during a cassava project with Ghana the previous year. Even if, as the Brazilian researchers themselves underscored, breeding is both a science and an art which requires an “eye” that can only be cultivated through experience, technical knowledge in this field required, more than in the others, increasingly specialized and sophisticated material apparatuses in order to be put to work. This was notably the case of statistical software: it was the only workshop where trainees were required to bring along an artifactual attachment, a laptop computer . In 2011, much of the trainings involved teaching how to use the new software: two open-source statistical programs that had been reverse engineered at a Brazilian university. Similarly, breeding was the component for which the African partners made most demands for material infrastructure, especially in biotechnological fields such as marker-assisted breeding. Many of the Brazilian researchers, however, were of the opinion that the high financial investment required for setting up and maintaining state-of-the-art biotechnology facilities generally did not yield worthy returns in terms of actual applications; in their own experience, it was cheaper and easier to outsource certain tasks to other labs.

Still, the project did accede to some of these demands: as Phase I was coming to an end in 2013, a biotechnology lab was being finalized in Sotuba, and a local researcher was to be sent to Brazil for training on how to run it. The rationale for the project’s decision-making in this case, as I understood it, was that in relatively resource-poor institutes such as the ones in the C-4 countries, the point of a lab like this was not necessarily to produce immediate, cost-beneficial results. It would, above all, fulfill a pedagogic function of supporting training and learning of junior researchers. For senior researchers, it would enable the practical enactment of a kind of advanced knowledge that would remain otherwise idle. In this sense, it would also have a sort of “prosthetic” effect: after being trained overseas, the knowledge acquired at the “centers” would go to waste without an appropriate material base through which it could be put work in their home institutes. More than the other project components, thus, breeding brought to the fore, at the scale of research institutes, an asymmetry similar to the one observed between research recommendations and peasant practices: that is, between available knowledge and the artifactual network required to put it in practice appropriately. Besides biotechnology, another sub-field where this appeared quite clearly in the project was genetic resources conservation.African institutes were generally limited to forms of conservation that require less “de-contextualization” , such as in farm, in situ, or ex situ. The cotton germplasm bank in Farako-ba was of this latter type, and included a range of creole cotton plants found across the country: some were as tall and lean as trees, others were low and bushy; some had light yellow flowers, others had dark pink or purple ones . After many breeding cycles over the course of decades, diversity of traits becomes narrower and related to hardly perceptible variables such as pelosity of the stem, length of fiber, relative capacity to absorb certain nutrients, or degree of yellowness. Even among breeders, increasing mediation by artifacts becomes necessary so that the precise difference in performance between the varieties can be ascertained: scales to weight harvest samples and statistically estimate productivity, soil and leaf analysis to calculate nutrient absorption,dutch bucket hydroponic or highly specialized equipment to measure the various technological parameters for quality of fiber. The African institutes had some of these artifacts, but not others, and rarely did they have their latest versions according to global standards. Moreover, none of them had fully functioning facilities for the more de-contextualizing forms of germplasm conservation such as cold chamber or in vitro tissue culture. Not surprisingly, this was part of the demands posed by the project partners, and again, they were partly fulfilled: a cold chamber was being built as part of the project’s central facilities in Sotuba, but not in the other institutes. Finally, the African partners showed significant interest in the possibilities for germplasm exchange opened up by the project.

What they sought in the Brazilian varieties was not the plants as such, but certain traits that could potentially ameliorate the varieties created by them and their predecessors in the national institutes. The introduction of Brazilian cotton varieties would provide for an always-welcome enlargement of the genetic pool available to the institutes’ cotton programs and their breeders. “Our cotton has good quality fiber, better even than the Brazilian, and it’s longer”, one of the C-4 breeders explained to me. “It’s also better adapted to our environment. But the Brazilian varieties have very good productivity”, and some had whiter fiber. For the Brazilians, quality of fiber and resistance to drought were traits of potential interest in the African varieties. This was an exchange between peer researchers; in spite of the narratives on resource plundering and biopiracy often associated with the global flow of genetic resources, as in bioprospection they do not necessarily lead to commercially viable products: “it’s always good to have this kind of germplasm around, just in case”, one of the Embrapa breeders put it plainly. Having being de-contextualized from its original assemblage in Brazil, relations between germplasm and context had to be remade anew at the arrival point: this was precisely what the breeding component’s adaptation experiments were about, as will be seen in the next chapter. But to take validated Brazilian varieties or cross-bred hybrids outside of the C-4 research institutes will be a whole other story. Rarely does one single variety carry all desirable traits, and systematic cross-breeding is a lengthy process: ten or more years may pass before a stable variety can be ready to be transferred to farmers. Aside from such technical issues, there are also explicitly political ones: the direct transfer of Brazilian varieties to African farmers as such will not necessarily be of interest to all local actors, and would call for an altogether different level of legal discussion in terms of cultivar protection and licensing procedures. This is one of the few areas where a potential remains for economic gain by public agronomic research institutes, rendered possible by the worldwide expansion of legal frameworks enforcing intellectual property rights . This makes breeding a more sensitive field than the other two, something that also concerns the ethnographer: indeed, at points some of my interlocutors seemed more worried about the identity of the plants than their human counterparts. As others have also remarked , in the age of IPR, anonymity seems to be as much an ethical matter for non-humans as for humans.Early on during fieldwork, in the CECAT course on seed production in 2010, I had learned that the seed is one of the most effective forms of technology transfer. That one small grain contains years, often decades, of research efforts by breeders and other experts that can, in such condensed and disembedded form, be taken to farmers with relative ease. A year later, in the C-4 project, I learned that to unravel all that knowledge and technology again out of the tiny seed once it gets to its new destination implies launching a whole other – reverse, if you will – translation chain in a socio-technical assemblage that will necessarily differ from the original. This difference between contexts, which seemed minor at the level of official discourse because based on analogies that took them for granted as shared preexisting backgrounds for relations, came to the fore at the front line where the researches operated; in fact, it became the very “stuff” on which they worked. How the new context differs from the original, and with what consequences for technology transfer, is not something that is given previously to the relation, but that is actively made by those who work across the new interface. Cooperation front liners from both sides of the Southern Atlantic were, in this sense, brokers; but rather than brokering flows of material and symbolic resources through a multi-layered social network, as normally emphasized by the literature on development , they brokered the making of social and natural contexts for the network itself. Technology transfer in this case turned out to be less about “rendering technical” through planned intervention than about demonstration, collaborative context-making and scaling operations, co-production between technology and context, and, as will be seen in greater detail in the next chapter, attention to the controls available to actors at various scales. These characteristics stem not just from South-South principles of horizontality or demand-drivenness, but from the organizational and practical conditions of Brazilian cooperation remarked in Chapter 1. Here, the technologies being transferred did not appear as “a blueprint for an ongoing reorganization of farming so that the latter corresponds with the assumptions and requirements built into the technological design” .

The fact that Brazilian cooperation is not based on direct transfer of resources to partners meant that the institutes had to pay upfront for some of the project’s operational activities, to be reimbursed later on. Another share of ABC funds was transferred to Africa in the form of daily allowances paid to employees from Embrapa, ABC and the African institutes while traveling on project missions, regulated according to UNDP standards. This cannot be but a rough sketch, since the entire accounting process is very complicated, detailed documental information was not always forthcoming, and this was not my privileged ethnographic focus. But it did interest me inasmuch as it impinged directly on the project’s front line activities, and this happened throughout. Already during the early months of project implementation in 2009, for instance, the Brazilian Cooperation Agency’s official for the project remained out of the loop for over a month, until he could be re-hired through another UNDP consultancy contract . Also at this stage, until all formalities for resource transfer through UNDP fell into place, project front liners had to rely on temporary fixes such as to transfer funds through the embassy, or make front payments on their own. But even when the ABC-UNDP system was on track, bureaucratic constraints on resource availability and transfer persisted ,blueberry packing boxes and were probably the most widespread qualm expressed by those involved in implementing the project. Along with the budget cuts during the Rousseff administration in 2010 and the unexpected political crisis in Mali in 2012, this was considered one of the chief “externalities” jeopardizing project execution.

The overarching issue here, also found in traditional aid , seemed to be that bureaucratic temporality and requirements were frequently at odds, if not outright contradiction, with the rhythm and needs of project activities on the ground. In the project’s early moments, needs regarding purchase of equipment or payment of personnel – basic tasks in any project implementation – would sometimes clash with standardized bureaucratic provisions. For instance, anyone formally hired in the project through UNDP, even a driver, would receive significantly higher pay than the local researchers’ salaries; or, UNDP would pose obstacles to changes in the purchase plan included in the original project documentation. The first project coordinator was particularly keen to underscore conflicts between bureaucratized provisions at the managerial level and the practice of project implementation as it unfolded locally: while a detailed project plan has to be crafted in advance of implementation, “accommodations that eventually need to be made [at the front line scale] can only appear during implementation”. Bids for equipment, licenses for exporting and importing seeds, rigorous bookkeeping required for auditing procedures – these and more sometimes made it difficult for researchers to strictly follow the project’s technical protocols, or introduced an extra time and energy burden to their work. At times, for instance, sowing happened after the optimal date due to delays in seed transfer from Brazil. The construction and equipping of lab infrastructure at the Sotuba station in Bamako, which was supposed to support the project’s training and experimental activities, were not concluded until Phase I was already coming to an end. “Nature can’t wait”, one of the Embrapa researchers put it, exasperated. “I want to tell you about this because it is really important that this be registered”. One of his African counterparts insisted along similar lines: “With France and other partners, things are more simple. This has to change.

One day Brazil will have to sort this out”. Everyone I met, including at the ABC and Itamaraty, was aware of these issues; but as remarked in Chapter 1, effectively addressing them would involve reforming cooperation legislation as well as the Brazilian Cooperation Agency itself; and this, as far as I could gather, wasn’t anywhere on the near horizon.At the project front line, not all Embrapa researchers were fully acquainted with, nor terribly interested in, the project’s political-commercial backdrop described in the previous section. For those who did, the tendency was to take to heart the project’s avowed purpose: to engage in an interest-free sharing of knowledge and technology with the ultimate aim of reaching those who really needed it, the African peasants. For those who did not, this disinterest and unawareness did not really seem to interfere with the practical task at hand – they were there quite simply to execute a task demanded by their home institution. Not that they did not care about the work they were doing in Africa. On the contrary, given that recruitment to work in this kind of project always had some leeway for negotiation with the heads of Embrapa’s decentralized units, and that researchers got little extra financial or career incentives for doing it, in most cases there seemed to be some degree of personal interest in it, even if a simple curiosity to get to know a different part of the world. In fact, I even wonder how representative of the ensemble of Embrapa staff is the sample of researchers I ended up with, since not everyone is willing to commit to a modality of project that does not normally bring the obvious professional benefits of scientific cooperation with Northern countries or other emerging economies, for instance in the Labex .While some seemed to take their work in the project as part of a routine job, others ended up developing a more personal kind of commitment towards it.

As I discussed with a Brazilian diplomat in Africa the somewhat uncertain future of South-South cooperation in the post-Lula era, he contended that “at this point, projects are moving forward because there is people out there willing to vestir a camisa” – literally, to “put on the jersey”, another soccer metaphor meaning to wholeheartedly embrace a challenge. My impression however was that this commitment stemmed less from a sense of historical indebtedness towards Africa, allegiance to South-South politics, or a sense of duty towards their home institution or the country, than from the concrete engagements they effectively came to establish with the other front liners – their African partners, but especially their Brazilian peers also involved in the project. For the Brazilian front liners, the project was an exceptional enterprise in their professional and personal lives, and it is not clear whether such dedication to group work could be reproduced on a regular basis – even if institutional incentives eventually come to concur to a routinization of motivations .This contrasted with many of the African cooperantes’ perspectives: for them, international projects were a major part of their institutes’ quotidian landscape. In general, these external resources were welcome, since their own states’ budget provided them with insufficient support. Individual researchers and managers do however negotiate their participation in projects, and, unless they see benefits, may choose not to commit . Through the Brazilian project, individual researchers got mostly immaterial benefits, such as expert support for their research work,package of blueberries capacity-building, or networking opportunities. The question of resource transfer was sometimes a source of discontent, especially by those in charge of managerial functions, but also researchers; occasionally, even they would have to disburse upfront personal resources to get project-related activities going. The fact that they were willing to do it even if a salary surplus or funds from other projects were not forthcoming indicates the personal interest and commitment the project was able to arouse in some of them. Brazilians, who got better and more regular pay by Embrapa than their African colleagues, would show less concern about financial incentives for participating in the project. But one point that was consistently raised instead regarded career incentives. “It’s been some time here in Embrapa that researchers have been made to follow the academic logic, and publish every year in good journals”, one of them explained to me. “The time we spend travelling for projects, then writing reports when we return – one for the ABC, one for Embrapa, sometimes more –, we could be writing an article for publication”. This grievance was further reinforced by the fact that projects of this kind typically do not involve new scientific work worth publishing, or at least not in the short term. Management of the cotton unit also expressed concerns about overburden, especially with respect to the project’s second phase and to the possibility of replicating it in other countries. Different from those in specialized development bureaucracies and their associated industry of consultancy firms and NGOs, front liners in this project were research scientists employed in national research institutions.

As such, their primary commitment was to their routine research work, which not always happened to be streamlined with the technical content of the project. This configuration seems to have a bright side, though: the fact that researchers from both sides recognize each other, and reciprocally value each other’s engagement in project activities, as researchers. African researchers were recognized for their good technical knowledge and sense of method, and their Brazilian partners were complimented for their skills in doing hands-on research work and non-patronizing ways. In spite of asymmetries in availability of material resources and infrastructure and some divergences in technical background, at bottom the work of an agronomist or a cotton breeder is not radically different in Brazil and in Africa. But this is not just a matter of common training, often in the U.S. or other parts of the global North . Embrapa researchers had not just been trained in these expertises at an early point in their lives and then went on to a career in development projects and consultancies; they have been continuously applying them to research work back in Brazil, sometimes in close contact with farmers. This was a major difference vis-à-vis Northern projects remarked by the African partners, and a far cry from the disconnections between expert developers and their target groups found in the literature on development . As I will discuss further ahead, this may entail a potential for robustness different than traditional aid’s.The task of the cooperantes initially recruited by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency was to draft the project document, and kick-start its implementation on African grounds. This involved diagnosing the “problem” with cotton production in the C-4 countries, and proposing means to address it. In much of the anthropological literature on aid projects, solutions appear as coming before problems – or, in what Tania Li calls problematization, local problems are framed according to technical solutions already available in the agencies’ expert apparatuses. In the C-4 Project, the framing of problems was also directed by technical expertise; but this involved less the implementation of policies and methodologies consolidated in the development apparatus than an intermittent and somewhat malleable process involving much ad hoc accommodation between various organizations, and in which the research institutes played an equivalent, or even larger, role than the cooperation agencies themselves. The project’s overall technical scope was already sketched at the level of the WTO Cotton Initiative, where the idea for a project between Brazil and the C-4 countries first came into being. The three technical areas eventually included in the final version – genetic improvement of cotton varieties; soil management; and integrated pest management – were however only vaguely indicated. A more precise diagnosis was elaborated through a series of missions of “technical-political character” to Benin, Burkina Faso, and Mali, of which both Embrapa researchers and ABC officials took part.In 2006, a breeder from Embrapa’s cotton center was convened to execute a first fact finding mission to these three countries. Having had no significant experience working in Africa, he suggested that a retired Embrapa agronomist who did would come along with him . Both the diagnosis and ensuing recommendations were crafted in conversation with employees from the C-4 research institutes, government offices, and cotton companies. Their report produced a common diagnosis for the cotton sector in all four countries, identifying low productivities as the chief problem. Through conversations with researchers from the local institutes in West Africa and other cooperantes, the cause of low productivities was traced primarily to the poor nutrient content of soils and the “insignificant amount of fertilizers” used by local peasant farmers on the one hand, and to the irregularity of rain patterns in the region on the other.

If one takes society here in terms of domains like politics or the economy, for instance, Africa’s historical experience may seem to share more with that of Asia – and indeed, the latter is a favorite comparative counterpoint in academic and policy debates on economic development in Africa.Both continents ushered into national independences at around the same time, ended up split into many nation-states divided by largely arbitrary borders, and the pioneering experiences of India and other parts of the British and French colonial empires effectively played a part both in enticing liberation struggles and in shaping the politico-institutional legacy of colonialism in the African continent . Indeed, there is much debate among Africans as to why much of post-colonial Asia has succeeded in developing itself, while their own continent was left behind. In my experience, comparisons with Brazil or Latin America along the same lines are much less frequent; in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon even mentioned Latin America as an example not to be followed by the newly decolonized world.118Perhaps even more than the assumption about shared cultures or natures, that of a shared development timeline seems to be the most widespread in South-South cooperation at large; after all, potentially it can encompass the entire global South. It is based on the assumption that, along their peripheral developmental path, emerging countries such as Brazil would have “accumulated expertise that could be shared with other southern countries facing similar challenges” . As with other discursive claims, this may stand for a shared past between world regions that have in fact come into closer contact only recently,grow bags for gardening such as Brazil and countries outside of its historical areas of influence in Africa.

Here, such un- or little-connected pasts are brought together by an abstract universal scale: the modernization timeline, which once ranked all countries according to a same classificatory grid of developed, developing, and underdeveloped. This common scale can be indeed regarded as an effect of Western discursive hegemony , sustained by an apparatus of economic and military dominance during Europe and the U.S.’s colonial and imperialist expansion. But the assumption of a shared development timeline present in the discourse of today’s emerging donors is neither an imposition from the North, nor a mystifying, contradictory legacy of their colonial pasts. Much to the contrary, it is a strategic deployment that aims to draw a line between North and South, this time to the latter’s benefit. This move in fact echoes another one, which took place over fifty years ago: in his mythic 1949 Point Four speech, which arguably first named international development as such , President Truman called for putting the United States’ “store of technical knowledge” to the service of developing nations . And just as, speaking in the immediate aftermath of the World Wars, he was “keen to distance his project from [Europe’s] old-style imperialism” , today’s emerging donors strive to differentiate South-South cooperation from “old-style” – that is, Northern – development aid. Like the U.S. in the aftermath of World War II, Brazil and others regard themselves, and are largely regarded, as emerging powers in a context of geopolitical and geoeconomic reaccommodation. But the U.S. never thought of itself as part of the Third World, while for emerging donors of today belonging to the same geodiscursive space as the world’s poorest countries – the global South – is at the very core of their self-assigned identity as donors. The narrative of modernization theory had allowed Truman to arrange the rest of the world along the same scale as the U.S.. But with Europe ruined by war, the American president was speaking alone at the top of the development ladder: this is what allowed him the “god trick” of claiming that his country had the solutions for everyone else’s ills .

Emerging donors, on the other hand, do not regard themselves as being at the top; but rather than being a handicap, it is this precisely this “subaltern expertise” Mawdsley that would make them better donors than the U.S. and the rest of the global North. And just as in the thirties Freyre’s culturalism frontally contested prevailing racial paradigms imported from Europe in order to turn a peripheral experience into a positive asset vis-à-vis central models, South-South cooperation today is partly built on a claim of failure of the world development project championed by the global North since Truman’s times. In this sense, it can be argued that South-South cooperation rides the wave of the decoupling of the two axes of the modernization timeline – that of time, and that of status – claimed by Ferguson for contemporary globalization. Ferguson argued for this decoupling in terms of a discursive and practical failure of the original, all-encompassing, unilineal modernization project. This recognition of failure would hold more, however, for some regions of the global South, while others would be still “offered a role in the convergence narrative” ; epitomes of these poles would be Sub-Saharan Africa on the former, and emerging economies such as the BRICS on the latter. But while “no one talks about African economic convergence with the First World anymore” , this is precisely what emerging donors have been talking about: this time, in relation to themselves rather than to the First World. Emerging donors do reject the notion of a single, un-situated “package” solution to the world’s problems along the lines of modernization theory. But as much of what goes on in South-South cooperation, this movement is highly ambivalent, since provincializing the North’s development god trick does not imply a rejection of the achievements of modernity as such, especially in technical fields like agriculture. While modernity is, as Ferguson suggested , indeed decoupled from a teleological timeline that follows point-by-point the North’s path, this is not about coeval societies negotiating separately their own brand of modernity either.

In South-South cooperation discourse, the developmental experience is resituated in time and space according to each country’s national developmental experience, against the backdrop of a historical experience of being at the world’s peripheries that is presumably shared by all of them. Indeed, during fieldwork, in all sorts of technical and non-technical contexts, it was common to hear Brazilians remark to their African colleagues how “we were in the same situation X years ago”. One Brazilian farmer I met in Ghana had even “calculated” how far back in time were local agricultural techniques: “around 80 years”. An idea behind the original Embrapa Africa model was to transfer technologies whose patents had already prescribed, but which could be nonetheless useful for Africans, since “varieties released in Brazil twenty years or more ago,garden grow bags in the public domain and even outdated in Brazil, can be very useful here given the countries’ technological backwardness” . While still following a teleology of progress, these notions manifest the decoupling noted by Ferguson: Africans do not need to absorb the latest development package wholesale, but could profit from some technologies that, even though no longer the cutting-edge in their sites of origin, could be better suited to their infrastructural conditions. A problem with this, as with “appropriate technology” kinds of schemes in general, is that African researchers usually do want the latest technology. Many of them have been trained in the global North and/or are well aware about the state-of-the-art in their own scientific fields, and often that is what they demand from cooperation partners. In spite of the demise of modernization remarked by Ferguson , one domain where teleology still holds sway and produces vast material effects has been precisely techno-science, especially technology research, development & innovation and its speedy treadmill. In Brazil-Africa cooperation, therefore, there is an ambivalent and sometimes contradictory coexistence of different temporalities on on-the-ground assemblages, somewhat along the lines of what Mbembe referred to as “time of entanglement”.This is reflected in Brazilians’ views on Africa’s agricultural development. The denial of coevalness found here was not grounded in inevitabilities or determinisms tracing the roots of African underdevelopment to any domain outside of history, be it biology or the environment. These reflected, rather, Brazilian actors’ own experiences, in two ways. On the one hand, and resonating with basic tenets of dependency theory, African underdevelopment was generally traced to its peripheral position in the world system, in a historical process that was regarded as having some analogies and connections with that of Brazil.

This appeared for instance in expressions of sympathy such as that “we have also been colonized”, or that both Brazil and Africa were still imposed unequal conditions by Northern countries in global trade. On the other hand, views on African development were largely refracted by views on Brazil’s own experience of domestic development, shaped by the hierarchical topography inscribed by internal coloniality. Denial of coevalness is not total, since it is not the case that African countries taken as a whole were regarded as being the past of Brazil taken as a whole. Part of what Brazilian front liners saw in African institutes was considered fairly “up to date”, such as the technical background of many African researchers. Other domains were, conversely, deemed more or less backward, such as the state of equipment and infrastructure in the research institutes. As one left the institutes to peasant areas, this temporalhierarchical continuum became more clearly mapped onto a spatial one, translated into comments along the lines of “we were in the same situation X years ago, and in some places in Brazil this is still the case”, or “here [in Brazil], we’ve passed through the stage where you [Africans] are now, but we’re still living all stages at the same time”. Indeed, many of the familiarities Brazilians recognized in African countries referred to the inferior term in coloniality’s dichotomies. African peasants were often associated with rural areas in the semi-arid hinterlands of the Brazilian Northeast, where a less technology and capital-intensive kind of family agriculture has historically prevailed. This contrasted both to the Center-West, characterized by large agribusiness farms, and to the South and Southwest, where family farmers make more intensive use of modern technologies and associational models like cooperatives. But as in all forms of coloniality – the iconic one being probably the cannibal/noble savage dyad –, the inferior term might carry contradictory connotations. Thus, while peasant agriculture was generally regarded as backward and unable to compete in the contemporary globalized world, for many at Embrapa it was also something to be defended and respected, including in terms of farmers’ special experiential wisdom for taking care of the land. These and other temporal-spatial analogies made during cooperation activities were however far from exhaustive; African farmers, policies, research institutes, soil, climate would never find a perfect fit in the Brazilians’ classificatory grids. Sometimes, these misfits would elicit a loosely articulated recognition of the complexities of Africa’s agriculture precisely through the contradictions it showed when compared to the Brazilian experience. Even if, in cooperation settings such as CECAT, these problematizations were not usually carried forward or systematized, they would inevitably lead to an acknowledgement of the potential difficulties for engaging in effective, sustained technical cooperation with African partners. Even in official discourse, Embrapa cooperantes tended to be more cautious than their counterparts in Itamaraty. Thus, in the concluding paragraphs of Paralelos, after over sixty pages of “parallels” one finds a somewhat dissonant caution note: “It should be kept in mind that this work is not a mere transfer of the experience obtained at the Brazilian cerrado, since there are significant socio-economic differences. Thus, the project to be implemented will take advantage of the lessons learned and the techniques developed in other Embrapa initiatives, considering the peculiarities of Mozambique” . This brief admonition about the significance of “socio-economic differences” between Brazil and Africa and the need to take into account the “peculiarities” of recipient countries as well as “lessons learned” on the ground in fact encapsulates a remarkable challenge: how to do technology adaptation and transfer in a domain like agriculture, which is highly contextsensitive? And how to do it without the bureaucratic apparatus and bountiful resources available to Northern donors and multilateral institutions? The remainder of this chapter will look closer at one of Embrapa’s South-South cooperation modalities – capacity-building trainings – to suggest how some of these questions have been explicitly raised and pursued by means of a mode of engagement that differs from that of Northern aid, and which I will characterize here as being based on demonstration rather than intervention.

While cooperation discourse was centered on confident expectations borne out by cultural and natural affinities supposedly shared by the two sides of the Southern Atlantic, those operating at the front line of cooperation showed a much more diverse range of concerns, addressing the multiple domains they encountered while making their way into Africa’s intricate development landscape. As it turned out, the idiom prevalent in the Brazilian diplomats’ discourse could also be found among most other emerging donors, and was just as often conveyed through presumed historical connections or analogies. Thus, in their cooperation efforts, Indians have evoked ties with Africa from pre-history – the landmass where India stands today broke off from the Southeastern part of Africa before it bumped into Asia to form the Himalayas – to the common struggle against colonization, where that continent would have figured as “the land of awakening of the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi”, to language, food and Bollywood songs and films . The Chinese have made extensive use of a “rhetoric of commonality, analogous underdevelopment, suffering at the hands of colonialism and encouragement of self reliance” . Age-old sea trade and the imaginary of the millenarian Silk Road linking Asia to East Africa have been lavishly deployed by both Asian giants. Emerging donors from the African continent– South Africa and some Maghreb countries – have drawn on their alleged natural vocation to act as mediators between Sub-Saharan Africa and Northern and Southern donors.

Even those who do not enjoy significant historical ties with Sub-Saharan Africa, like the Japanese,round nursery pots are finding their way around this handicap by partnering up with those who do, like Brazil. When one looks closer at the historical record, however, a series of strategic “occlusions and associations” quickly emerges. Based on several case studies, some of them by anthropologists, Emma Mawdsley remarked for instance how China’s South-South rhetoric draws extensively on the Maoist era’s close engagement with Africa while in contemporary China itself, that period is a subject to be avoided ; how India’s “sanitized historical referents” have excluded “troublesome realities” like the expulsion or hostility against Indians in some East African countries, or their participation as lower-level officials in British colonization in Africa ; or how, in today’s reemergence of Poland as a donor, it is as if cooperation experiences during its socialist past “had never existed” . Therefore, all emerging donors have a “symbolic politics” of re-writing their joint history towards a naturalized narrative of affinities and commonalities.This chapter will discuss this symbolic politics in the case of Brazil-Africa relations. Although in this case the rhetoric of affinities and commonalities is equally prevalent, it has addressed with particular poignancy and tenacity a domain in which anthropologists have also made much investment over the decades: culture. The first section will probe into the historical roots of Brazilian diplomacy’s exceptional interest in culture, and discuss some of the contradictions to which this has led. I then go on to suggest some of the ways in which culture appeared at the front line practice of contemporary cooperation, as it was observed during fieldwork.

The last section takes up the claim that Brazilians’ views on Africa have been historically imbued with a persistent “culturalist grammar”, originally popularized by the work of sociologist Gilberto Freyre from the 1930’s onwards in Brazil, and later on in Portugal. Looking at Freyre’s ideas and their vulgarized version through the lenses of Said’s Orientalism, I elaborate the notion of nation-building Orientalism to suggest how Brazilians’ views on Africa have been shaped by the double directionality of coloniality discussed in the Introduction: on the one hand an internal colonialist concern with the incorporation of African descendants into the national polity, and on the other, Brazil’s sense of sub-alternity and quest for recognition vis-à-vis European and U.S. hegemony. In October 18th 2010, Embrapa’s brand new training center in Brasília opened its doors to its first cohort of African trainees, from 27 countries in both Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. In the opening ceremony, government officials and Embrapa managers received them with a warm welcome, urging them to feel at home, “brothers and sisters” of Brazilians as they are. A representative of the Brazilian Cooperation Agency opened the speaker series by presenting Brazil’s model of South-South cooperation along the lines described in Chapter 1: demand-driven, non-conditional, based on solidarity and free of commercial interests, tailored to particular conditions of recipient countries. In the case of Africa, he argued, success in adapting Brazilian experiences would be further linked to a series of enabling elements: ethnic and historical resemblances produced by past migratory flows; a common cultural heritage expressed in the arts, sports, food, music; natural and climatic similarities; and comparable challenges in developmental fields like agriculture or energy.

In his afternoon presentation, he addressed Brazilian culture: the country is highly mixed racially, he explained, with an “open, dynamic and versatile culture” marked by religious and racial tolerance. Both plural and original, it is diverse across the country’s different regions, while being capable of producing modern world-class “jewels” like Brasília. The assumption of “indissoluble cultural ties” between Brazil and Africa, and that Brazil’s unique cultural outlook owes much to African contributions in domains like food, language, music and other arts, sports and other bodily techniques, is one of the most recurrent threads in written and spoken official discourse on Africa-Brazil cooperation.A secondary one is the ample deployment of an idiom of kinship, especially that of siblinghood, where Brazil occasionally appears as a more mature brother. President Lula was one of its most enthusiastic users, and even his temperate successor Rousseff has maintained it; in their statements during trips to Africa or when receiving Africans in Brazil, irmãos e irmãs africanosor vizinhos próximoswere a sure reference. A third theme speaks of Brazil and African countries in terms of a common historical experience of having been subjected to colonization or imperialism, and the almost automatic ties of solidarity that would ensue from it. Different from Europe’s racialized rule that “relied on assertions of fundamental cultural differences between Europeans and Africans to legitimate imperial projects of civilizing improvements” , relations between Brazilians and Africans would be characterized by cultural familiarity and spontaneous affinities. The recurrence of these claims led me to ask the obvious questions: is this indeed the case? If not, what role is this discourse playing in contemporary rapprochements between Brazilians and Africans? How is it able to sustain itself in spite of its potential for contradiction vis-à-vis both front line practice and the historical record? One of the first things my research effort unveiled is that none of this is new; in fact, if it weren’t for some recent inflections, one would be tempted to suggest that contemporary discourse on Brazil-Africa cooperation is at least half-a-century old. In his reference book on Brazil’s international relations with the African continent, Brazilian historian José Flávio Sombra Saraiva remarked an “intriguing continuity” throughout the decades, despite oscillations in virtually all other domains: what he called,plastic flower pots in a formulation that I will take up here, the culturalist grammar of Brazil’s discourse on Africa. This rhetoric is not only long lasting but in many ways unique; according to Saraiva , it stands out sharply for its “emotional” elements, in contrast with the tone dedicated to other regions historically privileged by Brazil, such as Latin America, the U.S., and Europe. This grammar can be found with particular salience in the two other moments when Brazilian diplomats, policymakers and businessmen sought a closer approximation with their African counterparts.

One harks back to the first wave of independences in the African continent beginning in the late 1950’s, when Brazilian President Jânio Quadros inaugurated in 1961 an official foreign policy for the African continent which was carried forward by his successor João Goulart until his overthrow by a military coup in 1964. The first three years of military rule swung back to Brazil’s traditional Occidentalist alignment with Europe and the U.S., downplaying relations with African countries and other decolonizing nations. But this did not last long: in another shift around 1967, begun what Saraiva called the “golden years” of Brazil-Africa relations, which this time would last over a decade. Both Quadros and Goulart used to refer to Africa in today’s tropes of familiarity, a common cultural identity and history, and a natural bridge across the Southern Atlantic. Correspondingly, it was often taken for granted that Africans would be “naturally” receptive to Brazil’s gestures of political and cultural solidarity , and that the nascent African nations would be eager to learn from Brazil’s more mature post-colonial nation-state, including as an “example of complete absence of racial prejudice” . Brazil’s constitutive “Africanness” and its marginal position within the Western sphere were cast by Brazilian diplomats as a positive vocation for mediating between former European colonizers and the new “tropical civilizations” in Africa, or between the First and the Third Worlds at large – even to “lead the bloc of Afro-Asian nations” in its relations with the West . But if metaphors of approximation have framed the Southern Atlantic as Brazil’s “Eastern border” , an “inner sea” , or “no more than a ‘river’ between two continents” , the 1,600 miles that separate continental Brazil’s Easternmost portion from the Senegalese capital of Dakar have also been regarded as a line of key geopolitical importance for protecting the West from the communist threat . In spite of the discursive emphasis on spontaneous solidarity, geopolitics, global trade, and imperatives of national development played from the start a key part in shaping Brazil-Africa relations. In fact, this kind of rhetoric showed to be highly flexible to different uses; its basic logic would persist even when Brazil’s orientation towards Africa followed a very different direction than Quadros’ and Goulart’s distinctive Third-Worldism. In those moments when an engagement with decolonizing Africa was downplayed in favor of a realignment with the West, the culturalist grammar undergirded the confidence placed on the supposedly higher civilizing capabilities of Portuguese colonialism – of which Brazil itself would be the most finished exemplar. Supporters of Portugal would often deploy kinship or sentimental terms to describe its relations with former and current colonies, going to such lengths as to declare that “Our policy with Portugal is not really a policy. It is a family affair”, or that “I have no policy. I came here to love Portugal” . A common starting point in narratives about Brazil-Africa relations, including in SouthSouth cooperation discourse, is the arrival, in the 1550’s, of the first African slaves to the shores of recently “discovered” Portuguese possessions in South America. Most of them were shipped from slave trade outposts established by the Portuguese in what is today Angola, and in the Gulf of Benin in West Africa. By the late seventeenth century, Portugal had become a subaltern Empire politically and economically dependent on the British, and from the late 1700’s, Brazilians themselves had surpassed the Portuguese in direct trade with Africa . The nineteenth century, which saw a gradual receding of legal and then illegal slave trade across the Atlantic, is generally regarded as a moment of relative silence between Brazil and the African continent . During this period, the rising British Empire succeeded not only in significantly curbing the transatlantic traffic in slaves, but in consolidating its hegemony over South Atlantic trade routes . The encroachment of European powers on the African continent, which would culminate in the late nineteenth century “scramble” and from there in the effective colonial occupation of the African hinterlands, finished closing off the continent’s channels of exchange with Brazil. And this included Angola as well as all other Portuguese colonies – as part of its independence deal with Portugal in 1822, Brazil had renounced any attempt to gain control over its former colonizer’s possessions in the African continent. But the reasons for Brazil’s retreat did not refer solely to changing international arrangements: the first decades of independence were a key moment for internal colonialism and territorial integration, marked by multi-pleinternal rebellions and upheavals as well as by an outflow of retornadose specially to the Bight of Benin. Such returnees would become a central element in the twentieth-century reinvention of a shared tradition between Brazil and Africa .

Consequently, lower NO3 – concentration and lower NO3 – :Clratio are predicted in the silty loam vadose zone as compared to the sandy loam column. It is interesting to note that while greater NO3 – loss and denitrification are predicted for the silty loam vadose zone, carbon concentration associated with the shallow vadose zone are comparatively lower than for the sandy loam column. Moreover, the calculated pH is lower and iron concentrations are higher in the silt loam profile below the top meter when compared to the same depths within the sandy loam column . This suggests that chemolithoautotrophic reactions could be more important for these finer textured sediments. While both heterotrophic and chemolithoautotrophic reactions would be expected to result in a pH decrease , the greater decline in pH and concomitant increase in Fe+3 concentration suggests the importance of Fe and S redox cycling associated with the chemolithoautotrophic reactions in silty loam sediments . Evolving from these steady state conditions, scenario S1 suggests that denitrification is enhanced as floodwater infiltrates into the silt loam column. Model results indicate that saturation increases to 80% from 1 to 4 m depths and O2 decreases from 2.1 x 10-4 mol L-1 to 1.7 x 10-4 mol L -1 , resulting in 43% of the NO3 – being denitrified for this scenario . In comparison to the homogeneous profiles, the sandy loam with silt loam channel stratigraphy has higher calculated water contents and slightly lower O2 concentration within and surrounding the silt loam channel than the homogenous sandy loam column under steady state conditions . Calculated NO3 – concentrations are also similar between the homogenous sandy loam column and SaSi case,flower display buckets except for within and below the silt loam channel where lower NO3 – concentration was predicted .

For scenario S1, water content for the SaSi case increased in a manner similar to the homogenous sandy loam, except for within the silt loam channel, which increased from 60 to 81%. Figure 4 further demonstrates that the infiltrating floodwater resulted in an increase in NO3 – concentration between 1 and 3 m within the sandy loam textured soil, but a decrease elsewhere. Within the channel itself , lower nitrate and NO3 – :Clratio are predicted, suggesting higher rates of denitrification . Overall, the model results indicate that an average of 37% of the NO3 – concentration is denitrified in the SaSi case 60 days after flooding, with 35% denitrification occurring in the sandy loam matrix and 40% occurring within the silt loam channel. Furthermore, the silt loam channel has lower carbon and higher Fe+3 concentrations similar to the homogenous silt loam column again suggesting the importance of both heterotrophic and chemolithoautotrophic denitrification in these finer textured sediments. In comparison to the SaSi case, calculated water saturation and O2 profiles were markedly different between the homogenous silt loam column and the silt loam with sandy loam channel under steady state conditions . In particular, the sandy loam channel has lower calculated water content than the homogenous silt loam column . Further, greater gas flux within the channel resulted in 11-19% higher O2 concentration that penetrated deeper into the vadose zone as compared to the homogeneously textured column. NO3 – concentration are also estimated to penetrate deeper into the vadose zone in the SiSa case due to the high permeability of the sandy loam channel .

While carbon concentration also penetrated deeper in the vadose zone in the SiSa case, higher calculated O2 concentration did not allow for comparable rates of denitrification below 1 m in this case as observed in the homogenous silt loam profile. This is further confirmed by the lower NO3 – :Clratio, which indicates that transport processes dominate biogeochemical fluxes within this column . With scenario S1, the calculated water content increased to 48% saturation while the O2 concentration remained the same within the channel. The high permeability channel allowed for NO3 – to move faster and deeper into the vadose zone. Overall, calculated denitrification was lower in the SiSa case as compared to the homogeneous textured column. In the simplified ERT stratigraphy, similar patterns were observed such that high permeability channels transported water, O2, and NO3 – faster and deeper into the subsurface than low permeability regions . As a result, concentration profiles showed significant variability across the modeled domain even under steady state conditions. For example, the calculated O2 and NO3 – concentrations are an order of magnitude lower in the shallow vadose zone below the limiting layer than within the preferential flow channel. Higher NO3 – :Clratio within the channel further confirms that preferential flow paths transport higher quantities of dissolved aqueous species without their being impacted by other processes such as denitrification . Other interesting trends are shown by carbon and Fe+2 concentrations within the modeled column. Dissolved carbon in particular is predicted to have a lower concentration in the preferential flow channel and the matrix surrounding the channel than below the limiting layer. In contrast, the Fe+2 concentration is estimated to be higher in the matrix surrounding the preferential flow channel and below the limiting layer . For scenario S1, model results indicate that NO3 – moved through the preferential flow path faster and deeper into the profile, while the limiting layer acts as a denitrification barrier as evidenced by the decrease in NO3 – :Clratio.

The highest denitrification was estimated to occur in the matrix adjacent to the preferential flow channel , followed by intermediate nitrate reduction below the limiting layer and far away from the channel , while the lowest denitrification was estimated to occur within the channel itself . The confluence of higher amounts of C and NO3 – moving into a reduced zone could be the reason that the matrix surrounding the preferential flow channel has higher denitrification rates, while the regions further away from the preferential flow channel have lower amounts of microbially available C and NO3 – . In contrast, residence times are too short in the channel to allow for reducing conditions to develop. The ability of the entire vadose zone to denitrify would depend on the overall surface area of preferential flow paths to the rest of the surrounding matrix in the zone of flooding. Overall, we find that low permeability zones alone or embedded within high flow zones demonstrate highest denitrification rates across all soil profiles. Because the ERT column more closely approximates the heterogenity of our agricultural field site,flower bucket we use this column to demonstrate the impact of hydraulic loading and application frequency on nitrogen fate and dynamics. Simulated profiles of liquid saturation, NO3 – , NO3 – :Cland acetate for the simplified ERT stratigraphy for scenarios S2 and S3 are shown in Figure 9 and A3. It is interesting to note that AgMAR ponding under scenarios S2 and S3 resulted in fully saturated conditions to persist within the root zone only. In comparison, the 68 cm all-at-once application for scenario S1 resulted in fully saturated conditions to occur at even greater depths of 235 cm-bgs . This resulted in the NO3 – front moving deeper into the subsurface to depths of 450 cm-bgs under S1 compared to 150 cm-bgs for scenarios S2 and S3 . Much lower concentrations of NO3 – were found at 450 cm-bgs in scenarios S2 and S3 compared to S1 . Thus, larger amounts of water applied all-at-once led to NO3 – being transported faster and deeper into the profile. Surprisingly, model results indicate 37% of NO3 – was denitrified with scenario S1, while 34% and 32% of NO3 – was denitrified in scenarios S2 and S3, respectively. For scenarios S2 and S3, denitrification was estimated to occur only within the root zone. This was confirmed by NO3 – :Clratio that did not show any reduction with depth for these scenarios. A reason for this could be that acetate was not estimated to occur below the root zone, preventing electron donors from reaching greater depths for denitrification to occur. In contrast, model results for S1 indicate that acetate was leached down to 235 cm-bgs below the limiting layer. Overall, model results indicate that NO3 – did not move as fast or as deep in scenarios S2 or S3; however, the ability of the vadose zone to denitrify was reduced when the hydraulic loading was decreased. The main reason for this was that breaking the application into smaller hydraulic loadings resulted in O2concentrations to recover to background atmospheric conditions faster than the larger allat-once application in scenario S1. In fact, the O2 concentration differed slightly between S2 and S3. Because O2 inhibits denitrification, we conclude that these conditions resulted in the different denitrification capacity across application frequency and duration. In summary, we find that larger amounts of water applied all-at-once increased the denitrification capacity of the vadose zone while incremental application of water did not. However, NO3 – movement to deeper depths was slower under S2 and S3.

Because initial saturation conditions impact nitrogen leaching, we also simulated the impact of wetter antecedent moisture with 15% higher saturation levels than the base case simulation for the ERT profile. Simulated profiles of liquid saturation, NO3 – , NO3 – :Cland acetate for the simplified ERT stratigraphy under wetter conditions are shown in Figure 10. Model results demonstrate that the water front moved faster and deeper into the soil profile under initially wetter conditions for all three scenarios. Within the shallow vadose zone , across AgMAR scenarios, O2 concentrations were similar initially, but began differing at early simulated times, with lower O2 under wetter antecedent moisture conditions than with the base-case simulation. In addition, both oxygen and nitrate concentrations showed significant spatial variation across the modeled column. Notably, nitrate concentrations were 166% higher in the preferential flow channel compared to the sandy loam matrix under wetter conditions, while only 161% difference was observed under the base case simulation . Nitrate movement followed a pattern similar to water flow, with NO3 – reaching greater depths with the wetter antecedent moisture conditions. Under S1, however, at 150 cm-bgs, NO3 – decreased more quickly under the wetter antecedent moisture conditions due to biochemical reduction of NO3 – , as evidenced by the decrease in NO3 – :Clratio, as well as by dilution of the incoming floodwater. In the wetter antecedent moisture conditions, 39%, 31%, and 30% of NO3 – was denitrified under S1, S2, and S3, respectively. For S1, where water was applied all at once, more denitrification occurred in the wetter antecedent moisture conditions, however, the same was not true of S2 and S3 where water applications were broken up over time. This could be due to the hysteresis effect of subsequent applications of water occurring at higher initial moisture contents, allowing the NO3 – to move faster and deeper into the profile without the longer residence times needed for denitrification to occur. Thus, wetter antecedent moisture conditions prime the system for increased denitrification capacity when water is applied all at once and sufficient reducing conditions are reached, however, this is counteracted by faster movement of NO3 – into the vadose zone. Simluations from our study demonstrate that low-permeability zones such as silt loams allow for reducing conditions to develop, thereby leading to higher denitrification in these sediments as compared to high permeability zones such as sandy loams. In fact, the homogenous silt loam profile reported the maximum amount of denitrification occurring across all five stratigraphic configurations . Furthermore, the presence of a silt loam channel in a dominant sandy loam column increased the capacity of the column to denitrify by 2%. Conversely, adding a sandy loam channel into a silt loam matrix decreased the capacity of the column to denitrify by 2%. These relatively simple heterogeneities exemplify how hot spots in the vadose zone can have a small but accumulating effect on denitrification capacity . Note that differences in denitrification capacity maybe much greater than reported here because of increased complexity and heterogeneity of actual field sites when compared to our simplified modeling domains. Another observation of interest for silty loams is the prominence of chemolithoautotrophic reactions and Fe cycling observed in these sediments. In comparison, sandy loam sediments showed persistence and transport of NO3 – to greater depths. A reason for this is that oxygen concentration was much more dynamic in sandy loams, rebounding to oxic conditions more readily than in silt loams, even deep into the vadose zone .

The last two chapters will focus on one project , and the other three will provide a broader account of Brazilian South South cooperation. Here, what is lost in terms of depth is hopefully gained in terms of breadth. Had I focused only on the cotton project, for instance, I probably would not have had a real notion of the heterogeneity and shifting character of this phenomenon called “Brazilian SouthSouth cooperation”, and might have generalized an experience that turned out to be in fact quite particular, even within Embrapa itself. This is due not only to the way I entered the field, but to the way I left it. In other words, it has to do with the highly politically charged character of the phenomena that I am proposing to describe here . As with other ethnographies of developers, many things – important things – had to be either addressed indirectly or left out of writing altogether for ethical reasons. As Rottenburg remarked, differential access to information is itself part of the game in development networks, so there will always be a potential for interference and even harm by the ethnographer’s “external” gaze.20 My transit from field to desk – a step that, when completed, would normally mean the conclusion of the PhD project cycle – has been therefore shaped by a prospect: the reverse path, from desk back to field. In fact,procona flower transport containers I have had a previous experience with an academic publication going back to the field in a way that was, from my perspective, “unfaithful” to it.

I know already of a couple of field interlocutors who have quoted some of my writings about Brazilian South-South cooperation. This dissertation is therefore not a detached account, but, to use Jensen and Rödje’s Deleuzian-Strathernian idiom, a “specific exploratio[n] of multiple concrete interfaces at which … experimentation with the real takes place” . This way, it can be brought into generative connections with other academic works on similar phenomena, and hopefully also with the field: as these authors have further suggested, “if the relation between the explanation and explained is destabilized and rendered flexible, then one’s ambition cannot be to achieve a more or less adequate ‘matching’ of the two. Instead the aspiration must be to create associations that mutually enrich and reciprocally transform each part of the material” . By thus nurturing this dissertation’s relational potentials vis-à-vis both academia and the field in a direction that I see as productive for both domains, I hope it can be a step towards a more robust representation of / intervention on the emerging practical and discursive interfaces of South-South cooperation. This chapter looks at South-South cooperation as an emergent trend within the international development landscape. What was described in the vignette with which I opened the Introduction is not something one would encounter as frequently, say, even ten years ago. Both Brazil and China have been entertaining cooperative relations with various parts of the African continent since decolonization and even before that, but not with the same extension, purposefulness, systematicity, or visibility of today. And even though many of the processes, institutions, and individual actors engaged in contemporary South-South cooperation did exist previously, I suggest that the interfaces into which they are being brought together since the last decade or so are, indeed, emergent.

This claim is based on Brazil’s recent rise as a provider of cooperation, but the growing body of works on other emerging donors indicate that some of the trends I observed may be more generally shared among them. As virtually all commentators, academic and not, of these proliferating global interfaces remarked, the agents and processes that have been brought together under the rubric of SouthSouth cooperation are multiple, shifting, ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory. South-South cooperation is itself a contested term, not only in academia but in the field: various actors and institutions currently struggle with or against each other to codify it and stabilize their own account of what South-South cooperation is or should be. But in spite of the complexity of stakes and narratives, a claim that has been widely shared by those purporting to speak about, or in behalf of, it in Brazil and elsewhere is that it is something different than the development aid provided by Northern donors and multilateral institutions during the last half-century or so. This claim to difference is found both in self-accounts by emerging donors and in views on them by Northern donors and the recipients of cooperation. Difference may have opposite signals: competition or complementarity, positivity or negativity. Thus, one of the common framings of South-South cooperation has been neoimperialism; in this view, emerging donors would be merely reproducing the rapacious intentions and behaviors of their Northern counterparts, and even more perniciously because couched in a cloak of Third World solidarity. Another option is a negative assessment of emerging donors by those who stand by development aid: that through their heterodox and unaccountable practices, new donors would be jeopardizing the good work achieved by traditional aid thus far. A third perspective, which shares the latter’s sympathy towards traditional aid, views South-South cooperation as an embryonic, incomplete phenomenon, that has yet to catch up with the more mature form of development cooperation found in the global North and in multilateral institutions such as the World Bank or UNDP.

Finally, and closing the circle of this four-legged matrix, critics of Northern development aid may see in emerging donors a hope out of the latter’s neocolonial grasp over the global South. Between these poles, in practice there are multiple hybrids and combinations. During fieldwork, the most prevalent views involved the latter two; rarely did I come across manifestations of the first two among Brazil’s African partners. In Brazil and elsewhere in the emerging global South , even official self-accounts do not always fit squarely in one such options. In its multiple manifestations in the various governmental and nongovernmental arms involved in the provision of South-South cooperation, emerging donors’ views on themselves may also span polar ends: ranging from an oppositional, Third-Worldist discourse that they should remain independent from the North and frame their practices against those of traditional development aid , to a conciliatory, North-friendly narrative that South-South cooperation is here to complement, rather than to replace or oppose, aid delivered by traditional donors. Although my interlocutors in Brasília used to be much more explicit about these kinds of self-accounts than those implementing cooperation activities on the ground, I found more or less coherent versions of these two views among all of them – not rarely, ambivalently combined in the same person. The question of difference between South-South cooperation and its North-South counterpart found in the field also characterizes this dissertation’s engagement with the available literature. In the absence of an ethnographically and theoretically robust body of ethnographic works on emerging donors, this chapter’s privileged academic interlocutors will be studies based on development initiatives led by Northern donors or multilateral agencies. Two mainstream currents will be privileged here: works inspired by Foucault’s notions of discourse and governmentality , and actor-based approaches .The debates prevalent in this literature drew attention to three inter-related analytical domains, which this chapter will approach: historical genealogies of development cooperation; organizational architecture and dynamics; and discourse and de-politicization. Section 1 will sketch a brief historical account of South-South cooperation based on its relations with traditional development aid,procona valencia going back and forth between global scales and Brazil’s more situated standpoint. Against the backdrop of this situated genealogy, Sections 2 will set the terms for a discussion, to be pursued further in this dissertation, about whether, and in which sense, would South-South cooperation imply a re-politicization of a phenomenon marked, according to much of the anthropological literature on development aid, by de-politicization. Section 3 will provide an account of the organizational architecture and dynamics of Brazilian South-South cooperation, based on data collected during fieldwork and on secondary sources.

The chapter will conclude by claiming that this emerging phenomenon calls for an analytics capable of attending to open-endedness, ambivalences and contradiction, as well as to the historical density of particular South-South relations. I suggest that generative insights in this direction may be found in discussions on the postcolonial question in Latin America and elsewhere; the next chapter will put some of these to work with respect to Brazil-Africa relations.Brazil and other emerging donors are hardly newcomers to the international development scene. From its early beginnings, the Western development apparatus has included them, but mostly in the condition of beneficiaries of aid. This experience as recipients is relevant for their current transition to providers of cooperation, but this relation is not a simple one to track empirically . Moreover, South-South cooperation provided by individual countries is never an isolated, unidirectional effort, but part of a broader historical tide that has also included other emerging donors. This is a story about a changing world order, about an emerging multi-polar world that would have outgrown the regulatory shoes crafted by the hegemonic geopolitics that spanned much of the twentieth-century. It is a story told by many narrators, including – and claims to North-South opposition notwithstanding – the international development community itself. How would the story of international development, told by so many in the academic literature , look like from the other side of the North-South hemispheric divide? In historical approaches to South-South cooperation, a common way to begin has been with the emergence of the global development apparatus at large and the “making of the Third World” that ensued . From this perspective, SouthSouth cooperation shares Northern development’s two chief, interrelated historical vectors: the emergence of the global multilateral system in the aftermath of the World Wars, within which developing countries participated initially as subaltern parties and recipients of aid; and decolonization in Africa and Asia, which led to the formation of what would become the Third World. It was not until then that broad-based alignments across what is now best known as the global South could emerge as a formal engagement between independent nation-states. Against this broader historical canvass, Mawdsley singled out more particular “drivers or contexts” in her comprehensive work on emerging donors: “socialism, the NonAligned Movement, the United Nations South-South cooperation initiatives, the oil price rises in the 1970s, and European Union expansion” . The last two have little relevance for the case of Brazil, and in the others, it has participated quite differently than other emerging donors such as China, India, or Russia. A loyal, though at times ambivalent, member of the Western block along with most of Latin America, Brazil has been less permeable to the Cold War juggling for allegiances that marked decolonization in much of Asia and Africa.Cold War geopolitics was, on the other hand, key for understanding the early engagements within and between Asia and Africa during decolonization. Besides the former Soviet Union and China, smaller socialist countries such as Cuba, Vietnam and those in Eastern Europe participated in pioneer experiences of South-South collaboration in various domains, from financial to military, from technical to diplomatic . The non-aligned movement was also a direct outgrowth of Cold War politics, but emerging around a commitment not to align with either of the two blocs. If Harry Truman’s iconic 1949 Point Four program is widely referenced in both the academic and the development literature as marking the birth of international development,the 1955 Bandung Conference is often raised as a key historical landmark for horizontal cooperation between Third World nations.Even if the Conference’s original twenty-nine members – all from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East – were not equally committed to neutralism, they closed ranks firmly around the question of decolonization.Both in Bandung and in its sequel, the Non-Aligned Movement, Brazil and most of Latin America participated only as observers. As independences were gradually achieved and most of the original Bandung and non-alignment leaders eventually left power, the politico-ideological character of early alignments across the nascent Third World gradually gave way to pragmatic drives of a geopolitical and economic order . As will be seen, even if foreign aid was not a major theme in the Non-Aligned Movement, the purchase of the latter’s political language in contemporary South-South cooperation, including in Brazil, is remarkable.

If the potential support is not proportional to revenues, then the tangency will deviate so that the group with more political clout receives lower prices. Both of these situations can deviate from the case of the discriminating monopolist which would charge prices based solely on the relative costs of providing service to each group. Rosen, develop a cooperative game model that examines how coalitions might be built for water markets within a district . This model uses an approach developed by Sexton to assess the voting patterns of agricultural production cooperatives . In this cooperative setting, R&S examine if a policy which maximizes the net benefits fora number of individuals that represents the majority in the district will be chosen over another which maximizes the total net monetary benefits to the members of the district. R&S assume that a single popular vote institution is used to transmit political influence to the district’s board and managers.’ The implicit assumption is that political power is in proportion to the institutional allocation of votes. R&S examined the Imperial Irrigation District-Metropolitan Water District sales transactions and how lID farmers decided to accept or reject various sales terms and revenue allocations. R&S surveyed 31 farmers about their farm operations to estimate the net benefits from alternative trading scenarios. They then created a voter-decision model using a pair-wise voting procedure that simulated farmers’ choices based on the expected net benefits to each individual.

The result was that the policy which would have generated the greatest total benefits to district members-a defacto assignation of water rights to individual land owners before transfer-lost to a policy which gave the greatest net benefits to a majority of eligible voters-a combination of conservation measures to preserve water supplies to farms and a distribution of A useful institutional perspective is to compare how the operations and financing of water districts reflect the principles of cooperatives : these districts provide service “at cost” as non-profit organizations; benefits generally are distributed in proportion to use of the managed resource; returns to equity capital are limited and generally gained through directly-related activities, such as selling irrigated crops; and the district is controlled by the member-users, which meshes with the concept of vertical integration of the water supply with agricultural production. Several advantages exist in the cooperative management of input resources . The joint allocation of resources avoids the transaction costs and risks associated with markettype exchange institution, e.g., post-contract opportunism by a party . By extending or avoiding market power, it can encourage development of asset-specific relationships by removing risk of contract breach . And it provides a mechanism for avoiding, mitigating,25 litre plant pot spreading and sharing risk among members . The internalization of allocation decisions can avoid government interference in the exchange institution, e.g., federal reclamation law acreage limitations . The model presented here builds on the three political-economy models that explain district behavior from different perspectives, but rely on a common assumption. The assumption is that members try to influence district managers to choose management policies that distribute benefits in proportion to political power while maximizing aggregate benefits subject to that constraint.

The district’s objective, acting as a cooperative, is to maximize net benefits to all members, but the non-profit constraint means that the district’s “rents” must be distributed among its members indirectly, perhaps through changes in water rates or allocations. This distribution is the function of political power within the district, measured in terms of voting share in this case. Politically, water districts in California are marked by a variety of governance-selection schemes . Most of these are directed through state general district acts, of which there are 38 types; in addition, over one hundred special-district enabling acts were in place by 1994 . Selection of the governing board may be through a vote of eligible persons or appointment by the county board of supervisors. Eligible voters may be residents of the district and/or property owners. Votes may be counted as one-person/one-vote or be weighted by property acreage or assessed value per acre. California law tends to favor landowners in governance procedures . While the popular vote is predominate in older districts in the Sacramento and east San Joaquin Valleys, the property-weighted scheme has grown in use, especially in the west and south San Joaquin Valley served by the newer state and federal water projects where corporate farms, rather than family-owned farms, are more common . Even older districts have switched to land-owner enfranchisement.’ Each of the districts’ management-selection procedures give different incentives to district members and managers. Economic theory leads to an expectation that an assessed-property-value weighted voting scheme would most closely mimic that of a vertically-integrated firm. Agricultural property values reflect the net returns to crops, and to the degree that water application is correlated with land values, the votes would be allocated in proportion to implicit ownership and utilization of the water resource. However, because land values reflect other factors such as soil type and relative market location, value-based voting should not simply follow the same pattern as that for single-product firms.

District “ownership” shares are not necessarily in direct proportion to the value-added from water application, as would be case in a private enterprise where ownership would be based on output value, not input quantities. Acreageweighted schemes reflect a presumption that the amount of water applied per acre is roughly constant across farms and that marginal land values attributable to water use do not vary substantially across a district. This scheme is less likely to match the profit-maximizing interests of the landowners than value-based methods. A popular-vote method tends to divest the district from a solely profit-maximizing objective. Equitable distribution of benefits from district operations become more important. The interests of individual landowner farmers can diverge from that of the district, e.g. in the extra district sale of water rights. Finally, board-appointed districts represent an interesting enigma. In theory, because the district board supposedly represents the interests of the entire county, the decision-making process for the district should be quite divergent from maximizing the profits of those receiving water supplies. However, these agencies are relatively obscure except to those directly impacted, and these boards more likely are “captured” by their customers and reflect their informally-transmitted desires. In summary, it is evident that the motives for the districts can be quite different than the classic assumption of “profit-maximization. ” The various governance rules used by different types of districts, such as voting eligibility and weighting, can undermine some of the principles in cooperative management in achieving efficiency. Stated simply, managers are likely to distribute benefits from operations of the district in proportion to the political strength of its members rather than to economic contribution. Reliance on popular vote rather than property-weighted vote can create a wedge between those defined as members versus users, and benefits may be rebated on a basis different from use. These benefits might extend beyond simply delivering water to reassigning responsibility for water rights, deciding if water sales need approval to protect certain interests within the district, and setting district charges and taxes to achieve economic goals other than efficiency. In general, we might expect if the votes are distributed in proportion to the value of agricultural land,30 litre plant pots bulk then the district will act to maximize the value to landowners. If on the other hand, the electoral selection process uses a one-person/one-vote rule, we might expect that the district will attempt to maximize the value of water-related economic activity regardless of its ties to the land. These action can include maintaining the water resource for tenant farmers who do not hold title to the land but may have significant fixed investments in their farm, and considering local farm-service businesses if they are eligible to vote. An assessed-value-weighted voting scheme appears more likely than a popular-vote system to mimic the prototypical “firm” in economic modeling due to the closer correlation between the governance process and the distribution of benefits from water use. Water sales tend to benefit landowners because the districts’ rights are most frequently tied to the land. Thus, we expect property-weighted districts to be more receptive to selling into a water market than districts with other types of governance structures.

Using some assumptions about how the motives for various district members might differ, we can build a model that assesses how the various political structures might influence the districts’ management decisions. In a property-based voting system, we can assume that the preferred policies will tend to lead to accrual of district benefits in land values. For the popular vote structure, we must identify a proxy for those actions that target benefits towards water related activities. As the voting structure moves away from being directly proportional to the value of water use, we might find that the district’s manager will pursue policies that benefit non-landowners. Landowners are more likely to be focused on the bottom line=-for example, which generates more revenues per acre, growing crops or selling the water. On the other hand, tenant farmers require water to work their land-they are unlikely to receive payment for water sold by the landowner through a district. Local businesses also rely on farming activity, not just income flows to local landholders that might result from water sales. In a popular-vote system, the district may choose to both limit outside water sales so as to maintain farming activity, and to price water in a way that maximizes other related economic activity, e.g., fertilizer and equipment sales. Observing the former is difficult when water markets do not exist for many other reasons such as state policy. However, we may be able to find a suitable proxy for the latter.In the case of tenant farmers, they may be reluctant to plant high-value, water-saving crops due to uncertainty about the their tenure on the land. Orchard crops require several years before they reach maturity and must produce for up to two decades to recover the initial investment. Tenants tend to show higher discount rates than owners, leading to less investment in resource-conserving technologies that are capital intensive . More efficient irrigation technologies generally require sunk investment that can be lost by a tenant if the landowner takes action to stop farming on the land. In response to these risks, tenant farmers would be more likely to grow water-intensive field crops with less-efficient irrigation technologies. To support these practices, the district would lower the per unit price of water so that higher application rates do not cause higher costs, and rely on other revenue sources such as per-acre fees or taxes and electricity sales. Higher property taxes have the added advantage for tenants that the elasticity of demand for land limits the incidence of the tax on rents, i.e., landlords must absorb part of the tax in their rents to stay competitive in the agricultural land market. The existence of sharecropping arrangements reinforces this tendency because landowners often must pay the delivered water charge, which comes out of their rent earnings. Local businesses may prefer two types of outcomes. The first is that crops be grown that require a high level of purchased inputs, e.g., fertilizer or equipment. Field crops generate less employment per acre-foot of water than other crops , which might imply that other local inputs such as farm equipment are utilized to a higher degree in production. The second is that business activity remain at a fairly constant or growing level, and that it be of the same nature year-to year . This gives businesses a greater assurance that they will recover their investment in equipment, knowledge and good will. To serve both of these desires, the district will tend to establish pricing structures that do not penalize water use, particularly if the water is for long-established crops. Again, this perspective encourages support for a two-part pricing tariff in which the per water unit charge is relatively small compared to the fixed or property-based portion.This is done in a broad framework that encompasses a large number of districts. For this reason, the model developed here takes the perspective of a district as the decision-making unit. In this way, we can draw inferences about a broad range of districts while controlling for other factors that may influence their behavior, e.g., source of water, dominant crop type, the types of farming operations.