Despite the asymmetry in resources between Embrapa and the local institutes, their Brazilian counterparts did, for the most part, understand that. The situation found in the local institutes was not entirely unfamiliar to them; even back in Brazil, some would declare to have already shared many such frustrations: corn ears get stolen from the parcel, sloppy technicians ruin experiments, funds run out in the middle of a research project. In this project, therefore, the faltering in rigorous obedience to protocols, appropriate inscription artifacts, fully shared scientific standards and codes, strictly disciplined workers, was at once the object of the transfer work being carried out by front liners, and its very operative context. Even though these would sometimes bring frustration and temporarily stall the flows in the network, they did not become an impediment to project work. Noise across the project’s interfaces was dealt with most often, as remarked, through “approximations”, or ad hoc adaptations. These approximations did not seem however to be unfortunate though necessary fixes occasionally appended to the translation chain so that it would keep running its otherwise smooth flow; paradoxically, I will suggest, they were becoming its very condition of possibility. After all, if ever, it is like this that these technologies will ultimately get to West African farmers. Other African researchers made comments along similar lines, sometimes emphasizing other aspects,planting gutter for instance their own agency in making the Brazilians change their minds about the original proposals they brought for the project.
But I found this statement particularly significant for it came from a researcher who was not as politicized, for instance as others who would think that to do a project with Brazil is by default better that remaining under the umbrella of the French. His qualm about European cooperation was not political strictly speaking, but concerned how he thought the relation between counterparts in a techno-scientific project should unfold. African researchers know the terrain like no one else, are well-trained and well-experienced; why should they come into a project implemented in their own country to do the work of technicians? In saying this, he was not demeaning the work of technicians, but pointing to a more or less implicit common technical hierarchy that relegated African researchers to the periphery of the creative process and decision-making within projects. In short, he felt that, in this project, he was more in control of things. Here, the question of controls straddles again the society-nature divide, for greater technical control entails greater political control. A point remarked by some of the front liners, for instance, concerned the project’s potential for empowering local researchers vis-à-vis their management, other projects or the cotton companies, or for improving the standing of technicians within the institutes. Others recognized the project’s positive effect of bringing closer together the C-4 researchers, who do not always have enough resources for interacting even if they work with very similar realities. Conversely, greater technical control also requires greater political control over the conditions necessary for doing research and technology transfer.
The project provided extra resources and controls that the local researchers did not always have in their daily work at the institutes, but it also required that they shared all steps in the project cycle and whatever resources they had available – upfront payments for many of the project activities, deployment of technical and non-technical labor within the institutes, provision of physical infrastructure and materials for trainings and experiments. This was for some a source of discontent, accustomed as they were to receiving resources from Northern donors; others thought that this was not only a fair deal in a South-South kind of engagement, as it was an assertion of their autonomy even on the face of limited resources. Here as elsewhere, greater room for control by the African partners had to do as much with South-South cooperation principles as with Brazilian cooperation’s loose bureaucratic grip and limited resources. In other words, front liners from the C-4 countries had to take a lead in project activities for them to happen at all. Here we arrive at the vexing question of ownership in development aid, or the appropriation of projects by their recipients after the donor leaves. In the idiom deployed in the Introduction and in Chapter 1, we could ask, what are the effects of the kind of engagement emerging at the interface of Brazil-Africa cooperation on its potential for robustness? The experience of the C-4 Project, which is likely to be somewhat particular even within Embrapa, suggests less a definite answer than directions to be explored both academically and in practice. As noted in the previous chapter, many of the African partners underscored the need to provide for, as one of them put it, a pérennisationof relations between themselves and Embrapa researchers. But as any other project in the world of development cooperation, the C-4 is by definition a spatially and temporally circumscribed enterprise; its discourse and practice are explicitly organized in terms of a cycle, with beginning, middle, and end.
In terms of the problematic of ownership, it is almost as if cooperation projects, Northern and Southern alike, are doomed to fail by design. But as discussed in Chapter 1, since at least Ferguson’s pioneering ethnography we know that development projects are not really about “development”, but about the concrete effects that they produce among recipients . Since the kind of engagement emerging here is, as I have argued in this dissertation, not of the same kind as the one analyzed by Ferguson and other anthropologists of development, its effects could be of a different kind than bureaucratization and de-politicization. As such, it may overflow its formal spatial-temporal frame to differentiate further into other, yet unpredictable kinds of relations . And as the other project with which this dissertation is deeply concerned – that is, itself – also comes to an end at the desk, so I hope this will be its faith as it returns to circulate in the field.As I was doing the last revisions in this dissertation, I heard from one of the researchers in the C-4 Project that a Trichogramma had been finally found in Mali. The little wasp still needed to be sent to Embrapa in Brazil for proper characterization, but the project workers were certain that this was what they had been looking for since early on in the project. As recounted in Chapter 4,gutter berries the senior Malian entomologist, already on his path to retirement, had put exceptional effort into finding it, including making payments out of his own pocket so that technicians would continue to make collections in the fields. Meanwhile, an apparatus for breeding this natural enemy at the massive levels required for biological pest control was being inaugurated in Sotuba along with the project’s new headquarters and research facilities just as I was writing these lines, in the hope that experiments with the new species could start soon. Yet, it is unlikely that biological control will be deployed at a large scale anywhere in the foreseeable future in Mali or any other of the C-4 countries. Why, then, to invest in this modality of pest control? When the project was being drafted, this was established as an appropriate technical solution for a problem diagnosed by preliminary project missions on a “macro” scale: in West Africa, caterpillars were developing strong resistance to the most commonly deployed chemical pesticides, and that was seriously jeopardizing cotton productivity in the region. Burkina Faso farmers had decided to tackle the problem by introducing varieties of Monsanto transgenic cotton, and others continued to spray ever-increasing dosages of pesticide; in theory, biological control is a more sustainable alternative to both. Upon closer inspection, however, this choice also turned out to stem from affinities on a more “micro” level: entomologists at the Embrapa cotton center involved in Trichogramma research were among the most enthusiastic cooperantes on the Brazilian side; the head project entomologist in Mali happened to be trained in biological control, an expertise that he rarely had the opportunity to put fully into practice during his regular research work. Moreover, as an ecologically sound technique, it bode well for the Brazilian diplomats’ discursive aspirations to differentiate their cooperation from business-asusual. Thus, even if there were uncertainties about the technique’s potential for thriving outside of the research institutes, in the more circumscribed project assemblage it was finding fertile ground. As the other technologies being transferred between Brazil and West Africa, therefore, this project component stemmed as much from “macro” processes at the level of international relations, cooperation policy and scientific expertise as from the practical relations that gradually unfolded between African and Brazilian natures-cultures in the multifaceted assemblage originally conjured up by diplomacy.
The transit between these scales was not directed in advance by an established bureaucratic apparatus along the lines of that described for Northern aid; in fact, as this dissertation suggested, the practical enactment of South-South principles was often prompted precisely by the absence of such an apparatus. Moreover, neither were these scaling moves unidirectional, with macro-processes “causing” or “shaping” micro-practice. They were, rather, a major part of the knowledge practices that the actors themselves deployed as they made a context for, and navigated as best as they could, the emerging interface of Brazil-Africa cooperation. In its general lines, these remarks can, I believe, be extended to Brazil’s South-South cooperation at large, and perhaps also to other emerging donors. As remarked in the Introduction, “emergence” is a characteristic of many of the subjects studied by anthropologiststoday . In the case of South-South cooperation, this emergence happens where new relational interfaces, some of which are unprecedented, are being formed. In this process, new conceptual and material contexts are made, analogies are tested against each other and against practice, scales are shifted back and forth, multiple domains are evoked and reshuffled. Organizational structures, diplomatic discourse, technical expertise, domestic politics and economy, global governance and trade, natural environments – as the different chapters in this dissertation sought to show, Brazil’s recent reach to African countries and other parts of the global South has not been limited to the bureaucratic confines of the international development apparatus, but has involved an intensive, and at times explicit, mobilization and rearrangement of all these domains and scales. But the picture of South-South cooperation evinced by recourse to a relational and perspectival analytics inspired in Strathern’s work brought to the fore not only emergence and context-making.In the account provided here, this cross-fertilization between literatures happened in two chief ways. On the one hand, the gap and contradictions between discourse and practice found in much of Brazil-Africa relations both historically and contemporarily were approached in Chapter 2 through the notion of nation-building Orientalism. Inspired by Said’s original idea, this notion aims at shedding new light on the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of “Southern donors”, by foregrounding the interplay of coloniality in its double directionality: both internally and externally to post-colonial nation-states. Different from the empire-building impetus driving classic Orientalism, in its postcolonial iteration this kind of discourse is fundamentally refracted by nation-building concerns, which are themselves shaped by the historical experience of having been colonized. This double directionality of coloniality helps make sense, I believe, of the ambivalent and sometimes contradictory character of South-South cooperation. On the other hand, insights from postcolonial critique were brought to bear on the account of empirical domains that are normally addressed by the literature on science and technology studies. The cases of knowledge and technology transfer approached here not only reaffirmed assumptions, common in the STS literature, about the co-production between technology and context. They also begged for a richer perspective on the question of agency – more precisely, the “gap” in agency perceived by both Brazilian and African actors in multiple domains, from geopolitics to organizational capabilities, from agronomic research to agricultural practice. This called for questioning anew actor-network theory’s assumptions about the flatness and transparency of socio-technical assemblages. The notion of socio-technical controls, elaborated in the last chapter, aimed at providing an idiom for talking about enduring power asymmetries and the sense of in-betweenness experienced by actors all across the South-South assemblage approached here.