Concerns shown by many of Brazil’s partners with respect to large-scale agricultural schemes, for instance, regarded the likelihood of massive migration to the cities, which would pose an unbearable burden to already fragile urban infrastructures.Although these issues did not come up frequently as questions during the trainings, they were occasionally remarked in informal situations by some of my Brazilian interlocutors, including explicitly as a potential complicating factor for Brazilian cooperation. This was the case for instance of Embrapa’s only project in Africa that will involve intervention in land settlements, the Pro-Savannah in Mozambique. Not by chance, it is Brazil’s most controversial agricultural project in that continent. It has been squarely categorized by Mozambican peasant organizations as land grabbing – a label normally associated with enterprises by multinational corporations or development projects from Europe, Japan, or arable land-scarce Southern donors like China or Arab countries. In a recent statement, they expressed a grave concern about the “massive influx of Brazilian agribusiness farmers, who will turn Mozambican peasants into their employees”. Among urban sectors, while many have welcomed the Brazilian investments, others have shown concern about African countries running “the risk of copying more the flaws than the advantages of the Brazilian model”, as a Guinean UN official recently declared with respect to Brazil’s “unregulated land occupation system”. In times of neoliberal hegemony, this domain has become a field of intense debates in Sub-Saharan Africa since subsidies to farmers and other support policies were removed by structural adjustment programs in the eighties and nineties, and became the target of global trade negotiations .
Today, most agribusiness farmers in Brazil operate with no direct state subsidies. They are however backed by a mixed,grow bag for tomato public-private system providing agricultural credit for inputs and machinery at cheaper rates, rural insurance partly paid by governmental funds, support to commercialization of production in the private market through minimum price and other policies, support to compliance with sanitary regulations, organization into cooperatives, construction and improvement of logistic infra-structure for production outflow, and so forth. This was a domain that raised the interest of many African trainees, especially in the case of policies for family agriculture, and one of the things they often wished to know more about was how they were funded. They were less excited to learn that resources for supporting both large and small agriculture have come, more or less directly, from the state budget itself. As many of my African interlocutors remarked, most states in the continent do not, and in some cases cannot, have a robust, continuous policy for inputs, credit, and technology development and extension for effectively supporting domestic agricultural production. Even when good policies are drafted, states may lack in resource availability; when resources are forthcoming, governments may lack in implementing capacity, or funds may be lost somewhere along the extensive patronage network connecting tax or foreign revenues to African state bureaucracies, urban elites, rural elites, and finally peasant villages. Moreover, few African countries can rely on a large domestic market with enough purchasing power, such as is the case in Brazil, China and other emerging economies . There is also a difference in timing, which some of the cooperantes did not fail to remark.
In Latin America during the early twentieth century,and later on in other Third World regions, nation-states’ investments in agriculture aimed not only at feeding their own populations, but above all at creating wealth to finance national industries. As one of the senior speakers in CECAT put it, “at that time, the right policy to pull Brazil out of backwardness was industrialization, not agriculture … But today, this model might not work everywhere. In Africa, I think, you’d have to strike some kind of balance between industry and agriculture”. But while in the aftermath of, or in tandem with, industrialization and urbanization Brazil and others made an effective effort towards guaranteeing a minimal level of domestic food supply,agricultural policies in most African countries remained almost exclusively focused on export cash crops. This was, and still is, the case for instance of cocoa in Ghana and cotton in Mali and Burkina Faso; as my interlocutors in those countries emphasized, these are among the few sectors that count with more structured policies and sustained support by the state. This emphasis on export crops often happened at the expense of food crops for domestic consumption, especially cereals, introducing a dichotomization that remains central today . In other words, in contrast with the long-standing support Brazilian farmers have been receiving from the state through agricultural policies, when African peasant farmers grow food crops aimed at subsistence or sale in local markets, they often do so in spite of, and sometimes even against, the state. Along the way, and especially more recently when comparative trade advantages came to the fore of the food security equation,some African countries became increasingly dependent on food imports. As observed during fieldwork, imported grains such as rice or wheat in particular have increasingly catered to the taste of a growing urban population, while traditional staple cereals such as sorghum or millet come to be regarded as “villager” food.
A third focus of demonstration in the CECAT trainings – the final link in the developmental loop – referred to agronomic research, especially Embrapa’s role in the historical process that led to Brazil’s agriculture boom. In their presentations, the cooperantes reproduced a common list of technologies developed by Embrapa that enabled and sustained the expansion and diversification of large-scale agriculture in the cerrado region, especially those aimed at fixing the low nutrient content and high acidity and toxicity of its soils. These typically included appropriate soil management and fertilization techniques, new crop varieties better adapted to cerrado conditions , and later on, others such as no-till and biological nitrogen fixation.To make a long and technically complex story short, these new tropical technologies allowed farmers to successfully overcome natural barriers to high-yielding agriculture, turning “Brazil’s greatest liability, the cerrado, into our greatest asset”. And this was portrayed as a conquest not only for the Brazilian nation, but for science at large; in an institutional video shown to the African trainees, a proud Embrapa researcher affirms that “according to Dr. Norman Borlaug… the transformation of the cerrado into a productive zone for agriculture was one of the greatest achievements of agronomic science in the twentieth century”. This affinity between the conquest of the cerrado and Embrapa’s techno-scientific developments was not a felicitous convergence; the very existence of the latter owes to the former. The story widely disseminated in Brazil,grow bag for blueberry plants and reproduced in CECAT and other SouthSouth cooperation initiatives, is that Embrapa was created by the military government in 1973 as a rearrangement of previously existing research institutions in order to solve a concrete problem: how to enable the expansion of Brazilian agriculture into unproductive areas.Japan, then eager to diversify its international cereal supply, helped fund the technical arm of the conquest of the cerrado: the Prodecer Project, which spanned over two decades and was led by Embrapa. This arguably successful international cooperation partnership has been reproduced in other triangular projects, most notably the Pro-Savannah in Mozambique.The picture painted in CECAT also included an exposition of non-technical elements undergirding Embrapa’s success, in particular the high investment made in scientific excellence. In tandem with the institute’s inception, the Brazilian government made, partly through foreign loans, massive investment in training at the graduate level; in a few years, hundreds of Brazilian bachelors received M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s in multiple agriculture-related fields from reputable universities around the world. As one of my interlocutors recounted it, “in the seventies and eighties, Embrapa would take young agronomists right as they came out of [Brazilian] universities with their degrees, and put them on a plane to go do their graduate studies abroad”, usually in the United States and Europe. Most of the senior or retired researchers I met during fieldwork had been beneficiaries of such programs. This was less the case of younger researchers hired more recently, the majority of whom were fully trained in Brazilian universities.Despite much of the nationalistic tone of narratives about Embrapa, the institute has always been engaged in international research and training networks, and this is what ultimately rendered possible its technological achievements.
In this history as recipient of international cooperation, Embrapa followed a pattern it is now replicating with the global South: to maintain other national agricultural research institutes as privileged partners for implementation of projects and trainings.African institutes have also been enmeshed in global scientific networks from the start, and many of the African researchers I met held M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s from reputable institutions in the global North. But what happened in the early years of Embrapa that did not happen in most of them was, on the one hand, that researchers were actively valued, including financially, so that they would stay in the institution: as one of the speakers in CECAT explained it according to the common metaphor, “a team that does not have a Pelé will never win a championship”. On the other hand, brain drain continues to be a serious problem in much of Sub-Saharan Africa. Based on my fieldwork interactions, my impression is that this relates not just to low pay per se – a major issue, if the salaries of African researchers are compared to those of their counterparts elsewhere – but to the poor working conditions found in many of the local institutes, especially in terms of untied research budgets and available infrastructure. It should be remarked however that, while it is true that many of those whom I met would leave Africa provided they had the opportunity , many others declared they preferred to stay in their countries, for personal reasons but also out of a sense of duty to contribute to national development. Finally, another concern addressed in CECAT was on the top the mind of many of the African researchers I met: budget. The demonstration of Embrapa’s experience emphasized the nourishing of connections between the institute and Brazil’s broader political environment in order to guarantee a steady and sufficient flow of state funds for science & technology that, left to itself, would tend to diminish. This account portrayed a conscious effort by the institute’s agents to cultivate channels with top decision-makers in Brasília, especially in the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Congress, as well as in all corners of the country through its decentralized units. This has proceeded not only through personal-institutional networks, but also through mechanisms for quantifying research’s “returns rates” to society, most notably Embrapa’s Social Balance.The kind of reasoning underlying the Social Balance – “X reais invested in research returns X reais in impacts for society” – is quite widespread in the institute, and many of the researchers I interacted with seemed to have internalized it even in informal situations. As an Embrapa researcher working in the cotton project one day fancied explaining it to me, “it’s estimated that biological nitrogen fixation in soybeans alone has saved the country seven billion dollars every year in nitrogen fertilizers.This would have already covered decades of the Brazilian state’s investment in Embrapa [whose budget is currently at around U$1 billion/year]”. It was this kind of self-presentation that Embrapa personnel were strongly suggesting that their African peers incorporate: if agriculture is the engine of national development, research is the engine of agriculture. Besides government, another privileged public for Embrapa has been the Brazilian media and society at large, reached through communication and PR strategies broadcasting the institute’s brand and its impacts on national development. This has also been a conscious effort from the start, as explained by a speaker in CECAT who urged African trainees to do the same in their own institutes: “We have always valued our journalists and other communication staff as much as we value our research scientists; they are also well paid and trained up to the PhD level”. The outcomes of this strategy are indeed remarkable; Embrapa has a extraordinarily positive public image in Brazil, and significant control over what is said and not about itself in the media and in the Brazilian public sphere – something that has not failed to impact my field interactions as well as the writing of this dissertation.Finally, Embrapa’s international networks were also remarked as an important channel for persuading Brazilian politicians to keep supporting the institution financially.