Some evidence in this table also appeared in the decomposition tables; in particular, a 1 percent decline in the price of agricultural materials would be expected to reduce total costs by eTC,pMA = -.254% , and increase MA demand by eMA,pMA = 1.137% . The expected reduction in total cost can in turn be decomposed from the values reported in Table 5 into declines in all other factors of production, with L and K decreasing the least relative to the average, and other materials falling the most. The responsiveness of the materials inputs, however, is clearly rising over time, and that for the value added inputs falling.In this study we have investigated the production structure of the U.S. food processing industries, with a focus on the role and impact of agricultural input markets. Our results show that the demand for primary agricultural inputs in the food processing industries, and overall production costs, have been increasingly impacted over time, but in contradictory directions, by abroad range of production factors. These factors include input price changes , output demand changes , interrelationships with capital , and both disembodied technical change and innovations embodied in the agricultural materials input from technical progress in the agricultural sector. In particular, our data suggest that although MA use has risen less than the demand for MF in the food processing industries overall between 1972 and 1992,blueberry containers it has increased more than both other-input use and output production, especially in the latter part of our sample.
During this period growth in the price of agricultural commodities has fallen off, and the effective price of agricultural materials has dropped further relative to its measured price, reducing the own-price impact that would stimulate declines in MA demand, and in fact reversing it in the 1980s. This is to some extent related to an increasing price elasticity of demand for agricultural materials, which was also found by Goodwin and Brester. MA demand has been further stimulated, at least to some extent, by substitution among inputs, and especially from effective capital price increases. Expansion in output demand has also has augmented MA demand, since at least when effective prices are taken into account output increases have been associated with slightly greater than proportional MA changes on average. However, this is not true relative to MF use, since scale biases are much more MF-input-using. We also find a declining effect of agricultural materials prices on output prices, which provides an indication of a weakening linkage between the primary and processed foods markets. Technical change embodied in capital equipment also appears to have enhanced MA use, but this impact is statistically insignificant, whereas disembodied technical change has clearly driven declines in MA use, holding all other determining factors constant. The direct t-impact has been large and negative, particularly in the early part of the sample period, and has only been partially counteracted by the positive technological impacts embodied in the effective MA and K prices. The implied drop in primary agricultural product demand has also been stronger than the overall cost diminution effect, which implies a relative MA-input-saving bias. And the post-1980 structural change impact suggests that this trend is intensifying, and is further exacerbated by diminishing effective price changes. Overall, the measured share of primary agricultural materials in total costs has been dropping, so the contribution of MA price increases to cost changes has fallen over time.
Thus, the link between MA demand and costs of production has weakened, especially compared to capital due to its higher and increasing effective price, and in relative terms to partly processed food inputs, MF. These patterns are largely due to output effects and disembodied technical changes, that are likely associated with output demand adaptations. However, a complex combination of economic, technological and demand forces have contributed to changing the role of agricultural materials in the food processing industries. The second time I landed in Bamako, it was on the eve of a big festivity. It was time to celebrate the 51st anniversary of Mali’s independence, consolidated in September 22, 1960. The main event was going to be the inauguration, by President Amadou Toumani Touré, of the capital city’s mile-long troisième pontover the Niger River, the country’s largest construction works in recent years. Its official name was Bridge of Sino-Malian Friendship: it was, the press happily announced, a 70 million dollar “gift” entirely paid for by China. I had a glance of it for the first time as I entered the gates of the Sotuba research station of Mali’s national agricultural research institute, the Institute d’Economie Rurale . The new bridge stood less than a mile from where Brazil had, two years earlier, set up the grounds for one of its flagship cooperation projects in Africa, which involved transferring cotton technologies to Mali and three other countries in the region. The project’s experimental fields were established right next to that of CIRAD, France’s research institute for tropical agriculture, which had been present in Mali, in changed forms, since colonial times. The imposing Chinese bridge, on its turn, was constructed literally on top of an older one built by the French in the 1920’s – in reality, a narrow, intermittent causeway amidst the rocks on the bottom of the river, only crossable during the dry season. This vignette, it would turn out, encapsulates well broader processes going on in Africa and across the so-called global South at large during the time I did my fieldwork. The Chinese had been investing heavily in infrastructure works demanded by African governments, in straightforward bargaining agreements usually involving access to natural resources.
The Brazilians were extensively expanding their portfolio of technical cooperation projects in the African continent to countries beyond their historical areas of influence in former Portuguese colonies. And they were not alone: Indians, Australians, Russians, South Koreans, South Africans, Turkish, and many others – new and not-so-new presences adding to the already populated development landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa, for decades dominated by former European colonizers and other Western players such as the U.S., the Bretton-Woods institutions, the various United Nations agencies, and an infinity of NGOs. This dissertation is about the recent efforts entertained by one of the world’s so-called emerging countries to establish closer ties with other nations in the global South by offering them an alternative modality of international cooperation for development. This country is Brazil,best indoor plant pots and this dissertation will look at its reach across the Southern Atlantic to the African continent by means of discourses, technologies, capacity-building, and other objects and practices defined as technical cooperation. Brazil’s efforts are part of a larger wave that has been variously referred to as South-South cooperation, emerging donors, non-DAC donors,technical cooperation between developing countries – to mention a few of the rubrics available in the international development community and the academic literature. Here I chose to speak of South-South cooperation, as this was the preferred label among my field interlocutors, both on the Brazilian and on the African sides. In spite of being discursively defined in contrast to Northern aid, South-South cooperation does not describe a monolithic, stable, or even coherent phenomenon – in fact, as much as a conceptual tool in academic inquiry, the notion of South-South cooperation is itself one of the stakes in this empirical field. Different emerging donors may have quite distinct modus operandi and motivations for stepping up cooperation with others in the global South. In the last few years, much has been said about them – what I take to be a predictable effect of the development industry pipeline itself.Most of this writing belongs however to the report genre; very little has been based on careful academic, empirically grounded research on both provider and recipient sides.This dissertation aims to help fill this gap by looking at the case of Brazil-Africa cooperation through the lenses of ethnographic fieldwork and theory in anthropology and allied fields. But I chose that vignette to open this dissertation for yet another reason. It conveys a basic problematic permeating both my fieldwork and writing: that of scaling.
Shifting back-andforth between scales occurred from the most micro level of what anthropologists call practice to the most macro scale of global organizations, political economic structures, or geopolitics – that is, from what is immediately accessible through observation during fieldwork to the intangible objects they are supposed to stand for. As anthropology itself, both development and techno-science are fundamentally characterized by such “tricks of perspective and scale” . South-South cooperation also shares other traits Bill Maurer has identified as characterizing the empirical fields for which he claims an analytics of ethnographic “emergence”: “bleeding across the frame, hybridity, auto documentation or reflexivity, and the continual shift in perspective between general and particular to generate knowledge” – all this according to a temporality that is “coincident” with that of ethnographic writing. Indeed, I came across Maurer’s Strathernian proposal after having reached the conclusion that what I was looking at could be best conceived of as an emerging phenomenon. This notion first came up during fieldwork in the form of a self-awareness, by many of those involved in Brazilian cooperation, about their country’s emergence in the world stage – in 2011, for instance, Brazil for the first time overtook the UK as the world’s sixth largest economy. For Brazil and others, this primarily economic emergence from the developing to the developed world has entailed taking up a more prominent role in world affairs, including their self-assertion as donors: in other words, as providers instead of recipients of development cooperation . The notion of emergence I will deploy in this dissertation is not however a teleological one. What I wish to indicate most centrally with it is an assemblage whose arrangement is at this point unstable, and its direction, unclear. At a micro scale, this has translated into inadvertent accommodations, anxiety and sometimes contradiction, but also learning and openness to experimentation and creativity. This is, I suggest, what seems to be going on with Brazil’s recent South-South cooperation efforts, as projects and other cooperation activities take shape on the ground and begin to produce their first, more or less sustained effects – both on the side of receivers and providers. Even though this dissertation will make many claims about South-South cooperation at large, and will deploy a wide array of methods and primary and secondary sources, its ultimate anchoring is ethnographic. Fieldwork focused on a forefront Brazilian institution among the many that have been delivering technical cooperation to other parts of the global South in the last decade or so: Brazil’s national agricultural research institute, best known by the acronym Embrapa. This is not however an institutional ethnography about Embrapa, as others have done for Northern development agencies , but an account of the institute’s and its employees’ interfaces with other organizations and individual actors in Brazil, in Africa, and elsewhere. These organizations include most centrally the Brazilian Cooperation Agency , and the African research institutes with which Embrapa has been partnering up for implementing its cooperation initiatives. Along with the notion of emergence, therefore, interface is another methodological-conceptual pillar of this study. Previous ethnographies of international development have also tackled interfaces, such as Ferguson’s classic account of a project by the Canadian development agency and the World Bank in a village in Lesotho , or Mosse’s extensive description of a decade-long project run by the British Department for International Development in tribal India . But these and other studies have been usually circumscribed to the beaten path whereby Northern developers meet their clients in developing countries, usually tribal or poor communities . In the case in point here, not only is the current interface between Embrapa and its African counterparts largely unprecedented; also fairly new is its close work with the Brazilian Cooperation Agency – which is itself undergoing a transformation from receiver to provider of cooperation. Embrapa employees are not development workers like those implementing projects for CIDA, the World Bank or DFID; their regular work concerns agricultural research, and to a lesser extent, technology transfer to Brazilian farmers. Based on this fundamental way of framing the subject of this dissertation, I sought to marshal, drawing on theoretical works in anthropology and adjacent fields, an analytics of relationality that would help make sense of such emerging interfaces without reducing them to one final explanation.