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.