In the Brazilian public sphere, there hasn’t been much debate on its growing status as a provider of cooperation – even if, as one of my interlocutors in diplomacy claimed, there is always a press that will “pick on whatever the government does”. Indeed, in the national media, Congressional debates and in informal conversations with ordinary Brazilians, there seems to be no consensus about whether the country’s international relations should be following this path. Different from former European colonizers, for instance, not many in Brazil recognize a historical indebtedness towards Africa and other parts of the global South that could justify the deployment of scarce public resources in foreign aid. Some claim that the country has its own “Africas” to take care of, or that in today’s globalized, competitive world to help other countries would be “to shoot one’s own foot”. Yet others oppose the terceiromundista drive of the Lula administration, reckoning that Brazil would be better off privileging its historical alignment with the United States and the rest of the global North . The visibility of South-South cooperation initiatives is still dim even at the state level; as a senior ABC official once told me in late 2010, pointing to the National Congress’ modernist building standing just across the windows of the Agency’s headquarters in Brasília, round flower buckets “we are not yet on their radar. But when we are, we must be ready to show the impacts we have had on recipient countries”.

Indeed, this state of affairs has the effect of sparing Brazilian institutions of the need for a bureaucratic pipeline for producing “ritual evaluations” of their cooperation activities. Secondly, in the absence of an interested public, the domestic politics of South-South cooperation has been largely confined to intra-governmental relations. Thus, even though, like most other emerging donors, Brazil currently has the hybrid status of being a provider of cooperation while still being a recipient, its legal framework is not in line with this emerging status. Although at least one proposal for institutional reform of the Brazilian Cooperation Agency has already been drafted, as far as I could gather its appreciation by the National Congress is not yet on the horizon. Extensive reform has faced opposition, for instance, by sectors of Itamaraty itself, as greater institutional autonomy for the agency would mean loosening the Ministry’s grip over an important foreign relations instrument. When I was in the field, Embrapa itself was involved in Congressional debates on a Bill changing its original mandate for acting only within Brazil’s territory, so it would gain added flexibility for operating in other countries, for instance by being able to open bank accounts abroad. As the case of Embrapa flashes out, sector-specific domestic interfaces may be tensioned by Itamaraty’s growing demands on national institutions to carry out South-South projects. In the case of agriculture, this took the form for instance of a concern that by helping African countries Brazil would be “feeding tiger cubs that will one day grow and eat us up”, as one of my interlocutors at Embrapa put it. As will be detailed in the next chapter, this is not a new fear; it has been most visibly expressed by part of the Ruralist Caucus in the National Congress, a version of the American farm lobby that has been around virtually as long as the Brazilian state itself, and that has gained even more muscle during the Lula and Rousseff administrations.

My interlocutors at Embrapa and the Brazilian Cooperation Agency dismissed such claims on several grounds: that there will always be more than enough demand in the world for food crops; that, just as Embrapa itself has benefited in the past from technologies brought from the U.S. and other parts of the North, so would productivity enhancing technologies eventually find their way into Africa anyway; or that, more than a threat, Brazilian agribusiness should see such rapprochement as a commercial opportunity for opening up new markets, for instance for seeds or machinery adapted to tropical conditions. I was even told about how Africa’s preferential access to European markets could be harnessed as a potential indirect avenue around trade barriers against Brazilian products. These and other scenarios are certainly being discussed backstage among Brazilian policymakers and the many stakeholders involved in agribusiness, but in my experience these sector-specific strategies have not, or not yet, translated into clear impacts on the intensity and direction of technical cooperation.And even there, directions are not entirely clear yet; as one of my interlocutors in Brasília put it, “some in diplomacy ask, but what does Brazil stand to gain? China knows what it wants from Africa; we don’t.” Contradictions between development cooperation and other sectors such as agriculture, trade or intellectual property enforcement seem to be a common issue in development aid at large, and a particularly difficult one to tackle . During fieldwork, I heard about a growing will to accommodate cooperation activities to Embrapa’s own strategic interests and those of other stakeholders in the agricultural sector, and one would assume this is also true of sectors other than agriculture. To establish such relationships would indicate the extent to which strategies and interests that lay outside of the organizational scope of the cooperation apparatus are shaping South-South cooperation. Unfortunately, however, this interface remained largely obscured.

This may be due to the incipient character of these processes, but ethnographic access also proved remarkably difficult, since they refer to a high level of domestic politics that I could not access but indirectly, mostly through rumors or confidential statements that I cannot reproduce here. This heightened political sensitivity is not surprising, given that, according to official discourse, South-South cooperation is supposed to be solidarity-based, and therefore free of commercial and other non-diplomatic kinds of interests.One of the most puzzling paradoxes of international development, voiced over and again in both academia and the development community, is the fact that, after over five decades and trillions of dollars, “no country in the world has ever developed itself through projects” . It is generally acknowledged, even by agents of the development community,plastic flower buckets wholesale that many if not most projects fail in meeting their development objectives in a sustainable manner. One cannot but be baffled by such a striking distance between discourse and reality. How is it, then, that development aid organizations still get away with claims that their projects and programs will reduce poverty, enhance food security, raise income – in one word, develop – beneficiary countries? Responses to this paradox in the literature have been various. A prevalent, somewhat functionalist reasoning thread is that, if international development aid does not really deliver development, then it must be about something else. In his rewriting of a review made for USAID on The Political Economy of West African Agriculture, anthropologist Keith Hart linked the real “function” of agricultural development to processes of internal colonialism, or to concrete interests by African political and bureaucratic elites in expanding the state’s presence in rural areas. But probably the best-know argument of this kind in anthropology has been put forth a few years later, in James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine. Ferguson’s account traces the primary effects of development less to concrete interests by local elites than to an impersonal “anti-politics machine” operating according to broader systemic logics of “expanding bureaucratic state power” and “depoliticizing both poverty and the state” .Alternatively, development can be approached in terms of geopolitical and commercial interests undergirding especially bilateral aid, like in much of the international relations literature.Even though these are usually eclipsed by a discourse based on notions of uninterested solidarity , most actors would not shy away from acknowledging that development cooperation is a legitimate tool in a country’s foreign relations. Indeed, this was a view explicitly held by many of my field interlocutors. But such acknowledgement is usually put forth within a win-win frame: by engaging in cooperation, one helps oneself while helping others.

The claim that development aid really helps recipient countries is however far from settled. In particular, the question whether aid helps or harms structural development in Sub-Saharan Africa has been the subject of ample debate by African and Western academics and think-tanks.It is not evident however that rejecting foreign aid is an option for the world’s poorest countries. Although in particular cases individual countries and actors may and eventually do turn down aid, this seems structurally unlikely given Sub-Saharan Africa’s historical insertion at the most peripheral, dependent end of the world-system. The literature indicates, furthermore, that vested interests in the perpetuation of the development apparatus are not limited to the donor side; recipients of aid, too, are not only part of it, as they contribute in fundamental ways to its systemic inertia.Resistances encountered in contemporary attempts at implementing the Aid Effectiveness Agenda during the past decade or so, for instance, make evident the resilience of the development apparatus’ organizational inertia on both sides of the development divide. One could look at development agencies, then, as being primarily neither about commercial or geopolitical interests, nor about extending bureaucratic power beyond its organizational boundaries, but, in a more mundane way, as “actual institutions, which … spend billions of dollars a year” and employ a significant contingent of permanent and temporary, specialized and non-specialized, office and field workers . In this sense, they are not different from other organizations that operate according to self-referential bureaucratic logics and reward systems. Moreover, their goal is to stay in business. From this perspective, far from being a win-win situation, those who make their careers in the development industry and bureaucracy would only lose if the poor countries to whom they provide aid would actually develop – or, more realistically, if the provision of aid is reduced or altogether cut off. All these views on development as a self-referential system assume a professionalized, well-oiled, billion-dollar bureaucratic apparatus, coupled with a vibrant industry of expert consultants and NGOs, where the scale of managerial policy prevails over both discursive principles put forth by diplomats, and the practice of development workers at the front line of projects. Even though not based on fieldwork at this scale, Ferguson’s notion of the anti-politics machine aims to reflect precisely the systemic and colonizing character of this bureaucratic apparatus.Policy is also the locus where other authors would later on find some kind of governmentality to be operating . Even works that do not share the Foucauldian perspective assume such prevalence of policy. In his Latourian ethnography, David Mosse saw the work of developers as a “purification” of sorts, that is, a constant effort to bridge the gap that arises between the bureaucratic demands of policy and the messier level of front line practice – or between “what is attempted and what is accomplished” . Rottenburg described strategies deployed by developers in order to defuse contradictions between official narratives and actual practice as “the only way such organizations can survive”.But one of the sharpest contrasts between Brazilian South-South cooperation – and, according to Mawdsley’s account, also other emerging donors – and development aid is to be found precisely at this scale of managerial policy. From the latter’s point of view, the former would be still at an embryonic stage, lacking sufficient and specialized personnel, an efficient and comprehensive apparatus for producing and managing standardized, evidence-based knowledge about projects and programs, central coordination and a clear, institutionalized strategy. From another point of view, this could mean that South-South cooperation is more flexible, adaptable, and open to innovation and creativity – in other words, not congealed by bureaucratic inertia. Here I will avoid taking either of these positions for granted to look at organizational arrangements as part of the assemblage in which the practice of technical cooperation is enmeshed.The ethnographic scope of this dissertation concerns activities officially defined as technical cooperation by Embrapa and its main policy partner, the Brazilian Cooperation Agency . Technical cooperation is generally considered to be the “emblematic modality” of South-South cooperation. Even if, in practice, it may overlap at points with adjacent types such as scientific, academic or technological cooperation,it is typically associated with capacity-building and transfer of knowledge and technology in technical or policy fields such as public health, agriculture, or social policies.