In other words, the sheer existence and full-fledged operation of a public research institute was portrayed not as something to be taken for granted, but as the outcome of an active, continuous work of persuasion and building the right alliances with political groups and constituencies, both domestically and abroad. Those in African institutes did perform a work of persuasion and alliance-building in order to secure resources for their research work. But in SubSaharan Africa, given the fragility of most state budgets and their under-investment in agriculture, this work of brokerage – to use a key term in the anthropology of development – seems to be much more fragmented and not streamlined with a robust strategy led autonomously by the institutes or even national states. It is not surprising, then, that the image that ultimately stood out from this demonstration of Brazilian agriculture’s achievements for many of the trainees I talked to was that of a strong state seriously committed to developing the country’s agricultural sector and willing to make the necessary investments towards this end. This is a different picture from most African governments’ historical disregard towards the agricultural sector, as lamented by many of my African interlocutors and extensively discussed by both the academic and the development literature.The fact that this process took off in Brazil during a military dictatorship did not generally come as a surprise for them, and some even contended that top-down,blueberry grow bag state-led schemes perhaps may be the only way to effectively push for such a “revolution”.

But again, timing was key: the foundations for Brazil’s agricultural boom were laid way before the recent neoliberal wave, while African countries had only a couple of decades of existence before being engulfed by it in the eighties . Part of this foundation can be found in an interest group that, historically, has not been extensively present or sufficiently powerful in Sub-Saharan Africa: rural lobbies.Dictatorships in Brazil, even if indeed behind much of the decisive push towards conquering the cerrado , were circumscribed in time. A more long-lasting and unbroken historical vector, I suggest, lies in the political muscle of farm lobbies in Brazil. While this has been a strong political force virtually as old as the Brazilian state itself , in much of Sub-Saharan Africa an indigenous landed elite did not emerge until much more recently, and still it rarely matches the political force of urban groups and constituencies in most countries. The organization and lobbying power of farmers remains, on its turn, quite limited in much of the continent; this especially true for West Africa, dominated by peasant farming on customary land. A consequence of the pattern of territorial occupation especially where customary law under indirect rule prevailed, has been the absence of an extensive private market in land. As a result, in much of Sub-Saharan Africa the land question has been as much about guaranteeing equitable distribution of land use as about creating a market in land through the regularization of land titles. This is however a very complex, double-edged issue: while land titling could benefit smallholders by guaranteeing security of tenure, providing access to credit and other support policies, and so forth, it could as well go the other way to enable further land concentration by local elites or foreign investors.

The land situation is, moreover, highly diversified across the continent, while being somewhat unique when compared to other post-colonial regions . The next chapter will suggest some of the effects the African land question may have for Brazilian projects carried out on West African grounds. In Brazil, land tenure reform happened in the mid-nineteenth century, and largely crystallized the privileges landed elites held since colonial times . In this country as in much of Latin America, the agrarian question has historically involved a sharp dichotomy between large and smallholders, and the uneven distribution of land between them. In Brazil, this polarization has translated into a bifurcation of representation of these interest groups not only in Congress – where the bancada ruralista, linked to the agribusiness lobby, constitutes the largest organized bloc –, but even institutionally at the level of the Executive. Today, Brazil has one ministry for dealing with agribusiness , and another one for dealing with land reform and policies specific for smallholder agriculture, which includes family farmers, land reform settlers, and indigenous and quilombola communities. While the first group focuses on large-scale commodity production for export, the second is mostly oriented to food crops for the domestic market. Through the new ministry, the federal government has implemented special polices and programs for family agriculture that include even the direct purchase and redistribution of part of its production by the state. This domestic dichotomization has shaped Brazil’s international cooperation efforts. Some commentators have even singled it out as a chief characteristic of Brazil’s South-South cooperation for agriculture, underscoring how the country’s “piecemeal approach” has led to “contrasting narratives on agriculture development … reflecting competing visions of development held by the various Brazilian actors involved in agricultural cooperation” . These authors’ claims refer mostly to the split between the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Agrarian Development , as both carry out separate cooperation activities in Africa.

But this polarization is not as clear-cut as the institutional bifurcation may make it seem. It can also found within Embrapa itself, in terms of both research areas and political camps,from the scale of institutional arrangements to individual expertises and subjective sensibilities. During fieldwork, I met researchers who could be distributed all across this spectrum: from champions of export-oriented, large-scale agribusiness to those with greater technical and personal affinity with family and other kinds of small-scale, ecologically oriented agriculture. As perhaps would be expected, the latter were usually more attuned with the South-South cooperation’s solidaritybased drives. In CECAT, this dichotomy was also made explicit, but mostly in a de-politicized manner that tended to naturalize that separation. Debate could go on endlessly, for instance, about whether this institutional division of competences into two federal ministries did not amount to a de-politicization of the agrarian question in Brazil, by naturalizing a peaceful coexistence between two, as it were, “separate but equal” developmental models for agriculture . A general move in this direction has been suggested by other claims I heard during fieldwork, for instance that after successive settlement of landless farmers during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Lula administrations, pressure for land would have diminished to the point of rendering land reform obsolete. Or, more pervasively, that family agriculture was to be regarded not in opposition to, but as part of, commercial agriculture: as an Embrapa CEO once put it bluntly, “agriculture is one and the same thing”.The narrative of agriculture as the engine of national development,blueberry grow bag size which set the tone for the demonstrations, is itself a rhetorical strategy deployed extensively, and quite effectively, by the farm lobby.On the other hand, when agriculture in Africa is described as having a “dualistic structure” , this refers less to property size and capital intensity per se than to the unequal coexistence between subsistence food crops and export cash crops. In some countries, it may even happen that the same farmers produce both, as has been the case of cotton in West Africa. Here one could think again of a potential for contradiction between Brazil’s discursive claims about the reproducibility of its experience in Africa, and Africa’s realities – that is, between the prevalence of large-scale agriculture in Brazil, and of peasant farming in much of Sub-Saharan Africa. My experience however was that in Embrapa there is enough diversity and flexibility in terms of both technology and personnel for its products to be potentially adapted all along this polarity. I would argue, rather, that the most fundamental disjunction potentially preventing the effective travelling of technologies across the Southern Atlantic lies somewhere deeper than the domain of technology adaptation and transfer per se.

The very demonstration of Brazil’s experience in CECAT brought to surface the multi-scalar range of socio-technical mediators that ultimately make agricultural development possible: investment in research and technology; farmers’ organization and adaptation to a market logic; continuous state support through policies for credit, insurance, inputs, commercialization; planned spatial occupation schemes; government support and advocacy for farmers in international trade. All these have been differently related to Brazil’s and Africa’s respective postcolonial experiences, and modes and timing of their incorporation in the global system.It was from the seventies onwards that Brazil, China, India and other developing countries consolidated their respective “Green Revolutions”. In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, this period marked the beginning of stagnation and even decline in agricultural productivity.160 Thus, precisely at a moment when much of agriculture in the global South “stepped up a gear”, as Xiaoyun et al. put it, most African countries stepped, on their turn, “into a technology trap rather than an effective ‘Green Revolution’” . The trap idiom is indeed apposite here: while African countries did not take to full fruition the productivity enhancing promise of the Green Revolution , in a world where technology-intensive, high-yielding agriculture is the hegemonic horizon they could not afford to do without it either. In times of neoliberal globalization, African farmers and governments have had to contend with the added challenge of increasingly open markets, competitiveness imperatives, and the tightening grip of global free trade rules over which they have little control . A similar “trap” can be found at the scale of agricultural research & development. In Embrapa, as some of my interlocutors pointed out, the rising neoliberal tide has led, among other effects, to significant losses in the institute’s share of the Brazilian seed market to multinational corporations against which it cannot possibly compete. This is a lament I would sometimes hear from Embrapa personnel: how hard it is to compete with a Monsanto or a Syngenta, which invest heavily in marketing and advertisement, besides providing farmers with seeds along with all inputs to go with them, plus technical advice, sometimes credit and even an agreement to purchase part of their production. While these multinationals have gradually expanded their business portfolio over the decades from the chemical sector to pharmaceutics, agrochemicals, and plant biotechnology, Embrapa has remained an agricultural research institution. This new trend in Brazilian agribusiness – a paradoxical effect of Embrapa’s own success, as one of my interlocutors put it – has prompted researchers, managers and policymakers to rethink the institution’s mandate, mode of operation and funding strategies. As I write this dissertation, a Bill is running in the Brazilian National Congress proposing to open up the Embrapa’s capital to private stakeholders – or in the view of some, to privatize it –, in a process that is bound to be lengthy and contested.In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, state funding for agricultural research has been historically insufficient, and reliance on foreign donors, perilously high.162 This has meant unstable research budgets and insufficient strategic planning and coordination, as each donor typically presses for its own priorities. Besides the lack of coordination between foreign-funded projects, they are not always streamlined with research priorities favored by local scientists and policymakers. This was a quite common observation among my African interlocutors, which were always impressed by the unremitting support Embrapa has received from the Brazilian state while maintaining a fair degree of autonomy as far as research directions are concerned. These and other points raised by the demonstrations of Brazil’s agricultural experience brought to surface the question of socio-technical controls in technology and knowledge transfer, that will be resumed in a different light in Chapter 5: in a field like agriculture, the sociotechnical network that has to be assembled in order for a technology or technique to travel, thrive and spread beyond its place of origin is multi-scalar and extends much beyond the scope of research itself. Embrapa personnel were perfectly aware of this, and indeed part of their demonstration procedures involved showing how the institute has handled its interface with government, farmers and markets, so that not only would their technologies spread outside the institute’s walls, but so that resources and support would keep flowing into them from government, farmers, public opinion, or international partners.