Tag: agriculture

Farm subsidies in the United States have some impact on exports, especially for cotton, but the quantitative impact overall is relatively small because more products have not benefited from significant farm subsidies and many of the subsidy programs have relatively little net effect on production. Korea exports few agricultural goods and the Korean agricultural trade incurs a large trade deficit— an amount almost equal to the country’s total trade surplus . U.S. agricultural exports to Korea exceeded $3 billion in the late 1990s, fell to $1.7 billion in 1998 during Korea’s financial crisis, and then began to recover slowly in subsequent years . U.S. agricultural exports to Korea began to decline again in 2004 after the discovery of a slaughter cow with bovine spongiform encephalopathy in the United States in December 2003. That event caused a collapse in beef exports to Korea and, as a result, agricultural exports fell in 2004 and 2005 . After 2005, which marked the lowest level of U.S. exports since the financial crisis in 1998, U.S. exports bounced back, reaching $3.5 billion in 2007. The United States remains the largest agricultural exporter to Korea and is the chief supplier of many agricultural commodities traded in Korea. Korea is the destination of 4–5% of U.S. agricultural exports but those products constitute a significant share of Korean agricultural imports—23–38% during 2000–2007 . The trend in the past few years, though, is a decline in the U.S. market share,vertical farm mainly due to the emergence of new competitors in the Korean market such as China, Australia, and Chile.

Table 1.e lists shares of total U.S. agricultural exports to Korea for 2003 and 2007 by commodity. Distinct changes in export share during that period are the drop in meat exports and rise in coarse grain exports. With the collapse of meat exports in December 2003, meats’ share of total U.S. exports to Korea plummeted from 33% to 11% in 2007 and the share of coarse grains rose from 1% to 24%. The category that includes fruits, nuts, and vegetables changed little, remaining at 11–12%.Table 2.a on the following page presents University of California Agricultural Issues Center estimates of recent California agricultural exports to Korea.4 After growing by more than $100 million or about 75% from 1999 to 2003, exports declined in 2004 and in 2005 rose only back to the level reached in 2001. In 2006, California agricultural exports to Korea rose back to the record of $312 million reached in 2003. Oranges continue to be the number one export product. In recent years, fresh oranges have replaced cotton and beef as the leading export from California to the Korean market. Beef exports collapsed in 2004 with the discovery of BSE in the United States. Along with declining cotton production in California, the Korean textile processing industry has been shrinking for several years as Korean wages have grown too high relative to those in China and other textile processing countries of Asia. Korean imports of cotton reached a high of about $100 million in 2001, fell to less than $40 million, and then collapsed to less than $10 million in 2006. Tree nuts, especially almonds and walnuts, are also major exports to Korea. Hay, hides and skins, processed tomato products, wine, grapefruit, and rice round out the top exports to Korea in value. Dairy products declined substantially starting in 2003 but remain a major export category.

California is a major provider of U.S. exports for many of the commodities listed in Table 2.a. Table 2.b arranges the California export data to indicate the importance of the Korean market to California agricultural export products. The ranks in Table 2.b are not evaluated by the magnitude of value but by the size of export share shipped to Korea within the given industry. In 2006, Korea was the top export market for California grapefruit with an export share of 14%. For some commodities, export markets are spread among many countries. With a 2–5% export share, Korea is the second most important market for California grape juice, hay, and hides and skins. For California walnuts, Korea ranked eighth in 2006 with a 10% export share. Korea slipped from the top export market for oranges in 2005 to number four in 2006. Before the collapse of exports in 2004, Korea was the number two export market for California beef, accounting for 34% of California beef exports in 2003. In the more recent years shown in Table 2.b, Korea holds double-digit shares of California exports of almonds, grapefruit, oranges, rice, and walnuts. For many of the export commodities listed in Table 2.b, Korea is a top-ten export market and accounts for a significant share of California’s exports.To evaluate California’s relative position and the export potential in the Korean market, we investigate the size and scope of Korean imports. Before we consider individual commodities, let us first review Korean imports of fruits, tree nuts, and vegetables at an aggregate level. There are many individual fruit and vegetable export products. Thus, aggregation of import items and the World Customs Organization’s harmonized sy.

An item can be classified with an HS code of up to ten digits with longer codes representing more refined classifications of aggregation. For example, the first two digits of HS code 0706 represent vegetables while the last two digits narrow the category to root-type edible vegetables . HS codes 0703 through 0709 cover fresh/chilled vegetables and codes 0710 through 0712 cover vegetables in non-fresh form, which includes frozen, provisionally preserved , and dried products. Table 2.c presents Korean imports of selected fruits at the aggregation level expressed by four-digit HS codes. Fruits are first differentiated into fresh and non-fresh. In the table, processed items such as fruit juices are excluded because there are so many individual processed items and the HS codes cannot be conveniently aggregated. Table 2.c indicates that Korean imports of fruit products are mainly in fresh form with imports of non-fresh fruit accounting for, at most, 10% of import value. The value of fresh fruit imports was close to $500 million in 2007 with bananas and citrus being the top two fresh fruit import categories. California does not produce bananas but citrus is an important export item for the state. Korea also imports significant amounts of table grapes and cherries. Imports of these two items have grown rapidly and California has been an important supplier. Tree nut imports are presented in Table 2.d. The major items in tree nut imports are almonds and walnuts, which comprise almost 90% of Korea’s tree nut import value. Besides almonds and walnuts, other tree nuts imported include pistachios, pine nuts, and gingko nuts. Among these minor nuts, we report only pistachios, for which California is a major exporter. Table 2.d also reports U.S. tree nut exports to Korea for the last five years. Over this period, California has been supplying about 90% of Korean imports. For almonds, the United States was the only supplier in 2007. Tree nuts are a very important export category for the United States and California in terms of value and market share. Korea is not a major importer of vegetables. While it is a major importer of agricultural products, the country’s vegetable consumption is mostly supplied from domestic sources. Of the total imports of agricultural products worth more than $10 billion in 2007, nft vertical farming vegetables account for less than 5% . Table 2.e presents selected vegetable imports aggregated at the four-digit HS code level. The table omits vegetable categories that show few imports or little relevance to California. Unlike fruits, non-fresh items dominate Korean vegetable imports, accounting for about 60%. The table also shows China’s import share in the Korean market for the last three years. China dominates Korea’s vegetable import market with shares exceeding 90% for all categories except lettuce and other vegetables . Even in the lettuce market China’s share has been steadily growing, accounting for about half of the market in 2007.We now turn our attention to more disaggregated figures. Table 2.f presents the value of Korean imports for the three most recent years of individual commodities that are of potential importance to California. Among the products listed, the product with the highest value is beef with imports that exceed $1 billion. Product categories with more than $100 million in import value include fresh oranges, hides and skins, rice, wine, cotton, hay, cheese, and mixed milk powder. Categories that are greater than $10 million but less than $100 million include orange juice, lemons, table grapes, grape juice, cherries, processed tomatoes, olives, kiwis, garlic, almonds, walnuts, flowers, and many dairy products .

Imports of many of these products more than doubled during these years. Most notably, imports of table grapes, cherries, kiwis, walnuts, prunes, lettuce, butter, and mixed milk powder increased more than three times.Table 2.g lists the United State’s share of major Korean import products and the major competitors for each of these products. This table shows that the United States commands a major share of exports to Korea for a number of commodities, including oranges, lemons, grape juice, processed tomato products, raisins, grapefruit, lettuce, almonds, walnuts, pistachios, hides and skins, whey, cotton, hay, and flowers. The major competitors for orange juice include Brazil . Chile is the major competitor for table grapes and wine . China is the major competitor for many fresh products, including strawberries, lettuce, garlic, red peppers, rice, flowers, and processed tomato products. Spain is the main competitor for grape juice and olives. New Zealand is a major competitor for kiwis, beef, and dairy products and Australia is the major competitor for beef, dairy products, and cotton. Finally, Iran is the major competitor for pistachios and Vietnam for walnuts. An FTA would allow California suppliers either to have a price advantage relative to other suppliers or to keep up with suppliers that have or may soon have FTAs with Korea. Among the competitors we have listed, Chile is the first country with which Korea has established a bilateral trade agreement. The Korea-Chile FTA was signed in 2002 and came into force on April 1, 2004. Since the FTA was completed, Chile has had an advantage over other competitors and some exports from California compete with Chilean exports in Korean markets. Table 2.h uses Korean import data to examine the relative positions of the United States and Chile as import suppliers to Korea. Among the products of some importance to California, we consider only the markets in which Chile represents some positive market shares in Korea. The table includes data for 2003 as a representation of the pre-FTA period. This table shows that the United States commands a major share of exports to Korea for a number of commodities. Chile also is the main export supplier of table grapes to Korea and a significant supplier of kiwis and wine. Further, our data indicate that, after the FTA, Chilean imports grew substantially for kiwis, grape juice, lemons, processed tomatoes, wine, and whey. Imports also compete with domestic production. Table 2.i shows import quantities relative to Korean production for each commodity. The blank cells in the table indicate that either data are not available or production is almost zero. For many items, such as olives, pineapples, and bananas, there is no domestic production. Despite having no domestic industry to protect from directly competitive imports, Korea continues to maintain high tariffs, often more than 30%. These tariffs apply to lemons, grape juice, cherries, processed tomato products, raisins, pineapple, bananas, kiwis, grapefruit, almonds, walnuts, pistachios, and wine. Import tariffs for other products are also high, about 45% in most cases. Given the sizable domestic production, import quantities remain very small relative to domestic supplies. This is the case for table grapes, strawberries, apples, lettuce, and rice. Only a few products, such as oranges, beef, some dairy products, and hay, have significant imports when large quantities of domestic production are also available. In those cases, imports are able to compete with domestic supplies despite sizable tariffs because costs of production in the domestic industry are high. Finally, fresh peaches and pears deserve attention. Table 2.i indicates that Korea has a sizable fresh peach and pear market but almost no imports enter the country. Note that the Korea-Chile FTA excludes fresh pears from preferential tariffs.Korea maintains high tariffs on agricultural goods.

Further research is required to understand and minimize trade-offs between N fixation with NH3 loss and growth of diazotrophs, to optimize symbiotic interactions and nutrient exchanges between diazotrophs and plants, and to understand interactions between diazotrophs and the microbiome at large. For instance, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi may facilitate NH3 transfer between diazotrophs and the plant . Parallels between N fixing symbioses in legumes and arbuscular mycorrhizal symbioses that occur in most plant species, including common signaling components/genes involved in establishing these distinct beneficial symbioses, have spurred efforts to engineer nodulation and BNF in plant species that form AM symbioses, including the major cereals . In principle, current efforts are focused on engaging cereal AM signaling components to recognize rhizobial signals and transducing these signals into altered gene expression to promote plant cell division and nodule formation, while allowing bacterial entry into plant cells . These processes are complex, with over 200 genes known to be required to establish and maintain effective BNF in legumes . However, recent evidence suggests that evolution of one or a few genes was sufficient to put the ancestors of modern legumes on the pathway to effective BNF , so the hope is that the same key genes may set the stage for engineering of effective BNF in cereals . Further investments in this line of strategic and applied research will, at the very least, test our current understanding of the development and maintenance of BNF,plastic pots 30 liters while further basic research on the genetics, cell biology and biochemistry of legume BNF will advance knowledge and continue to inform efforts to engineer BNF in non-legumes.

The most audacious approach to solving the two-sided Nproblem is to engineer N fixation into plants directly by transferring genes responsible for BNF into plant genomes and expressing active nitrogenase enzymes in an appropriate plant compartment . There are many features of nitrogenase that make this venture a high barrier including coordinating the expression of the numerous genes involved in the assembly of the unique metal cofactors, and extreme oxygen sensitivity and high energy demand of the active enzyme complex . These features may explain why the process was never co-opted from microbes during plant evolution. Nonetheless, progress has been made toward this objective , and such work is testing and extending our understanding of BNF. Given the current state of knowledge and technology, the greatest impediment to solving the N problems of agriculture through N fixing plants may turn out to be public acceptance of such technology rather than our ability to develop it. At this stage, however, this approach, like the nodulating, N fixing cereals approach, remains in the high-risk, high-reward category . Breeding programs have traditionally focused on yield-based selection to achieve genetic gains, and comparisons among crop varieties representing historic and modern materials often show associated increases of mass yield but not of harvested N . This indicates that increasing NUE on a grain yield basis is not the same as increasing NUE on a N recovery basis. However, yield-based selection may have problems in efficiently overcoming possible barriers to improvement relative to trait-based breeding . Therefore, ideotype breeding centered on identifying and selecting traits affecting NUE may be an opportunity for breeding strategies that are based on understanding important processes rather than treating them as a black box, as done with yield based selection.

This opportunity is particularly attractive now because the rise of genomics and cheap DNA sequencing, functional phenomics, and high-throughput phenotyping allows the simultaneous identification of phenotypic variation, genetic mapping and marker identification, and understanding of underlying physiological processes . Natural variation for NUE has been observed among and within many crop species, including maize, rice, wheat, and soybeans. This variation implies that breeding programs may be able to select for high NUE, although many traits influence NUE and they are all under complex genetic control. For relevance to crop breeding, Moll et al. partitioned a NUE variant into N uptake efficiency , the fraction of N inputs found in the shoot of the plant at maturity, and NUtE, the weight of grain produced per unit of acquired N . Traits that contribute to plant NUE range from N uptake, assimilation, partitioning processes and transient storage, to N remobilization and utilization in source and sink organs . We propose synergistic breeding activities to improve underlying traits in the NUE functional hierarchy. NUpE can be partitioned into root and shoot processes, while NUtE centers around shoot processes related to grain production. While these efficiency measures are especially relevant for grain crops, others may be more relevant for forage crops where we expect high NUE due to greater synchrony of crop growth and N availability. Plant roots are responsible for acquiring N from soil. The acquisition efficiency of the root system has been defined in terms of the amount of N acquired per unit carbon investment to the root system . Root system architecture determines the spatial arrangement of roots, even at a given investment of carbon. Architectural features that increase topsoil foraging may be useful earlier in the season when N is applied, while deep rooting has been hypothesized to be beneficial for catching N before it leaches . Increasing acquisition efficiency may be possible by focusing on root traits that reduce the metabolic burden of individual root segments, or of the entire root system . For example, allocation among root classes may be optimized by increasing the number of lateral roots, which are thinner with less construction costs than axial roots.

Research in maize has shown that increased lateral relative to axial rooting can enhance N acquisition and shoot growth in soils with N limitation . Besides construction costs, maintenance costs such as respiration must also be considered . Anatomical traits including increased aerenchyma or reduced cortical cell area reduce respiration and have been shown to improve N acquisition, and in some cases to allow N remobilization from senescing root tissue . Recently, N-responsive differences in germination, respiration and crop maturity have been associated with NUE in rice . Specific uptake rate may be defined as the instantaneous potential rate of N uptake by a short root segment, but has rarely been considered as a root trait . However, variation among maize lines and maize root classes for nitrate uptake rates indicate that there may be a genetic basis that could be harnessed for plant breeding. Recent developments in high throughput phenotyping of multiple nutrient uptake by maize roots highlights this opportunity . Molecular biologists have identified many genes involved in root system architecture or transport of various types of N compounds and targeted some of these for genetic manipulation to improve NUpE, with varying success . Multiple approaches exist to increase uptake efficiency by the root system that could be included in pre-breeding programs screening for genetic variation. Once N is acquired by the plant, physiological processes in source organs that assimilate N and carbon, as well as in sinks that use or store the assimilates, will determine how well the plant can perform to increase growth and acquire more N. Photosynthesis is responsible for fixing carbon from the atmosphere and several strategies exist to decrease the N requirement of photosynthesis. Shoot architecture determines the overall arrangement of leaves,round plastic pots which has substantial impact of light interception efficiency . On a leaf area basis, photosynthetic N use efficiency may be related to chloroplast size and early seedling vigor . Recent work has demonstrated the importance of reducing photo respiration and accelerating photosynthetic induction after light changes for increasing overall photosynthetic efficiency. Steps involved in N assimilation, including NO− 3 reduction to nitrite then NH+ 4 , and assimilation of this into amino acids could be targeted to increase NUtE. Given the dependency of plant metabolism on enzymes composed of N-containing amino acids, substantial work could be done on the overall physiological efficiency of N anabolism and catabolism. However, it has been suggested that such strategies may only be successful if N metabolism and transport processes, including source-to-sink N partitioning, are coordinated or modified to avoid end-product inhibition or substrate limitation . For many years, breeders have focused on increasing the crop harvest index , which reflects the ratio of harvested grain to total shoot dry matter . However, increasing the HI on a mass basis may not necessarily increase NUtE , as indicated by the trade-off between grain mass and N concentration . HI may also be reaching a theoretical maximum because the remainder of the shoot including leaves is necessary to support grain production . However, altering remobilization and translocation of N from vegetative shoot organs to grains has been shown to affect NUtE .

Delayed leaf senescence can be important for prolonging grain filling as well as N uptake from the soil, but it may also hinder partitioning of remobilized N from leaves to seeds . More research is needed on the timing and interrelationship of these various traits and how they may be co-optimized to increase NUtE. Plant-microbe interactions that influence biological N fixation, soil N mineralization, and nitrification could also be the targets of plant breeding. Most directly, legume crops form nodules with symbiotic rhizobia bacteria that fix N to share with the plant in exchange for C-compounds. Legumes have the capacity to “autoregulate” nodulation and BNF, reducing these when abundant soil N is available, which prevents “luxury” fixation. Selecting or producing legume varieties that continue N fixation despite the presence of soil N could potentially result in enhanced release of biologically-fixed N into agricultural soils, thereby increasing available soil N pools for subsequent crops . Promoting external root-microbiota that fix N, mobilize soil organic-N, or inhibit nitrification that drives N leaching from soil and gaseous N losses to the atmosphere, is another opportunity to make N gains for plant nutrition. Such knowledge of crop genotype-microbe interactions is increasingly important in plant breeding, for example where beneficial bacterial communities are associated with particular crop genotype and N processes . Therefore, it is plausible to select for plants that promote associative N fixation within the rhizosphere. Another attractive, if elusive, alternative is for crops to exude nitrification inhibitors directly from roots . Over the past 70 years, selection of crops has primarily been performed under high N fertilization, which may have limited gains in NUE. In some cases, NUE of modern genotypes is greater in both high and low N soils . However, multiple traits influence NUE, most probably leading to considerable variations in improvements of NUE between genotypes. We propose breeding programs that select genotypes under sub-optimal N as a way to increase NUE under these conditions and to substantially reduce N losses to the environment . Genetic gains could be accelerated with marker assisted selection, genomic selection, and gene editing technologies . New phenotyping technologies will need to be incorporated, also, to increase the number of lines evaluated and to improve precision of measurements to maximize selection pressure. A promising method in the context of N would be the use of unmanned aerial vehicles that can estimate biomass, height, chlorophyll content, and yield throughout the growth season. Using high-throughput phenotyping with UAVs to select for both N status and plant mass on greatly expanded breeding populations in low-input fields has substantial promise for quick gains. Frontiers of plant breeding for NUE will include perennialization of agriculture using crop rotations, mixed crops, and perennial species. The perennial grain crop intermediate wheat grass was shown to decrease N leaching substantially compared to maize, for example , because roots are already in place when soil N mineralization proceeds as soils warm in the spring. Introgression of wild perenniality traits may be possible through the creation of interspecies hybrids, such as in sorghum . Seeding summer annuals like maize into perennial covers can have similar effects, but the agronomic management is difficult. Synchronizing crop demand with soil N availability can be partially accomplished through plant phenology, like stay-green, and also increased early vigor even in hot or cold planting conditions. Therefore, advances in breeding for perennial crops or for poly cultures of annual crops within perennial systems could have substantial impact on the NUE of cropping systems.

Knowing how many wage and salary workers are employed sometime during the year gives a more accurate portrait of worker earnings and mobility. In 2014, agricultural employers hired over 829,000 unique workers, which suggests that two workers filled the average year-round equivalent job, meaning that the total farm workforce was twice average farm employment. Although the unemployment insurance data do not include the characteristics of farm workers, they do show that most farm workers have only one farm employer during the year, which indicates that California has a very stable agricultural workforce. An earlier study reported almost three workers for each year-round farm job in the 1990s, and a higher share of workers with more than one farm job . Analysis of data for 2007 and 2012 finds that the ratio had dropped to two unique workers for each average agricultural job . The 2014 analysis presented here shows that this two-to-one worker-to-job ratio has remained constant.Agricultural systems are ecosystems that are managed under economic and logistic constraints to meet social needs and interests related to food and fiber production. As such, they are critical to a broad range of issues and interests, from environmental concerns related to conservation and ecosystem services to social concerns related to poverty and justice. While the interested parties vary widely, they agree that agricultural systems throughout that world are under performing in important ways and need to be adapted to better meet a range of goals,square plastic pot such as increased yield and input efficiency, or decrease reliance on inputs and unwanted externalities.

Such a statement would be a suitable introduction for a dissertation that focused on anything from the use efficiency of nitrogenous inputs to the legal details of international trade policies. The implication with such transitions is that the specific focus would be particularly appropriate response to the more general problem, and this is often directly stated. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this approach and it is important to both focus on specific problems and contextualize them within larger issues. However, this habit of quickly jumping from a general concern to a specific response can distract from the fact that there are numerous equally valid but radically different specific responses, and a whole series of response at intermediate scales linking the research specifics with the general context. This dissertation takes a different approach, and the following chapters are not linked by a specific geographic focus or a single highly focused research question, but by a larger epistemological problem facing efforts to bring about change within agricultural systems. Agricultural systems are inherently complex, which means that that they behave in surprising or non-linear ways that are difficult or impossible to predict in the way that an engineered system might be predictable. This is a result of both inherent features, such as emergent processes and transient dynamics, as well as incomplete and uncertain knowledge of these systems. As such, they cannot be treated like engineered systems or reconstituted from reductionist or piecemeal analysis. This complexity in agricultural systems can be investigated as a purely theoretical problem, but—like it or not—the results are often applied to practical concerns, such as management strategies and alternative policies.

This problem then is how to balance complexity and pragmatism to drive adaptation in agricultural systems. This problem is not pursued directly—whatever that might look like—but through three more focused interdisciplinary studies that are practical and pertinent engagements with this philosophical issue. These studies address this epistemological problem within three different study systems and with three different target audiences in mind. The first looks at the interdisciplinary field of development studies and seeks to help academics better understand the semantics of these conversations so that they can better participate in them. The second summarizes the scientific literature on soil organic carbon storage within diverse Mediterranean landscapes to help land managers make carbon-informed decisions. The third investigates alternative management options within a complex and heterogeneous agricultural landscape in semi-arid West Africa to help farmers and rural organizations make more adaptive decisions. The first chapter, which will be published in the Sociology section of Cogent Social Sciences in June 2017, is a study of the semantics of the term “development” within the field of development studies. This emerging field has far-reaching interests related to international relations, social and institutional change, rural poverty, poverty alleviation efforts, and many other interrelated topics. Agricultural systems and adaptive change are dominant themes in this literature, which addresses many perspectives and issues not normally appreciated in the agricultural sciences. The field of development studies explicitly appreciates the complex nature of the relevant questions, and emerged as an academic subject through the recognition that no single discipline to properly tackle the necessary issues alone.

The field also has high practical engagement with these issues, and the participants are often trying to inform policy decisions, influence non-government organizations, or find some other way to effect change. Unfortunately, these efforts to balance complexity and pragmatism are limited by some avoidable semantic confusion. The term “development” is central to this interdisciplinary conversation, but it is used in diverse and highly specific ways among the participating disciplines. Economists are likely to use it to refer to economic growth, politicians might assume it refers to specific policies and deliberate interventions, and anthropologists often relate it to externalities of colonization and globalization. These meanings are well understood within each discipline but there is little shared understanding between them. Careful semantic analysis is not necessary in the former, and perhaps as a result it is not common in the latter. Instead, influential authors in the field are willing to conclude that the term “development” cannot be defined, even though it is used to define the field itself. Most authors have been willing to leave this situation there, perhaps in their hurry to tackle the complexity of the issues and get on with more normative efforts. This chapter applies Confucius’ insight that the “rectification of names” is a necessary first step in an intellectual investigation,25 liter pot and directly investigates this semantic question directly. Using insights from Socrates and Wittgenstein, I survey the development studies literature to produce a descriptive typology of the variety of distinct but related ways the word is used in the field. I then demonstrate the benefit of this typology for interpreting complicated discussions of “development” by conducting a textual analysis of influential texts that propose provocative alternative understandings of “development.” I then do the same for articles from the prominent journal World Development to examine shifts in patterns of use over the last 40 years. In doing so, I am able to document evidence of the maturation of development studies from a conglomerate of multiple distinct disciplines to an increasingly unified field that in the future may be considered a coherent discipline in its own right. The second chapter, which was published in Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems in 2015, is a literature review of how soil organic carbon levels are affected by changes in land use and land cover, and how these changes can be mitigated by alternative agricultural management practices. These related questions reflect a growing shift towards investigating and responding to climate change and other environmental issues at ecosystem or landscape scales, and to do so by balancing multiple interacting forces. Such systems approaches are in contrast to more reductionist investigations that target specific processes but do not attempt to bring them to bear on each other. For example, the possibility of carbon sequestration through alternative management practices has often been investigated at the field scale and without any historical context. Such analysis can be interesting, but it is not sufficient to understand overall landscape carbon storage patterns or opportunities, or to direct efficient management practices within diverse settings. Such interpretations requires additional analysis, such as comparing the potential effect of alternative practices against the amount of carbon that was originally lost through the conversion of the land into agriculture, or could be recovered through alternative land uses, rather than alternative agricultural management practices.

This particular study was conducted at the request of The Nature Conservancy of California to inform their activities within agricultural landscapes, so is a clear example of the need to balance the complexity of the relevant processes with the pragmatic need to inform management activities. Given the geographic context, The Nature Conservancy was particularly interested in questions of carbon management within Mediterranean landscapes and commercial vineyards. Their request was simply to summarize the relevant literature and develop carbon budget estimates to inform spatial models. Unfortunately, this was not simply a case of insufficient knowledge reaching management practitioners, but also of a research gap within the scientific literature. Despite the substantial interest in carbon storage within managed landscapes, I found a serious dearth in relevant studies on both change in land use/cover and the effects of alternative vineyard practices. There was also a tendency to rely on inappropriate methods, such as shallow sampling depths. This question was therefore not simply a case of the ecological processes being complicated and dynamic, but also dramatically incomplete knowledge of those processes. The initial hope was to perform a meta-analysis to draw quantitative conclusions, but due to the limited availability and often low-quality of relevant published research, I had to settle for a literature review. The general pattern that I found was of dramatic declines in soil carbon with conversion of native Mediterranean land cover types into agriculture, with vineyards often containing the least soil carbon of any land use. Alternative management practices with vineyards could increase the soil organic carbon levels, but it was clear that even the best practices could recover only a fraction of the lost carbon. I concluded this literature review with a critical analysis of certain methodological practices and assumptions, recommendations for research priorities and alternative strategies, and a discussion of the risk of making strong quantitative conclusions or predictions from insufficient and highly variable information. The third and final chapter focuses on the balancing of complexity and pragmatism to inform independent farmer management decisions within rainfed cropping systems in Senegal and The Gambia. These countries form the western edge of the African Sahel, which is the region south of the Sahara desert that gets just enough rainfall to support agriculture. “Sahel” is the Arabic word for “shore,” a reflection of the marginal nature of this region, and it is prone to periodic droughts and famines and often considered ground zero for how climate change is affecting agricultural livelihoods. Accordingly, the Sahel and adjacent semi-arid regions are a major target of international development efforts, which often focus on improving the rainfed cropping systems that are the primary source of food and income for the rural population. The pragmatic need for agricultural adaptation in this region is clear, but the complexity of the local agricultural systems is often overlooked, and as a result these efforts have been far less effective than expected. At first glance, Senegal and The Gambia appear to be relatively homogeneous countries. They are flat, consist largely of sandy and low organic matter soil, and contain a continuous rainfall gradient from around 200 mm/year in the north—just enough for pasture and marginal crop growth—to over 1000 mm/year in the south— enough for thick monsoonal forests. By global standards, the rainfed cropping systems are also fairly homogeneous, with little fertilization or mechanization and low productivity. They look nothing like the highly productive systems of more industrialized countries but, the thinking goes, they should. Most agricultural recommendations in the region, and even the way in which research is done and recommendations are made, are primarily derived not from the local systems but from some more industrial example. Agricultural adaptation is often assumed to be analogous to the adoption of practices from these more productive systems. On second glance, however, there is a high level of spatial and social heterogeneity that is relevant to rural livelihoods and greatly influence the ways in which these systems can change. A great adaptive opportunity for one farmer might be impossible or even maladaptive for their neighbor due to subtle differences that might easily go unnoticed by the most careful researcher. This heterogeneity is due to factors that are known but often overlooked, such as political insecurity, factors that are known but difficult to quantify, such as household purchasing power, and factors that may simply be unknown to researchers, such as farmer preferences.

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 .