Horticulture

Next-generation computational frameworks can examine the complex N interactions in crop systems to inform management, prioritize research, and increase understanding of the complexities. These computational frameworks include statistical models, process-based mechanistic simulation models, and hybrids of the two . Such decision-support tools explore all facets of N in the soil-crop interface—from gene expression, crop physiology, and phenology to soil processes and predictions of N behavior. For example, cropping systems modeling frameworks consider critical N concentration for crop growth in the context of genetic, environment, and management factors that control interactions among soil N availability, crop phenology, and crop N partitioning and yield , including BNF . Cropping systems models are integrated assemblies of individual component models that address specific biophysical components . They can be used to develop hypotheses, test hypotheses, and generate management-focused decision support tools that improve productivity, profitability,hydroponic bucket and environmental quality. Although statistical models are relatively easy-to-use and well-suited for decision support tools, unlike process-based models, they cannot extrapolate beyond the G×E×M context in which they were developed.

Hence, they cannot predict the response of NUE to unobserved combinations of G×E×M. Yet, such capacity is critical for two reasons. First, experiments alone are insufficient to address the many potential G×E×M combinations that arise from interactions between farmer decisions and weather. In a given field and year, cropping systems outcomes result from billions of potential combinations of hundreds of variables.Some of these are chosen by the farmer while others are subject to variations in weather and climate. Second, new N fertilizer and cropping systems management strategies may be addressed in silico, to increase the efficiency of field experiments and to prioritize research based on sensitivity analysis that reveals scenarios with major impact. Simultaneously, field experiments will find and fill knowledge gaps of the models.Historically, NUE in agricultural systems has shifted from high NUE in low-input, low-output systems through low NUE in high-input, high-output systems, to moderate NUE in moderate-input, high-output systems . In fact, some existing low-input, low-output systems, e.g., in Benin, exhibit NUE >1, signifying net N extraction and soil fertility decline . While many countries experience a dramatic decline in agricultural NUE as N fertilizers are adopted and overused , it has been argued that this is not inevitable and that countries experiencing a downward trend in NUE could learn from those that have been able to “bend” their NUE curve toward higher NUE , through government policy, education, careful management, etc. .

As the historical trajectory shows, simply increasing NUE alone will not be adequate if it leads to low-output systems and food insecurity amongst the growing world population. Thus, we are faced with a complex, multi-objective problem, which is further complicated by dynamic economic and environmental factors. Profitability can be relatively insensitive to N fertilizer rate. For example, in Midwest US maize, budgets based on return on investment to N fertilizer demonstrate that the economic optimum N rate varies by as much as 50 kg N ha−1 based only on realistic differences in N fertilizer: grain price ratios . Fifty kg N ha−1 is ∼30% of the mean economic optimum N rate for these systems. Hence, while there is economic incentive to optimize N fertilizer rates, the optimum N rate is highly dependent on grain and fertilizer markets. Together, these challenges demand a robust, interdisciplinary approach to increase NUE using multi-objective optimization that considers social and biophysical sciences. Multi-objective optimization is a computational framework that searches for optimal solutions and takes into account trade offs among potentially-conflicting objectives, such as minimizing N inputs while maximizing outputs. Such trade-offs are captured by cropping systems simulations, which are powerful integrators for using multi-objective optimization techniques. While the simulations could be used only to maximize the NUE ratio, instead yield and economics can be maximized and N losses minimized simultaneously. Multi-objective methods have been used to optimize parametrization of a maize system simulation to match empirical results , but could also be applied to optimize the objectives for NUE. At the regional scale, these optimization methods have been used to allocate rainfed and irrigation areas in order to maximize yield and minimize environmental impact , so similar concepts could be used to maximize NUE across regions or the globe.

Trade-offs in objectives have also been identified in crop breeding, such as between total grain yield and concentration of N in grain, but recent work with multitrait genomic selection offers a path forward . Therefore, we propose that explicit consideration of multiple objectives in optimization frameworks is crucial for future progress to increase NUE while meeting food security and economic needs. THE number of people on Earth is expected to increase from the current 6.7 billion to 9 billion by 2050. To accommodate the increased demand for food, world agricultural production needs to rise by 50% by 2030 . Because the amount of arable land is limited and what is left is being lost to urbanization, salinization, desertification, and environmental degradation, it no longer possible to simply open up more undeveloped land for cultivation to meet production needs. Another challenge is that water systems are under severe strain in many parts of the world. The fresh water available per person has decreased fourfold in the past 60 years . Of the water that is available for use,  70% is already used for agriculture . Many rivers no longer flow all the way to the sea; 50% of the world’s wetlands have disappeared, and major groundwater aquifers are being mined unsustainably, with water tables in parts of Mexico, India, China, and North Africa declining by as much as 1 m/year . Thus, increased food production must largely take place on the same land area while using less water. Compounding the challenges facing agricultural production are the predicted effects of climate change . As the sea level rises and glaciers melt, low-lying croplands will be submerged and river systems will experience shorter and more intense seasonal flows, as well as more flooding . Yields of our most important food, feed, and fiber crops decline precipitously at temperatures much .30 , so heat and drought will increasingly limit crop production . In addition to these environmental stresses, losses to pests and diseases are also expected to increase. Much of the losses caused by these abiotic and biotic stresses,stackable planters which already result in 30–60% yield reductions globally each year, occur after the plants are fully grown: a point at which most or all of the land and water required to grow a crop has been invested . For this reason, a reduction in losses to pests, pathogens, and environmental stresses is equivalent to creating more land and more water. Thus, an important goal for genetic improvement of agricultural crops is to adapt our existing food crops to increasing temperatures, decreased water availability in some places and flooding in others, rising salinity, and changing pathogen and insect threats . Such improvements will require diverse approaches that will enhance the sustainability of our farms. These include more effective land and water use policies, integrated pest management approaches, reduction in harmful inputs, and the development of a new generation of agricultural crops tolerant of diverse stresses . These strategies must be evaluated in light of their environmental, economic, and social impacts—the three pillars of sustainable agriculture . This review discusses the current and future contribution of genetically engineered crops to sustainable agricultural systems.Genetic engineering differs from conventional methods of genetic modification in two major ways: genetic engineering introduces one or a few well-characterized genes into a plant species and genetic engineering can introduce genes from any species into a plant. In contrast, most conventional methods of genetic modification used to create new varieties introduce many uncharacterized genes into the same species. Conventional modification can in some cases transfer genes between species, such as wheat and rye or barley and rye.

In 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 30 genetically engineered crops were grown on almost 300 million acres in 25 countries , 15 of which were developing countries . By 2015, .120 genetically engineered crops are expected to be cultivated worldwide . Half of the increase will be crops designed for domestic markets from national technology providers in Asia and Latin America.There is broad scientific consensus that genetically engineered crops currently on the market are safe to eat. After 14 years of cultivation and a cumulative total of 2 billion acres planted, no adverse health or environmental effects have resulted from commercialization of genetically engineered crops . Both the U.S. National Research Council and the Joint Research Centre have concluded that there is a comprehensive body of knowledge that adequately addresses the food safety issue of genetically engineered crops . These and other recent reports conclude that the processes of genetic engineering and conventional breeding are no different in terms of unintended consequences to human health and the environment . This is not to say that every new variety will be as benign as the crops currently on the market. This is because each new plant variety carries a risk of unintended consequences. Whereas each new genetically engineered crop variety is assessed on a case-by case basis by three governmental agencies, conventional crops are not regulated by these agencies. Still, to date, compounds with harmful effects on humans or animals have been documented only in foods developed through conventional breeding approaches. For example, conventional breeders selected a celery variety with relatively high amounts of psoralens to deter insect predators that damage the plant. Some farm workers who harvested such celery developed a severe skin rash—an unintended consequence of this breeding strategy .In the 1960s the biologist Rachel Carson brought the detrimental environmental and human health impacts resulting from overuse or misuse of some insecticides to the attention of the wider public. Even today, thousands of pesticide poisonings are reported each year . This is one reason some of the first genetically engineered crops were designed to reduce reliance on sprays of broad-spectrum insecticides for pest control. Corn and cotton have been genetically engineered to produce proteins from the soil bacteria Bacillusthuringiensis that kill some key caterpillar and beetle pests of these crops. Bt toxins cause little or no harm to most non target organisms including beneficial insects, wildlife, and people . Bt crops produce Bt toxins in most of their tissues. These Bt toxins kill susceptible insects when they eat Bt crops. This means that Bt crops are especially useful for controlling pests that feed inside plants and that cannot be killed readily by sprays, such as the European corn borer , which bores into stems, and the pink boll worm , which bores into bolls of cotton. First commercialized in 1996, Bt crops are the second most widely planted type of transgenic crop. In 2009, Bt crops covered .50 million hectares worldwide .Most of the Bt toxins used in transgenic crops are called Cry toxins because they occur as crytalline proteins in nature . More recently, some Bt crops also produce a second type of Bt toxin called a vegetative insecticidal protein . Bt toxins in sprayable formulations were used for insect control long before Bt crops were developed and are still used extensively by organic growers and others. The long-term history of the use of Bt sprays allowed the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration to consider decades of human exposure in assessing human safety before approving Bt crops for commercial use. In addition, numerous toxicity and allergenicity tests were conducted on many different kinds of naturally occurring Bt toxins. These tests and the history of spraying Bt toxins on food crops led to the conclusion that Bt corn is as safe as its conventional counterpart and therefore would not adversely affect human and animal health or the environment . Planting of Bt crops has resulted in the application of fewer pounds of chemical insecticides and thereby has provided environmental and economic benefits that are key to sustainable agricultural production. Although the benefits vary depending on the crop and pest pressure, overall, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service found that insecticide use in the United States was 8% lower per planted acre for adopters of Bt corn than for non-adopters . Fewer insecticide treatments, lower costs, and less insect damage led to significant profit increases when pest pressures were high .

Moreover, the fact that one system is not as productive as another—which is only one of many measures of performance in an agricultural system—does not mean that it can be transformed through simple imitation. Adaptation, as understood in ecology and evolution, is not “adaptation towards” some target or end goal, but “adaptation from” some starting place, and the situation is no different in agricultural systems. This research turned the conventional approach to driving agricultural adaptation on its head by emphasizing relative change from the current practices and performance, rather than to some optimal or idealized state. Trials were conducted not on research stations under carefully controlled conditions, but in farmers’ fields and with their full participation, such that the results would best capture the full complexity and heterogeneity of the system. This research was conducted over three years through partnership with local and international non-government organizations and thousands of participating rural households. It began with 50 trials in 2014, expanded to 420 trials in 2015,fodder sprouting system and finished with nearly 600 in 2016. These trials were split among 6 major crops and 7 regions spanning the heterogeneity of Senegal and The Gambia.

Half of the trials tested multiple new cultivars and the other half, which are discussed here, tested alternative practices relating to 1) certified seed stock of new cultivars, 2) inorganic fertilization, and 3) local organic materials. These pathways are all sometimes used to improve yield, but differ widely in cost and availability. Eighteen different treatments were tested on each of the 1000+ trials, one of which was the common practice of using local seed and no fertility inputs, and another was the common official recommendation of using new seed, high levels of inorganic fertilization, and no organic amendments. These trials found that each of these three adaptive pathways—new seed, inorganic fertilizer, and organic amendments—could improve the production of rainfed crops, and the benefits were reliable across these countries, comparable to each other, and largely additive in combination. The recommended practice, which relies on imported high cost inputs, on average doubled the crop yield, but this same result could be had through three of the other treatments, which were all lower cost and less dependent on infrastructure and global markets. Other practices had a greater effect than the recommendation, and the addition of a low rate of manure to the recommended practice led to nearly a tripling of yield. However, the outcome of these trials was not to identify some new general recommendation for maximum production but to get away from that top-down prescriptive sort of approach entirely and to emphasize the role of farmer decision-making in agricultural adaptation.

That there are multiple adaptive options rather than a single “best practice” is of critical importance, and presenting farmers with options and allowing them to determine what it best for their circumstances is a new and highly effective means of driving change within complex and heterogeneous agricultural systems. Bringing diverse perspectives to bear on shared problems or interests is an increasingly popular intellectual strategy that is being applied a wide range of issues, such as those relating to social and environmental concerns . This approach is explicitly central to the trans- and inter-disciplinary literature and is foundational to many recently emerged fields, such as environmental and international studies . Even many academic fields that are now often considered to be coherent disciplines in themselves, such as ecology, were founded as intentionally integrative studies and retain high internal heterogeneity . However, these discussions among diverse participants can easily be hampered by unnecessary confusion resulting from semantic differences among the participating intellectual disciplines . The need to develop a shared language is often identified as critical for cross-disciplinary communication, but there has been limited application of this idea to practice or discussion of what such semantic inquiry should look like .

This study focuses on the use of the word “development” in the field of “development studies,” which is a particularly tricky example of the more general semantic problem. Whereas some interdisciplinary discussions have a central word that is broadly understood in a common way, such as perhaps “international” in “international studies,” this is not the case in this field. Instead “development” is used in diverse but highly specific ways that vary widely among the interacting disciplines, yet it is also relied upon to bring those disciplines together and provide coherence to the resulting discussions . In this case it is not likely that the participants would settle for a single shared concept, nor any reason why they should. Rather than arguing that a specific understanding of “development” should be given priority, this study presents a summary of the diverse but related ways in which the word is used and how that use has changed over time. This paper begins by introducing the semantic issues surrounding the use of “development” in development studies then discusses the philosophical foundations of semantic inquiry, with a focus on Socrates and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Prominent literature in development studies is then surveyed to produce a classification scheme, or descriptive typology, of the diverse ways in which the word is used in these interdisciplinary conversations. This typology is then used to perform textual analysis on certain influential and provocative texts and on select publications in the journal World Development from 1973, 1993, and 2013, an analysis that allows for the identification of general changes in use over time.The final chapter of the seminal book Doctrines of Development is entitled “The Jargon of Development” and is focused around the question “what is development?” . The authors Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton conclude, “development defies definition,” and support this claim with a wide-ranging critique of diverse attempts to provide a positive answer to this seemingly straightforward question.

This conclusion and the method of inquiry echo the first sentence of the book, which is “Development seems to defy definition, although not for a want of definitions to offer” . The authors’ intent with such statements is clearly not to argue that the term is therefore meaningless, but rather to encourage a more subtle investigation, one that requires the reading of the several hundred intervening pages. This line of questioning and the resulting ambiguous conclusion are not uncommon in semantic discussions of “development” within the field of development studies. For example, James Ferguson begins his preface to The AntiPolitics Machine with the same question and concludes that while it is “almost nonsensical to denythat there is such as thing as ‘development,’ or to dismiss it as a meaningless concept … it seems almost impossible to question it, or to refer it to any standard beyond its own” . He then proceeds to focus in on a specific interpretation of “development” and critique it from a standard of his own. Ferguson and many other modern commentators, such as Amaryta Sen in Development as Freedom , Caroline Moser in Gender Planning and Development , and Arturo Escobar in Encountering Development ,microgreen fodder system take issue with some conventional understanding of “development” and seek to expose unappreciated implications , define new goals , demand expanded dialogues , and encourage the transition to a “post-development” future . However, while each author attacks some conventional interpretation of “development” and presents an alternative understanding, their views of “development” have little in common. Escobar is clearly not seeking to move beyond Sen’s concept of expanding human freedoms, nor is Moser explaining how to conduct gender planning within what Ferguson describes as a political vacuum. While all of these authors make careful and diverse arguments attacking some understanding of “development,” they also rely heavily on the word itself to support their divergent positions. For example, Escobar uses the word over 150 times prior to the first chapter of the book that has since defined him as a “post-development” thinker. The result is the ironic intellectual situation where a central term apparently cannot be defined, yet it continues to define the discussion itself. A partial explanation for this situation lies in the semantic history of the term.

The deep etymology of “development” is uncertain, but one prominent theory is that it comes from the Latin words “dis,” to open or part, and “volvere,” to roll . In support of this, the modern English word can be traced more immediately to the Old French term “developer,” which appears in texts starting in the mid 1700s where it carried the literal meaning of “to unfold or unfurl” . By 2017, however, the Wikipedia entry for the word was a “disambiguation” page with over 60 links to more specific entries. Eleven of these are classified under “Social Science,” eight under “International and Regional,” and three under “Land Use,” all of which are major overlapping themes in the interdisciplinary field of development studies. . This pattern suggests a semantic radiation, where the historical root word differentiated over to time to lead to a variety of highly specialized uses. While this word may have once related to a single concept, this is no longer the case. The diverse perspectives that contribute to development studies represent a wide range of these specialized understandings of “development.” By and large, economists use it to imply economic growth, politicians recognize it as referring to policies and deliberate interventions, anthropologists imply the side effects of colonization and globalization, and historians interpret it as some specific result of interacting historical forces. Within each of these fields, the occurrence of “development” in a text or conversation is unlikely to cause significant semantic confusion. However, when these communities interact, the interpretation of even a seemingly well-qualified phrase, such as “the process of global economic development,” is highly dependent on the specific background of each reader. “Development” is therefore not an ambiguous term because it has not yet been adequately de- fined, but rather because it has been rigorously defined in diverse but related ways. As Cowen and Shenton point out, “development” in such discussions “comes to be defined in a multiplicity of ways because there are a multiplicity of ‘developers’” . This presents a semantic situation that is unlike terms that are ambiguous due to the lack of any specific use, and it increases the odds that discussants depending on the word “development” might be talking rigorously but entirely past each other. This semantic investigation of the term “development” may seem to lack the moral and political overtones that are common in development studies, but no less than Confucius identified this “rectification of names” as the appropriate first step to take in pursuing normative goals. “If names be not correct,” he writes in the Analects, “language is not in accordance with the truth of things,” and the resulting confusions will undermine subsequent efforts . The philosopher Henry Bergson takes a similar but more general position when he says that the common “first error” in trying to understand a system of thought is “to take for the constitutive element of doctrine what was only the means of expressing it.” . Given the importance of the larger human issues that come to the surface in discussions of “development” and the benefits of drawing from multiple perspectives, it would be a shame if the conversations were then undermined or inhibited by avoidable semantic misunderstandings. This paper therefore leaves it to others to explore the concepts associated with “development,” and instead addresses the less glamorous work of shoring up the semantic framework that supports these conversations.The aforementioned semantic inquiries into “development” pose the question “what is ‘development?’” and expect that it be answered in the positive with “‘development’ is ________.” When it cannot be, the authors then conclude that “development” cannot be defined. However, this approach rests on a common but naïve philosophical view of semantic inquiry that equates meaning with an explicit denotative definition. As a result, the seemingly nihilistic conclusions, while useful as a rhetorical tool, should not be understood as the result of a rigorous semantic investigation. The “what is X?” form of questioning was widely popularized by Socrates and other early Greek philosophers as a fundamental method of inquiry, and they considered a failure to supply a satisfactory response to this question as an indication that either the term was meaningless, the respondent was ignorant, or both. However, such a conclusion was in fact often the point of their questioning, and Socrates repeatedly states that recognizing the extent of his own ignorance is sufficient consolation for not answering the original question.

In developing countries, where food expenditure makes up a large proportion of household consumption, these price fluctuations have led to a proliferation of policies to control or stabilize food prices. Temporary export restrictions have been particularly widespread, with at least 33 countries using some form of export restriction during the 2007 – 2008 food price spike and its aftermath, including 4 of the top 5 rice producers and 7 of the top 13 wheat producers . This chapter focuses on the most common and severe of such restrictions: the short-term export ban. The literature on export restrictions has focused on understanding why countries implement them and the role they play in exacerbating international price spikes. Theoretically, export restrictions introduce welfare-reducing price distortions, with local farmers losing more than local consumers gain from lower domestic prices . Governments likely implement export restrictions because they put more weight on consumers’ interests than those of producers, are more concerned about negative deviations from the status quo than positive ones, or seek to avoid extreme events .

Gouel and Jean have also shown that export restrictions can be part of an optimal dynamic food price stabilization policy when consumers are risk averse and insurance markets are incomplete. Regardless of their domestic rationale, the welfare effects on other countries appear to be unambiguously negative: by cutting off supply to the world market during times of high prices,stacking pots export restrictions magnify international price fluctuations and have been criticized for representing a beggar-thy-neighbor approach to trade . This chapter provides new empirical evidence from East and Southern Africa that export bans do not always have the effects that governments think they do. Unlike other parts of the world where export restrictions were one-time policies implemented during the 2007 – 2008 food price spike , export bans in East and Southern Africa are regularly used to respond to high international prices or domestic production shortfalls of maize, the main staple grain in the region. I use monthly, market-level maize price data from 49 large hub markets in 12 countries over a 10-year period during which 5 of these countries implemented 13 distinct export bans on maize. I document a surprising and robust empirical result: export bans in this region do not have a statistically significant effect on the gaps in prices between pairs of affected cross-border markets. I compare my empirical results to results from simulations using the estimated dynamic monthly model of grain storage and trade in sub-Saharan Africa from the previous chapter, which includes nearly all of the same markets and cross-border trade routes.

The model predicts a large and statistically significant increase in the gaps in prices between the affected cross-border markets due to the 13 export bans, even when traders are able to anticipate the bans with perfect foresight. The absence of an effect on the price gaps in the data matches a model simulation in which the export bans are not implemented. However, prices in both implementing and trading partner countries during export bans are significantly higher in the data than in the model simulation with no implementation. Information collected from market participants in sub-Saharan Africa indicates that export bans are imperfectly enforced, with informal local traders as well as some formal traders who are able to secure export permits through back-door channels able to continue trading during bans. These alternative trade channels may be subject to capacity constraints, but these constraints appear to only bind at the very end of bans. However, the unpredictable, ad hoc nature of the bans and their enforcement appears to destabilize markets on both sides of the border. In addition to prices that are higher than they would have been without a ban, price volatility is also significantly higher in the implementing country.

Taken together, my results suggest that export bans in East and Southern Africa do not have their intended effects of stabilizing or lowering domestic prices or insulating them from high international prices and have unintended destabilizing consequences instead. Policymakers in the region should therefore re-evaluate their use even when they appear justified on political economy grounds. My results are also a cautionary note for studies that have used model-based simulations to estimate the effects of export restrictions , as these effects are likely different in practice if the export restrictions in question are imperfectly enforced.My primary dataset consists of a panel of monthly maize price data from large hub markets in East and Southern Africa assembled by the Famine Early Warning System Network and covering the 10-year period from January 2002 to December 2011. Using local newspaper archives and FEWS NET monitoring reports, I identified the starting and ending dates of 13 short-term export bans implemented by 5 countries during this period, ranging in duration from 4 to 54 months . I then selected the major markets on either side of the affected international borders from the FEWS NET database and identified the pairs of cross-border markets directly linked by transportation infrastructure. With competitive trade, any price change caused by an export ban should be detectable at these directly-linked cross-border markets, with markets further away from the border experiencing equivalent price changes if they are trading with the directly-linked markets and no price change otherwise. The resulting dataset includes 49 markets and 40 cross-border market pairs . This includes an additional 6 markets in areas not covered by the FEWS NET database in western Tanzania, eastern Malawi, and northern Mozambique, which I added to my dataset using price data from the Ministries of Agriculture and of Industry, Trade,strawberry gutter system and Marketing in these countries.The median market town has a population of 178,000, and the median market pair is separated by a road distance of 345 kilometers. All prices are expressed in US dollars per kilogram using monthly exchange rates provided by FEWS NET. The mean maize price across all markets and all periods is $0.274/kg. The price data is not complete as data collection began in some markets after January 2002 and there are a few missing observations throughout. The median price series has 102 of 120 possible observations, and 40 of the 49 markets have at least 6 years of data. Of 5,880 possible price observations, 1,435 are missing. I will show that my results are robust to restricting the panel to a more balanced subset.

My main empirical specification estimates the effects of export bans on the price gaps between pairs of cross-border markets instead. Export bans are unlikely to be endogenous to price gaps, since the events that trigger them are unlikely to affect the costs of trade between the cross-border market pairs. In the following section, I confirm with model simulations that in the absence of any bans price gaps would not have been higher or lower during periods in which bans were in fact implemented than in periods in which they were not. In theory, export bans work by increasing the costs of trade between cross-border market pairs . The spatial price analysis literature has thought carefully about the relation between price gaps, which are observable, and total trade costs, which are typically unobservable . Under competitive trade, the price gap between a pair of markets is equivalent to the total trade costs between those markets if trade is occurring, which Baulch and others have called “regime 1.” If trade is not occurring, the markets are in a segmented equilibrium , and the price gap between them is a lower bound on the total trade costs. The price gap may also temporarily exceed the trade costs if the markets are in disequilibrium following a shock . For markets with relatively low trade costs and consistent import-export relationships, restricting attention to regimes 1 and 3 would be appropriate. However, given the high trade costs in the agricultural sector in sub-Saharan Africa estimated in the previous chapter and the fact that maize is produced locally in all of the markets in my dataset, it is important to account for the possibility of regime 2 segmented equilibria in which export bans would have no effect because they are not binding. If I include these “no-trade” observations in my estimation, the resulting estimate of my parameter of interest β is a valid measure of the effects of export bans in a reduced-form sense conditional on market conditions at the time of ban implementation but is a down wardly-biased estimate of the effects of export bans conditional on the ban actually binding and preventing trade that would otherwise have occurred. Recent empirical evidence in contexts where regime 2 observations can be identified confirms this downward bias when all observations are included . In the regressions that follow, I experiment with different ways of identifying and excluding potential regime 2 no-trade observations and compare my subsequent results to my baseline reduced-form result using all observations. Column 1 of table 2.2 shows results from the specification given in equation 2.1 with all observations. The mean of the dependent variable is $0.0853/kg. The point estimate for the effect of export bans on this gap is less than three-thousandths of a US cent or less than three-hundredths of a percent of the mean price gap and is not statistically significantly different from zero at any confidence level. I calculate standard errors directly because of the complicated nature of potential correlation between the residuals in my dataset.

The standard approach with panel data would be to cluster at the market pair level to allow for correlation of residuals for a given market pair in different time periods. However, as is clear from the map in figure 2.1, the market pair structure also has features of a dyadic regression, with a single market often being a member of multiple market pairs. To deal with this additional source of correlation, I extend the approach of Fafchamps and Gubert for calculating consistent standard errors in cross-sectional dyadic regressions, allowing for correlation of residuals between any observations sharing at least one common market while continuing to assume that residuals are independent across observations with no common markets. The standard errors calculated using this dyadic approach are very close to those obtained by clustering at the market pair level . Using the standard errors from column 1 and the mean maize price of $0.274/kg, I can reject an alternate hypothesis that export bans have an effect at least as large as that of a 5% export tax at an 8% significance level. A 5% export tax is at the low end of short-term trade policy responses to commodity market price fluctuations — temporary export taxes of 25–40% are not uncommon . Of course, such taxes may not translate into empirical price differences, so the benchmark used here should be interpreted as the theoretical effect of a permanent 5% export tax. The specification in equation 2.1 implicitly assumes that no other variables besides export bans systematically affect price gaps over time. In columns 3 and 4 of table 2.2, I introduce additional covariates to capture some of this potential temporal variation. Recent results from Dillon and Barrett highlight the importance of fuel prices for maize trade in East and Southern Africa. I construct monthly retail diesel price series in US dollars per liter at the national level for my 12 countries of interest by using biennial observations from the International Fuel Prices project of GTZ to compute markups over the Dubai Fateh crude oil index and filling in gaps between GTZ observations using markups inferred by linear interpolation. In column 3, I add a term interacting these fuel prices in the origin market with the distance to the destination market as well as a set of indicator variables for major infrastructure projects affecting particular cross-border links compiled from government ministries and local newspaper archives. The point estimate for the diesel-distance coefficient corresponds to the expected cost of a 10- metric ton truck consuming 23 liters per 100 kilometers , although it is not statistically significant at conventional levels. In column 4, I include quarterly time fixed effects and a time trend instead. In both of these new specifications, the coefficient estimate on export bans is negative and not statistically different from zero.

As in previous accession negotiations, EU negotiators will be concerned about the impact of accession agreements on the EU treasury, while CEEC governments will be attentive to their implications for national budgets. Furthermore, many producer groups in the West will be nervous about granting market access to Eastern competitors; the political clout of these interests will constrain the negotiations. As with the accession of southern members Greece, Portugal, and Spain, the new members would be substantially poorer and less technically developed than those currently in the Union, raising the possibility of the need for substantial technical assistance. In the case of the CEECs, other issues arise that have no clear precedent. First, there is the unusual size and importance of agriculture in these countries. Depending on the chosen measure, these nations would increase the size of the Union’s agricultural economy by roughly one third. 1 In each nation, agriculture accounts for a larger share of employment and GOP than is typical in the current Union. Second,hydroponic nft these countries share with their western neighbors a similar continental, temperate climate, and similar growing conditions.

In the long run, after a period of restructuring, their agricultural sectors could display patterns of comparative advantage similar to those in the current EU member states, a prospect that makes concerns about competition even more pronounced than in past expansions . Third, these countries are presently going through a profound process of economic transformation that hopes to shed the legacy of the socialist period in favor of a market-based system of production. Eastern governments will have to consider how an accession agreement will affect the ongoing process of market development and enterprise restructuring currently unfolding in these emerging economies. Finally, the requirements of the Uruguay Round of the GAIT -will be an important new factor regulating agricultural trade, imposing new constraints on allowable treaty terms. The overall success of the accession accords may be determined primarily by factors outside agriculture. Nonetheless, the treatment of agriculture promises to play a central, and delicate, role in the accession negotiations. Nearly a decade after the region embraced market economics, their agricultural sectors continue to struggle with the transition from a socialist production system.

While it is problematic to make generalizations across the entire region, we can identify a few of the key characteristics of today’s CEEC agriculture that are likely to have first-order impacts on the prospects for long term performance . Farm enterprises in these countries can be broadly grouped, by size, into two types: large enterprises that are primarily the successors to state and collective farms organized during the socialist period; and smaller, usually privately-owned, operations. These latter farms, sometimes covering less than one hectare, have often been established by former members of the collective farms who have taken their land out of collective enterprises in an attempt to “make it on their own.” Both types of farms are typically undercapitalized, or have a mix of capital goods inappropriate to the kind of production in which they are engaged. In the face of woefully imperfect capital markets, farms are typically unable to undertake investments to improve their efficiency, even in cases in which such investment would be profitable , depending, of course, on the cost of debt. Short-term finance is typically only available at abnormally high rates of interest. Credit constraints are a particularly severe problem for the smaller farms, which tend to lack either demonstrable collateral or social clout. Persistent problems with land titling, and generally with the development of a market for land, impede the ability to offer land as collateral, further exacerbating problems in the market for long-term credit.

Capital market imperfections are, therefore, one of the key barriers preventing an improvement in the technical efficiency of East European farms, which consistently lags that in the EU. These problems are aggravated by the poorly developed state of public goods in rural areas, including transport and storage infrastructure and market information . In the socialist period, much of this rural infrastructure was provided from within the large enterprises. A system of infrastructure supporting independent farms has not yet emerged. These features the split between large and small farms, the low level of technical development on most farms, imperfections in market for agricultural finance, poor provision of public goods, and a history of government-controlled prices-define the landscape of agriculture in Central and Eastern Europe. These are the initial concerns that government policymakers in the region have to consider as they chart their agricultural strategies over the coming years. Official statements from CEEC policymakers have expressed multiple goals for agriculture during the transition. To the Czech Ministry of Agriculture, for example, an ideal scenario would include the transformation of agriculture along free-market lines; preparation for eventual integration to the EU’s CAP program, and maintenance of a “domestic equilibrium” that would keep farm incomes and output from collapsing during an excessively violent transition . A central motivation for the present paper is the observation, under-appreciated in policy circles, that these goals may be Inconsistent, and that there are points of tension between the goal of creating agricultural economies that respond rationally to market signals, and the desire to bring agriculture into alignment with the heavily-regulated CAP programs of the EU. In particular, a single-minded focus on convergence to EU norms can inappropriately distract policymakers from steps that create incentives to improve productive efficiency. Policies that encourage the restructuring of agricultural enterprise during the interim period prior to joining CAP allow factors to flow toward efficient uses. The terms of agriculture under the treaties of accession will have important implications for CEEC decision makers choosing pre-accession agricultural support policies. If CAP is maintained substantially unchanged from its current form , then producers in the new environment will enjoy higher prices,hydroponic channel supported through commodity subsidy programs and trade barriers. If a version of CAP covered Central and Eastern Europe, the current owners of land would reap windfall profits, as these benefits became capitalized into land values . . CEEC governments have a number of instruments that they can deploy in order to encourage such transformation. They can adopt policies to encourage the reorganization of agricultural enterprises, to move from a system dominated by huge state and cooperative agricultural enterprises into one more responsive to market signals, including a mix of large and small farms. CEEC governments can also control spen~ing on relevant public goods such as public information and rural infrastructure. They can vary the degree of the economy’s openness to foreign trade, through the erection of tariff and import quotas, export subsidies, and other trade management activities.

Commodity price supports and other market manipulation schemes will also continue to offer their rent-seeking temptations. Indeed, price supports and tariff barriers can have desirable effects, from the theory of the second-best: in the presence of a distortion in one input market-that for credit-a government imposed distortion in the output market can have beneficial effects, by transferring resources to producers that are able to use it efficiently. At the same time, however, distortive policies can create price instability. In this context, free trade can substitute for price supports as a market stabilizing mechanism, operating more effectively and at lower cost. Both distortive and laissez faire approaches may, however, compare unfavorably with policies that address market imperfections directly. Of course, use of any instruments has associated costs, both directly taxing the government treasury and indirectly imposing adjustment burdens on society. Thus, in bargaining over the treatment of agriculture in accession, and in selecting appropriate pre-accession policies, CEEC policymakers must therefore be prepared to juggle a complicated set of interactions and trade offs. The nature of these trade offs can be clarified through a heuristic version of a comparative statics exercise. Suppose that a government knew with certainty the date and terms under which it would join the CAP, and was cbn templating a restructuring program that would appropriately position the agricultural sector for successful entry. For a given date of entry, a relatively aggressive restructuring program would create multiple effects, including an increase in the efficiency and flexibility of the agricultural sector; an increase in producer profits and aggregate national wealth in the long term following CAP integration; a short-term decrease in output, as established patterns of production are disrupted; an ambiguous effect on output in the long term; and an increase in the short-term costs of adjustment, including social costs such as unemployment. The government’s fundamental decision problem is how to balance these trade offs, i.e., how to deploy judiciously the policy instruments at its disposal in order to position the agricultural sector for a successful entry into CAP while keeping it robust during the interim period and, perhaps, subsequent to a major reform in the CAP. To be sure, a number of questions concerning the interaction between the terms of accession to the EU and pre-accession policies naturally arise. Let us assume that the CAP will not be altered in the near term and, therefore, that the program’s current form represents a credible policy commitment by the EU, both to its own farmers and to prospective member states of Eastern Europe. How will alternative accession scenarios impact the budgets of the EU and the CEEC national governments, respectively? Under what forms of the accession contract, if any, should the CEECs use the pre-accession period to mimic the EU by adopting CAP-like policies? Do price supports encourage or inhibit efficiency-enhancing restructuring of farm enterprises? Should the restructuring process receive public subsidy? In other words, how should the burdens of the restructuring process be divided between the public and private sectors? Can open trading relationships substitute for direct government price supports in order to stabilize markets? More generally, how should CEEC governments allocate a limited budget amongst alternative forms of agricultural support, including commodity price supports, provision of public goods, and subsidies to restructuring? The goal of this paper is to analyze the effect of alternative accession scenarios and policy choices on the performance of CEEC agriculture, with particular attention to the process of enterprise restructuring. We analyze the decision problem facing a CEEC policymaker contemplating integration of his country’s agricultural sector into the EU, through use of a simulation model of production, trade, and enterprise restructuring in the agricultural economies of the CEECs. We focus particularly on how pre-accession agricultural trade and support policies affect social welfare, under alternative assumptions concerning the form of the “accession contract,” i.e., the terms governing the country’s entry into CAP. We approach the questions highlighted above with a partial equilibrium analysis; we do not address the general eqUilibrium effects that link agriculture to other economic sectors, nor the overall macroeconomic performance of these countries. A maintained assumption throughout is that no major reform in the CAP is presumed to be carried out prior to accession. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the analytical framework. Section 3 describes the data used to calibrate the simulation modeL In section 4, we present the results of several simulation experiments. Section 5 concludes with the key points learned through the exercise. Simulation experiments were performed using a dynamic model of agricultural production, trade, and enterprise restructuring in a three-region partial equilibrium framework, subject to policy interventions and random shocks. The first region, called the CEEC, represents a generic Central and East European Country in which farmers hire land, labor, and a composite variable input to produce a homogenous output. The effective price of the variable input depends on the CEEC governments’ expenditure on infrastructure and other public goods. Profits depend on the realization of random variables governing the domestic harvest and the prices prevailing in the other two regions, the EU and the Rest of the World .Trade flows are affected by tariff rates in the EU and the CEEC. In between production periods, some farm enterprises in the CEEC make investments to restructure their operations, thereby improving production efficiency. There is also a migration of land between the large state and collective farms, and smaller private operations, in response to profit differentials between those types of enterprises.

No-till tapped into the plants’ differential ability to absorb nutrients: those with deeper and more extensive roots were able to profit better from dispersed nutrients. This became a capacity that the system was nurturing in the cotton plant by gradually undoing the compaction layer so that its roots would have more room to grow. The length of cotton roots was a chief parameter of visual comparison when pits were opened in the no-till essay. Plants that had strong root capacity – cover crops such as brachiaria and crotalaria – were recruited into the system to perform a service of revolving the soil and bringing nutrients up. Crotalaria and other leguminous plants were further tapped for their capacity to bring nutrients down: that is, to capture nitrogen from atmospheric air and transfer it to the soil as their biomass degraded during fallow. These transactions were monitored and encouraged not just in space but also in time, especially with regards to intergenerational relations between the same and/or different crops. Plants in a same generation – that is,hydroponic gutter coexisting in the same cropping season – may compete or cooperate: maximizing the latter and minimizing the former was one of the ends towards which the no-till dispositif was oriented. Central to it was the legacy that one generation left to the next: the main crops – cotton or cereals – were to be the privileged heirs of nutrients recycled from all other crops grown in the previous season.

Successive generations of the same plant variety were also observed and compared across time, to ascertain the stability of the results concerning yields and other measurements. Scaling down the parameter of productivity entailed, finally, making sure not only that the cotton plant would thrive more than other actants in the parcel, but that certain parts of it would do so more than others. As with soil, researchers saw the cotton plant as a segmented entity; the above mentioned relationship between the plant’s roots and its aerial part was an important segmentation for the researchers. Within the latter, the flowers and bolls were their ultimate point of attention – several measurements in the dispositif tracked whether vitalities were being appropriately channeled into their multiplication, maturation, and quality: date of first budding flowers, first capsules opened, when bolls were ready to be harvested; number of branches and fruit sites; quantity and quality of fiber in the bolls. In this hierarchical redistribution of vitalities, however, the plants had their own priorities, which were not always aligned with the experiments’ productivity-centered frame. Much of breeding, in fact, is about reprogramming them to better respond to external demands, so that they will for instance yield faster, more abundantly and homogeneously.

In the project’s dispositif, plant agency often took the form of “natural” forces that its arrangement was designed to countervail. Researchers frequently talked about it by means of analogies with human organisms: the cotton plant “feels thirsty”, “looks happy” or “becomes sick, just like we do”. “Do you see all these dead flowers on the ground?”, a Burkinabe entomologist once explained, as he showed me the effects of different cotton pests in one of the tests. “These are not pest related. If there is hydric stress [i.e., lack of rain], the plant will sacrifice its flowers in order to maintain the capsules that have already budded. It is as if a mother, in a moment of scarcity, would prefer to abort a baby in order to save her children who have already been born.” Or, as a Brazilian agronomist explained in another occasion, if hydric stress is severe the plant may “abort the capsules before they are ready, sacrifice them in order for the plant itself to stay alive. It’s more important for the plant to survive.” This was because while cotton evolved to be a perennial plant, in commercial agriculture it is harvested as a whole and sowed anew each season; the plant becomes just a means to its offspring, the cotton bolls. Agriculture at large, not just the agronomic sciences, is fundamentally about understanding and controlling the behavior of these non-human agencies, about avoiding the dispersion of their vitalities by channeling them to certain ends that are extraneous to “nature itself” – productivity being the paramount end in mainstream scientific agricultural systems. The incredible rise in yields brought about by the Green Revolution was however predicated on other, broader changes: the more technology advanced, the more controls on the plant’s natural and social contexts it came to demand. This appeared at the micro scale of experimentation in the three project components, all of which ultimately revolved around how to make improved seeds express their full productive potential as it was envisaged by breeding.

While the more technological a seed is, the more controls are required for its potential to be actualized, in less capital- and technology-intensive types of agriculture, the less technological – or as agronomists say, rustic – the seed is, the less external controls it demands. As a result, its vitality is more dispersed and does not concentrate on the quantity and quality of cotton capsules to the same degree as in improved seeds: in one word, productivity is necessarily much lower. Its resilience, on the other hand, is much greater. One can therefore see the milieu paysan’s predicament as stemming from a lag between technology and context: peasant farmers deployed improved seeds without the attachments required for them to express their full normative potential. The project’s experimental dispositif largely followed the pattern of technology-intensive agriculture: more than in peasant farms, it successfully organized and controlled agencies and vitalities that would be otherwise free floating, dispersed in and around the space and time of the parcel, acting according to their own designs. The outcome was, as described above, a beautiful and vigorous parcel. The dispositif’s capacity for directing non-human agencies was limited by its very design: by prescribing a range of controls to be imposed on the actants within the parcel, it simultaneously limited its range of action to them; outside of prescribed controls, actants were pretty much out of its reach. There were however many other agencies that laid beyond the reach of the dispositif and the researchers. Experimental controls deployed in the project parcel were made to act by other controls – I am referring here to the capacity of researchers, technicians, and other front liners to implement the dispositif itself. Somewhat like peasant farmers, though in a lesser degree, project front liners did not, or could not,u planting gutter always follow the technical protocols with the rigor ideally required for a statistical design. One would be tempted to refer to these as “social” controls exercised on people, to differentiate them from “technical” controls exercised on things. But what I propose here, following actor-network theory’s basic prescription of symmetry between humans and non-humans, is an exercise in looking at them as being ultimately of the same kind. The chief effect of this exercise, as I saw it, was to bring to the fore how experimental controls were ultimately predicated on broader controls, that oriented those inscribed in the dispositif’s design but, paradoxically, also prevented their deployment as such. This “gap” in controls found in the C-4 Project – and probably in all others, since, as was discussed above, technology transfer is itself predicated on a preexisting asymmetry between departure and arrival points – brings to light agencies situated at scales beyond the ethnographic present and location, which are not always included in more “immanent” accounts of social-technical assemblages and their actants: agencies that make them act, but upon which they cannot act back – at least, not with the same force. There is, here, a fundamental asymmetry in the distribution of agency that is not normally recognized in actor-network theory’s basically “flat” networks : an asymmetry that elsewhere in the social sciences and humanities has gone by the name of systems, structures, the postcolonial condition, and many others.

The following section will illustrate this asymmetry through one of its most common manifestations in the field, related to how scientific enterprises operate through homogenization and standardization, and explore its consequences for technology transfer to farmers in the C-4 Project.To reach such levels of technification was never the aim of the C-4 Project, which was working, rather, to strike some kind of balance between the new technologies and local production systems. Nonetheless, standardization was a concern at certain key points. Crop management procedures should be the same across the entire field so that, upon harvest, the final product is as homogeneous as possible: cotton fibers of similar length, color, free of contaminants, and so forth. This was a strong demand coming from another, much higher scale, shared by cotton producers in Brazil and elsewhere: the world market. Lack of homogeneity was an issue recurrently noted by researchers for the milieu paysan; even a layperson such as myself could clearly perceive the contrast between the homogeneity of the project and peasant fields, where cotton plants would often have variable sizes, colors and amount of flowers or capsules. Since the seed was supposed to be the same, heterogeneity would come from factors such as variable soil inclination , or the uneven application of organic and chemical fertilizers. Most of these ultimately stemmed from a contextual element not found in cerrado agriculture: prevalence of human labor. Human labor necessarily entails greater diversity , discontinuity , and fewer mediation by artifacts . But even at the institutes, when workers were outsourced from the local communities to perform less skilled tasks such as harvest or counting damaged plant parts, homogeneity could be lost, for instance through lack of continuity. “We try, we train them, but then one day comes a woman, two days later comes her sister, and then she does it differently or loses track of the previous counting”, one of the African researchers told me. Sometimes, technicians themselves would be absent sick, too weak to work due to fasting during Hamadan, or would for some reason decide to harvest earlier than planned. Measurements and other standards would be found to vary between the Brazilian and the African institutes: one used volume, the other used weight; one soil classification was based on the U.S. system, the other on the French system. As one of the African front liners put it, even in the researchers’ joint work, “approximations” were often necessary. In other words, between Brazil and Africa, Embrapa and the C-4 institutes, experimental stations and milieu paysan, something almost always became lost in translation. But were they lost in Latourian translation? In Reassembling the Social, this notion was recruited by Latour to perform nothing less than the task of replacing the “social” itself. Translation indicates a relation that, rather than carrying causality between “intermediaries”, associates “mediators” that make each other “do things” : “a connection that transfers … transformations” . The network is the ethnographic inscription of such concatenated translations: “what is traced by those connections in the scholars’ accounts” . In this sense, there is nothing to be “lost”; each translation is immanent, in the sense that it configures its own reference, with no determination beyond itself. In this view, actor-networks are as if in a process of perpetual emergence: “in each instance, we have to reshuffle our conceptions of what was associated together because the previous definition has been made somewhat irrelevant” . Yet, there was among my interlocutors a pervading sense of inappropriateness – that the “real” thing laid elsewhere – that I could not just theorize away. African researchers had often been trained abroad, were fairly up to date in what was going on in their scientific fields, and participated in a global techno-science that had, quite literally, much of its reference elsewhere – usually, still, in centers of excellence in the global North. They knew how a dispositif should be correctly implemented, and how a good laboratory of soil analysis or biotechnology should look like. More often than not, however, this was not what they had in their own institutes. But on the other hand, what they had in their institutes was the real thing, their daily work environment. As with the “not-so-captured” African peasantry discussed previously, their regular condition was to be in-between – as Boaventura de Sousa Santos put it in an apt, and candid, formulation on the paradoxical nature of the postcolonial condition, they “live in the margins without living a marginal life”.

More common was for the technologies to be changed according to the version of the local context that was collaboratively assembled by Africans and Brazilians at the project front line. The project’s scope of action only reached as far as its more immediate context in the research institutes, which it sought to make more receptive to the new technologies through the provision of knowledge and research infrastructure . In their influential study, De Laet and Mol argued that the fluidity of the technologies is crucial in the transfer process, because it is what makes them more or less malleable to local adaptations by users. Indeed, some of the C-4 Project’s technologies turned out to be more fluid than others. While improved seeds are one of the most compact ways in which agronomic techno-scientific developments travel, they are also more rigid than technologies that function in the disaggregated form of systems, such as no-till. If the former demand significant interference in the local context in order to perform the work for which they were originally designed,dutch buckets system the latter is more malleable to changes in its internal composition and arrangement so that particular elements can be combined “selectively with other, more local elements, so as to fit better with existing styles of farming” .

As with De Laet and Mol’s bush pump, therefore, in the C-4 Project fluidity was fundamentally linked to the degree of disaggregation and substitutability of the technologies’ component parts. The tighter these parts were integrated, the harder it was to make adaptations. What these authors do not emphasize enough however is how this “quality” is imparted to the technologies according to the way they are assembled in the original context. As we saw, in Embrapa itself no-till was part of an ongoing research work involving regional adaptations and close interaction with different kinds of Brazilian farmers. But fluidity also depends on the way the technologies are reassembled and co-produced in the new context; without the special interest in this project component shown by the African agronomists and the project coordinator, for instance, no-till probably would not have been as fluid. Fluidity should not be seen therefore an essential quality intrinsic to a technology, but as itself a function of the process of assembling, transferring and reassembling it in the new context, as this new context is itself being made in relation to the technology. Moreover, technology transfer involves not just reshaping technology and context in a conceptual sense, as if an optimal balance between the two could be ascertained by getting technology design right once and for all.

As our account of the C-4 Project showed, the adaptation and transfer process was explicitly concerned with the relative controls that the various actors in the network exercised, or were expected to be able to exercise, at various scales. In other words, not just the way the contexts for transfer were made by selectively comparing them across common scales, but how agency was distributed across the project’s relational chain – between Brazilian and African researchers, and between these and technicians and farmers –, were key to the project’s potential for effecting successful, or robust, transfer. This attention to the relative distribution of agency across contextual levels was not just conceptual either; it imposed itself through a series of practical issues that the project workers had to face along the way. These issues were generally perceived as stemming less from mere difference than from asymmetries between contexts. The scales along which the Brazilian and West African contexts were brought together were not exclusive to their relation, but referred to a more diffuse kind of normativity – at time implicit, at times explicit – linked to globally hegemonic forms of agronomic research, farming, trade and governance. The next chapter will approach this issue by looking at the scaling moves and socio-technical controls involved in the project’s adaptive experiments.

The previous chapter concluded by looking at the C-4 Project from the perspective of how technology and context were co-produced in the case of each of its technical components. In various ways, the contexts in the C-4 countries “resisted”, or were expected to resist, the reassembling of the travelling technologies according to the same configuration in which they had been originally assembled back in Brazil. This was especially true when it came to their ultimate destination, peasant land, but was also found within the project’s more immediate organizational scope. Even if Embrapa and the African institutes shared much of the artifactual network necessary for carrying out collaborative adaptive research with the new technologies, transactions clearly unfolded along an asymmetric contextual topography. For an analysis that would follow strictly Latour’s prescription of “myopic” ethnography , this would not fundamentally alter the character of the network-based account. But when other scales beyond micro-practice are brought into the ethnographic picture, the constraints these asymmetries pose on the movement within the network become clearer, and the question of agency comes irresistibly to the fore: even if indeed distributed, agency is not evenly so. The evocation of broader scales in this case is not an illegitimate smuggling, a “ride from [a] faster vehicle” taken by the analyst to explain away the fundamental world-making processes unfolding on the ground, as Latour’s critique would have it. It was, rather, a major part of the latter, that is, of the context-making work carried out by the actors themselves. And they did it because, different from the myopic ethnographer, they were very much concerned with what would happen next: whether or not would the technologies disseminate to their ultimate context, the cotton farms. In other words, they were fundamentally concerned with present and future virtualities, not just with the flat immanence of actual practice. As we saw, during Phase I this concern took the form of projections about potential obstacles to transfer in local farming contexts, most of which laid beyond the project’s organizational scope. But if the project could not directly address many of these, it could at least try to provide for some of the local actors to do it themselves. This is, I will suggest in this chapter, one of the things towards which some of the front liners were working by the time I left the field. The key to technology transfer therefore came to lie not just in getting context-making right in a cognitive sense,dutch buckets but in addressing practical controls, or the relative distribution of agency along the various scales of the project’s broader assemblage.

This chapter will propose an account of how levels of context beyond the research institutes were scaled down into the most localized of project activities: field experiments. In this process, political controls at macro levels such as global trade or agricultural policies were scaled down into technical kinds of experimental controls at the micro level of adaptive experiments. While here, as in the “rendering technical” of development aid, there was a mutation of socio-political problems into technical ones, this did not imply a substitution of one for the other, or an eclipsing of broader socio-technical assemblages and the ways agency was distributed across them. As I will argue, technical controls exercised over non-human agencies were predicated on political controls exercised over human agencies, and vice-versa. This suggests that it is the opposition between political and technical controls that needs rethinking; anthropologists of development would therefore gain in looking at them as anthropologists of techno-science do: as being ultimately of the same kind. Even if, as I left the field for good in late 2012, the project’s next steps did not yet have one, clear direction, this chapter will conclude by addressing the question of technology transfer beyond the research institutes. This was the main concern of project front liners by then: how to make technologies thrive in the absence of the same socio-technical controls that shaped its development in the original context. Mine won’t be a disembedded – normative or theoretical – answer to this question, but a situated account foregrounding those lines of flight I see as promising for both field and desk . In terms of the first, it will be up to my field interlocutors to judge according to their own concerns. In terms of the latter, I will suggest how this experience in South-South engagement sheds light on aspects of technology transfer, and on the workings of techno-science more generally, to which the STS literature has not always given due significance. The section that follows will be dedicated to laying these out, before moving on to the account of the project experiments. One of the first things that struck me when going to biotechnology, soil, entomology and other research facilities in Embrapa and especially in the African institutes was how particular seemed to be the lab based on which Bruno Latour crafted his theory about techno-science and its relation to modernity . During fieldwork, it quickly became evident how fact construction in the way he described it is a privilege of some research scientists, while not so much of others. I do not think that this invalidates actor-network theory’s key insights; in fact, I am grateful to Latour for much of the sensibilities I brought with me to the field, and, self-fulfilling prophecy or not, they did turn out to be a quite valuable compass. What I wish to do, as I wrap up this dissertation, is a kind of critique that does not dismisses but works through and along some elements that are indicated but not sufficiently nourished by his theory. After doing fieldwork, for instance, it became obvious that what Latour saw inside the walls of the Salk Institute was allowed for by a much larger network of controls that stabilized not the chemical substances scientists were looking for and the scientific arguments they crafted for constructing them as facts, but the institution in which they worked itself. I am talking here not about experimental but political controls. These controls, largely invisible in Latour’s account, made sure that the Californian laboratory enjoyed a generous and reliable supply of the resources it needed for constructing facts: from an up-to-date collection of books and journals to a dependable electrical current; from well-paid and well- trained researchers and technicians to cutting edge equipment and materials. These preconditions for fact-construction are guaranteed by power, not by epistemology; as such, they are not equally shared by all laboratories everywhere. This question of political controls at broader scales turns out to be, indeed, one of ANT’s blind spots. As discussed in the Introduction, this is a particularly common qualm in the field of post-colonial science and technology studies. One of the things that the workings of technoscience in peripheral settings make irresistibly evident is precisely its embeddedness in power relations and deep-seated global asymmetries. A point that has not been much explored in this respect refers to the scaling moves whereby such broader power relations are brought to bear on“science in action”, not as external causality but as a constitutive part of it. This chapter will suggest how multiple scales came to be part of the assemblage brought together by the C-4 Project, and make a claim for the hybrid character of the controls – both political and experimental – involved in this process. A question raised by the literature on science and technology that deserves further exploration in this respect relates to what I will refer here as socio-technical controls, and the vitalities they aim at channeling. These twin aspects were especially salient in the kind of technoscientific work carried out by the project front liners. The chief aim of their experiments was not to produce new, readily universalizable scientific facts, but to test and re-calibrate the potential of certain technologies according to new sets of relations. Every technology is created with a performing potential in mind, and this potential is only actualized if it is calibrated according to an appropriate arrangement of controls, and made to work by an appropriate infusion of vitalities. This performance is shaped by normative directions that, as was argued in the previous chapter, refer to scales beyond micro-practice, such as global trade, techno-scientific networks, or public policies. Therefore, controls in this case are to be understood in a simultaneously technical and political sense.

The solutions recommended by the C-4 report came out of a compromise between the availability of technological expertise for addressing them at Embrapa, the demands made by the African partners, and the financial and organizational constraints posed by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency and UNDP. Solutions were as much tailored to local contexts as the latter were assembled according to the available technological options. And although the project was bilateral, it had clear normative references at broader scales, especially with respect to global trade on agricultural commodities and international scientific networks. Thus, different from other world producers such as the United States or Australia,both in Sub-Saharan Africa and in Brazil cotton is virtually only rain-fed. Embrapa had no significant expertise in irrigated cotton, and the cost of a large-scale irrigation scheme probably would have made it prohibitive for Brazilian cooperation anyway. The water problem therefore came to be addressed by the project by means of varietal selection and crop and soil management techniques aimed at maximizing humidity retention and crop resilience to irregular rain patterns, such as notill.These were also supposed to address the problem of degraded soils,nft hydroponic by improving their chemical and physical condition and deploying varieties more efficient at absorbing water and nutrients.

Already at this point, this was coupled with the project’s two other technical components: breeding and integrated pest management. All three catered to some of the demands posed by the African counterparts from the local research institutes, as these were scientific fields in which they already worked but needed more financial and expert support. “At first they wanted everything”, one of the Brazilian negotiators conceded, “but we ended up boiling it down to those three”. Other “strong demands” by the African partners considered at this point were excluded later on. This was the case, for instance, of post-harvest processing: while those in the C-4 countries wished to aggregate value to the cotton grain and fiber, which they exported in raw form, this exceeded Embrapa’s competency as an agronomic research institute. During a long conversation I had with the first report’s main author, I repeatedly insisted about what exactly guided him in his fact-finding quest – or, in the idiom privileged in this dissertation, what was his context-making logic. Having in mind the formal expert procedures according to which developers go about designing diagnoses as described by the literature , I was expecting to evince the name of some particular project methodology. But in response to my insistence he simply declared, “well, at bottom I just used my common sense as an agronomist”. And even though he was well aware that ultimately the problem with the cotton sector in West Africa goes much beyond low productivities, from the perspective of an agronomist there is not much point in improving other links in the production chain without addressing the productivity issue.

This was not due to a civilizational urge to lift a traditional agricultural system out of age-old darkness as the only path towards development. It stemmed, rather, from the fact that West African peasants already made use of improved varieties, chemical inputs and other technologies introduced by previous development initiatives, but these were not preforming up to their potential. This reasoning was also reproduced at the level of the productive system: soil management became the crux of the matter since without addressing it there could be “no expectation of changes in productive performance, even with the improvement of other aspects of the production system” . What came out of this preliminary stage was not a deep diagnosis of the cotton value chain in the four countries, but a foray into the possibilities that fell within the more circumscribed scope of technical cooperation . Rather than continuing along a linear bureaucratic path in the organizational pipeline, no immediate follow-up took place after this first fact-finding mission was concluded. After a period when this project of a project was “sort of left aside”, as I was told, the Brazilian Cooperation Agency finally decided, most likely driven by politico-diplomatic considerations, to resume it by hiring a senior consultant: a former Embrapa staff with extensive international experience at the FAO. Himself an entomologist specialized in cotton, he drafted the project jointly with ABC officials and researchers from the Embrapa cotton unit. “I had been in several ABC missions previously, but these were smaller projects, with one or two Embrapa researchers,” he told me. “The idea then was to make a different project, with much more participation from the recipient countries.”

According to him, the idea of investing in this new modality, which became known as structuring project , was championed by an ABC official who was particularly engaged in the South-South cooperation impetus during the Lula presidency. During the drafting process, he requested feedback from representatives of the African institutes during his own mission to Burkina Faso, Benin and Mali in 2008. At this point, the African counterparts did not demand much to be changed or included: “they were pretty much happy about what we had to offer”, he told me. Even if partly based on facts and figures from studies by multilateral agencies such as the WTO and the OECD, according to the accounts I collected, the main source of data for the diagnosis on the local context was direct contacts with the African partners. The document reproduces much of the previous report, while being more specific and detailed; its technical framework nonetheless remained somewhat open-ended. “If you read the actual project, you’ll see it’s all very general”, one of the Embrapa entomologists advised me. “We are the ones specifying the technical work to be effectively carried out”. To a large extent, those who drafted the project were not the same as those who came to be involved in actual implementation. In practice, most of the project work was to remain circumscribed to the local institutes, involving adaptive research of Brazilian technologies in their research stations, training their researchers and technicians in the concerned expertises, and building basic research and demonstration infra-structure.Only at the end would it take a step outside the institutes towards technology transfer proper, through diffusion brochures containing recommendations to local extension agents and leading farmers, based on the techniques validated by the adaptive research carried out during the project’s first three years. The consultant’s second task was to choose in which country the project’s headquarters would be based. After visiting three of the C-4 countries in late 2008 , he prepared a ranking based on heterogeneous criteria such as interest shown by local governments, quality of technical/scientific personnel, accessibility, areal hub, hotels, etc. Mali and Burkina Faso ended up technically tied, and it was left for Itamaraty to decide. In Mali, the consultant had suggested an IER research station in Sotuba, in the outskirts of Bamako, which did not belong to the institute’s cotton program proper. The Burkinabe partners, on the other hand, were fighting for the project to be based in INERA’s cotton center,nft system which was located in the country’s second largest city, Bobo-Dioulasso, way more distant from the capital city . The Sotuba station in Mali therefore won by a nose due to the logistic aspect.While this choice indeed facilitated logistics immensely and allowed for close support to the project by the Brazilian embassy, Sotuba was not where most local researchers participating in the project were based . It therefore became yet another mediator in an already intricate chain whereby resources, personnel, and materials flowed. Once a final version of the project was concluded in 2009 and all salamaleques, as a Brazilian researcher once put it, were completed, the ABC recruited back the retired Embrapa agronomist who had been on the first fact-finding mission. He would join his entomologist colleague who wrote the final project document to kick-start activities in Sotuba: the latter stayed in Mali for another month; the former, during six.

Both were former Embrapa researchers, but their career profiles were quite distinct. In fact, their complementary expertises seem to have been an important asset in those early moments of context-making. The entomologist was a Mississippi PhD, who, during the eighties, played a role in fighting a pest crisis that almost decimated Brazilian cotton production. When the C-4 Project was being conceived, he had retired after working for almost twenty years at the FAO, and was heading Embrapa’s international relations advisory body . The second consultant did not hold a graduate degree, and did not have a past career neither in management nor in international agencies. His expertise came, rather, from his somewhat rare long-term experience as an agronomist working in Africa during the early eighties, and for shorter periods later on. As discussed in Chapter 2, that was a moment when both Brazil and parts of Africa were experiencing an economic bonanza that brought together the two sides of the Southern Atlantic, before crisis would hit them hard later on that decade. One of Africa’s rising stars was then the Ivory Coast, where he lived with his family for six years. “You know, I speak French, but mine is African French!”, he warned me jokingly, but also kind of proudly, as he picked me up at the bus station in Goiânia in the summer of 2012. As he proceeded to recount later on that day, while showing me incredible post cards of a very modern Abidjan, pictures, newspaper clippings and other documents from that period he still kept, that project consisted in four seed production farms centered on soybeans. Like the C-4, it was bilateral, but, in an arrangement which is today unusual, it was co-funded by the Ivorian state. According to him, the country’s pére fondateur and president until his death in 1993, Houphouet-Boigny, “loved all things Brazilian; he even wanted to build a capital in the hinterlands like Brasília,” and decided to partner up with Brazil for mechanizing soybean production “in order to get rid of France.” The project deployed an apprentissage method where each Brazilian had an African trainee “24/7, like a shadow”, who had to learn their new métier from scratch, “in intense field activities”. As happens to many projects, today these farms are no longer operational, but it left some traces in the Ivorian landscape: “the seed analysis laboratory that was built is still there, the Ivorian project director at that time still makes consultancies.” He joined Embrapa not long after this project was completed in 1986, and since then has returned to Africa multiple times as a consultant, including for the Brazilian Cooperation Agency. Even though the C-4 Project had a quite distinct organizational format than the one in the Ivory Coast, in terms of practical relations at the front line his extensive experience would prove crucial for implementing the project virtually from scratch and within a very tight deadline. Much of the early work of the two consultants consisted in setting up the experimental parcel and getting it going so that year’s crop season would not be fruitless. That first year was almost entirely concentrated in Mali; only in 2010 would the project look more carefully to the other three partner institutes. In it were some of the huge trees that can also be found elsewhere in the station, home to an incredible amount of bats that put up quite a spectacle every day at dusk. I was shown a picture of the site when the consultants got there in mid-2009; the Sotuba director had provided for cutting the trees, but their huge stumps were still around, as well as heaps of weeds and waste of all sorts. To get it ready for sowing within just a couple of weeks – when the first rains would start – seemed indeed like a Herculean task. At that point, the Malian partners seemed to them to be highly skeptical about whether the project would ever happen, “especially because it was not clear how the funds would get there … [At that moment] we had no financial management, the local UNDP office didn’t even know about it”, one of them recounted. “They and the French were saying, ‘the Brazilians won’t be able to make it’. But when they saw that we were there to sow that very same year, [the Sotuba station director] budged, got institute money to pay for the tractors to clear the field … He would make payments upfront and the project reimbursed him later … he assembled the personnel … Without him we wouldn’t have done it.” The rhythm and networks consolidated during this period largely persisted from then on: the technicians who executed the experimental protocols in the parcels; the Malian researchers who co-designed the protocols and supervised their application; the hiring of locals for doing less skilled tasks according to the institute’s routine procedures and patronage networks.

In an interview to the Brazil-Arab News Agency in mid-2009 , the newly appointed CEO of Embrapa spoke of his ongoing “talks with the president of the Republic” about creating a new international center in Brasília for receiving trainees from the global South. Instead of carrying out small, separate projects in multiple countries, as had been largely the case up until then , Brazil would maximize efforts and resources by concentrating capacity-building activities in one site. “But thus far, this is just at the level of ideas”, he concluded. Less than one year later, in May 2010, this idea had become concrete in cement, steel and silicon, and President Lula personally inaugurated the modern new center amidst the events of the “Brazil-Africa Dialogue on Food Security, Fight Against Hunger and Rural Development”, a high-level meeting of state officials from Brazil and 45 African countries. In that occasion, President Lula proudly talked about CECAT as “a technology training center where we’ll receive many agronomists and technicians from Africa so they can be trained in Embrapa, learn the technologies we have here,tomato grow bags and take them to Africa in order to produce there the same as we produce here”.During fieldwork, I attended the first two capacity-building trainings held in CECAT, one in October 2010 and the other in April 2011.

Small changes were made between one and the other as part of a reflexive learning process by its newly formed team, some of whom were researchers recruited from other Embrapa units, while others were hired anew from specialized fields such as pedagogy and languages. The first half was held at the new center by the Embrapa headquarters in Brasília, and consisted mostly in indoor presentations by Brazilian officials from diplomacy, federal ministries and other governmental institutions, Embrapa research and management personnel, and guest speakers from other organizations such as universities and extension and research institutions from different Brazilian states. None of these were workers in the international development and cooperation industry; even the ABC personnel who took part in these trainings were usually actual or aspiring diplomats. African trainees, on their turn, typically included researchers from technical fields such as agronomic science, veterinary medicine, or crop breeding, or employees from institutions related to agriculture such as extension agencies and federal ministries. In the second part, the trainees were taken to one of Embrapa’s decentralized units and shown some of the technologies that Brazilian cooperantes fathomed could be of interest to them. The topic was chosen based on demands previously presented by African partners through diplomatic channels.

The first event in October 2010 took 42 trainees from 24 African countries to look at seed production in research units and farms located around Brasília, or to learn about pastures in Embrapa’s livestock center in Mato Grosso do Sul. The following year, a similar group was split between the Embrapa center in Sete Lagoas, where they looked at maize production in family agriculture, and the soybean unit in Paraná. I attended the maize and seed production trainings. Seed production was potentially applicable to a broad variety of crops of interest to African countries, from commodity grains to garden vegetables and greens. Both livestock and maize are, on their turn, key components in much of Sub-Saharan African agriculture, including in West Africa, where they are combined into the cotton production system . African countries are not major producers of soybean, but this is a potentially promising export market for them due to growing demand from China and elsewhere in Asia, and one in which Embrapa has significant expertise. The overall purpose of the trainings was, in the words of one cooperante, to provide for an “immersion of African trainees in Brazil’s agricultural realities, including social and environmental”. The focus was to look at agriculture as an “engine for national development” – an arguably defining trait of Brazil’s developmental experience seen as especially promising to African countries lacking wealth in mineral resources . Such “immersion” was created through the demonstration of Brazil’s experience in multiple, technical and non-technical domains.

As with the dimensions of culture/race discussed in the previous chapter, these demonstrations were highly selective, foregrounding some elements and domains while back grounding or eclipsing of others. They involved less the presentation of abstract technical content to be learned than a call to join in and extend the comparative exercise between the situated experiences of Brazil and African agricultures. In the coordinator’s words, “this is just a testimony; here we are not teaching you a lesson.” It was up to the trainees to accept the invitation to look at these demonstrations as an inspiration for facing their own developmental challenges. These challenges were rarely “rendered technical”; in fact, most of the trainings addressed nontechnical dimensions of agricultural development. While this demonstration of Brazil’s experience could not be but a situated perspective on it, it nevertheless purported to be authoritative; but this authority was grounded less on abstract expert knowledge than on a particular kind of experience. Above all, most cooperantes took for granted that this experience had been highly successful. In particular, they underscored how the country’s productivity boom during the past thirty years or so turned Brazil from a recipient of food aid until the sixties, and a net importer of food until the eighties, into one of the world’s leading exporters of agricultural products. From other perspectives, this “success story” was discontinuous and had multiple historical paths. Yet, the trainings privileged two narrative threads, also found in other cooperation modalities: the expansion of the agricultural frontier into the cerrado, and Embrapa’s enabling role in this process. In CECAT, this historical process was generally accounted for in terms of a virtuous symbiosis between the Brazilian state, research institutions, and farmers.In the summer of 2008, I visited some of these farms in the state of Mato Grosso along with a UC Berkeley research team.There, the prevalence of a white population was indeed remarkable, as was the recognition of bonds with Europe expressed by the people we talked to. Some of them even traced to this ancestral relationship their will to implement best agricultural practices such as strict compliance to environmental laws and fair labor policies. Farms were enormous and well equipped with modern machinery and large, well-structured facilities. The endless landscape of soybean, cotton or maize fields was only occasionally interrupted by rectangular patches of native rainforest required conserving by law.Roads were narrow, but new and smooth. Many towns, too, were new, planned,grow bags garden and well tended – quite different from older agricultural areas elsewhere in the country. In what was considered an exemplary town in the region in terms of environmental and social best practices, we were hosted by a family of migrants from the South where one brother ran the family’s model farm, the other owned one of the town’s best restaurants , and the third was the mayor. Two years later, I visited another gaúcho farm – this one, many thousand miles away, in the Eastern part of Ghana.

These unlikely investors had been led to Ghana through a series of fortuitous paths, some of which had been loosely prompted by the recent approximation with Africa championed by Brazilian diplomacy. With no experience in Africa, very poor English skills, and no substantial help from governments from either side, they built their enterprise virtually from scratch, finding the land to lease literally on their own, after driving around at random over 12,000 miles. What made it worth crossing the Atlantic in order to plant rice, the manager explained to me, was the figures: the cost of land was incredibly low, and they got almost twice for the ton of rice than what was paid in Brazil.Their aim was Ghana’s domestic market, which they regarded as a big opportunity. I found their experience so remarkable to the point where the gaúchos’ “trailblazing spirit” started to seem like a convincing thread in the narrative of the conquest of cerrado. In this sense, Africa would be just a next frontier for the gaúchos to explore. But at the same time, it points precisely to the impossibility of reproducing in Africa the story as it happened back in Brazil. Firstly, the population that turned the savannahs into the country’s “breadbasket” does not correspond to the country’s African heritage. On the contrary, they descend from those who were brought from Europe precisely to complement the African labor force freed from slavery in 1888. Most remarkable however is the fact that none of the accounts of Westward expansion I heard during fieldwork addressed the other side of the population coin: if migrants and their huge farms took over the area, whatever happened to those who occupied that land originally? As with Brazil’s invisible history of reluctance to actively oppose South-African apartheid and Portuguese colonization discussed in Chapter 2, this story is not on top of the mind of most Brazilians either. Yet, this is an unavoidable question for any significant developmental scheme for agriculture in Africa today. The historical movement that eventually led to Brazil’s agricultural production boom involved more than the common story, reproduced in CECAT, about the military rulers’ might to guarantee the country’s domestic food supply and redress an unfavorable balance of trade in the 1960’s and 70’s. Begun in earnest during a previous dictatorship – Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo regime –, Brazil’s “March to the West” had a broader, two-directional vector: one geopolitical ,and one of internal colonization .This double directionality is powerfully encapsulated in the motto, widely deployed by governments during the seventies, integrar para não entregar: to integrate in order not to abdicate . This process entailed centrally planned colonization policies, including large-scale relocation of populations living in the cerrado area . Two main groups occupied Mato Grosso and the surrounding backwoods at the dawn of the twentieth century: indigenous peoples, and what could be called caboclos. The latter comprised a sparsely settled, mixed-race population of cattle ranchers and small farmers descending from those who remained in the region after a relatively short-lived mining boom during the eighteenth century. The first group included a diverse range of aboriginal groups, either originally from the region or who had been pushed inland during the centuries of colonization concentrated on Brazil’s coastal/eastern areas. While the caboclos, mostly squatters on state land, were partly absorbed by settlement schemes during the Vargas and subsequent administrations, indigenous groups were deliberately removed or driven away to make room for the newcomers. Many studies have documented this lengthy process, which did not happen without resistance from indigenous groups, and whose contested character reaches well into the present . As I wrote these lines, a fierce struggle was raging in Brazil over land rights, between indigenous groups and farmers in Mato Grosso do Sul and elsewhere – a battleground into which anthropology itself has been dragged through a smear campaign against the discipline’s expert authority championed by sectors of Congress and of the national media. But the very demarcation of indigenous territories by the Brazilian state – the first being the world-famous Xingu Park in the northeast of Mato Grosso, established in 1961– was the flip side of Vargas’s project of colonizing the Center-West and turning it into “productive” land. In one of those paradoxical effects of internal coloniality, even if there has been sharp opposition and fierce disputes between indigenous peoples and farmers over land rights in the cerrado region, historically one would not have come about without the other. The land-population equation is key not only to understand current struggles in the Brazilian cerrado, but to assess the possibilities for successful transfer of Brazilian agricultural experiences to Africa. In spite of that, in the demonstrations at Embrapa only one of the sides of this equation was explicitly foregrounded. It does not take deep knowledge of African realities, however, to envisage the serious difficulties, if not impossibility, of reproducing anywhere in that continent a resettlement scheme of the type and scale of the one underlying cerrado agriculture. Historically, the colonial and internal colonization processes involving indigenous peoples in Africa have differed sharply from those in Brazil.With the exception of parts of southern Africa, governments have not confine entire populations to native reserves, as was done in Brazil. In most African countries, moreover, rural areas are still fairly populated,and, as many of my interlocutors pointed out, pressure for fertile land has been all but mounting.

Today’s South-South cooperation has also included projects for restoring their material and immaterial culture in countries like Ghana or Benin. In Accra, I visited the Brazil House, a small museum dedicated to the Tabom returnees which was, according to the ambassador there, one of President Lula’s “pet projects”. When he inaugurated the museum in 2008, Lula praised the returnees as “a true example for us”, for “never giving up the dream” of overcoming their condition as slaves.Not all Africans returned to their continent of origin by choice, however. A significant contingent was deported by the Brazilian state in the aftermath of slave revolts, most notably that of the muslim Malês in Bahia during the 1830’s . In the mid-twentieth century, the resumption of more intensive contacts was marked by excitement and hope by sectors of Itamaraty and Brazilian intelligentsia imbued with ideas about Africa’s affinities with Brazil . Multiple missions crossed the Southern Atlantic back and forth carrying diplomats, intellectuals, returnees, artists, and athletes. Even if all Brazilian diplomats were white,plastic garden container the culturalist grammar allowed them to claim some degree of Africanness.

When President Quadros decided to appoint a black ambassador to Brazil’s first embassy in Sub-Saharan Africa, he had to choose someone from outside of Itamaraty’s regular ranks: Raimundo Sousa Dantas, a journalist. This initial enthusiasm occasionally ran into its own inflated expectations and Brazilians’ poor knowledge of on-the-ground realities in Africa. A particularly evocative story tells of how, when Dantas arrived in Accra to take up the Brazilian embassy, Ghana’s iconic independence leader Kwame Nkrumah would have replied that a true demonstration of racial integration in Brazil would have been to appoint a black ambassador to Sweden rather than to Africa. This anecdote points to the sharp potential for contradiction between Africa’s place in Brazil’s nation-building imaginary and Africans’ views on race, colonialism and their own processes of internal colonialism. In the aftermath of decolonization, for instance, not all Africans saw their supposed legacies to Brazilian culture in a positive light, connected as they were with a tradition that those eager to modernize wished only to leave behind. Another telling anecdote recounted by D’Ávila speaks of a Nigerian student in Salvador who went crazy of fear of the Orishas ,associated as they are by many urban, Christianized Africans with the dangers of the bush. But the potential for disjuncture between the affinities discourse and the historical record is not limited to culture and race relations. One of them had to do precisely with the historically peripheral position shared by Brazil and the African continent in the domain of trade and finance.

If, at certain moments, horizontal relations across the South appeared as a cooperative move stemming from some inherent Third World solidarity with the potential to reduce economic dependence on the hegemonic West, at others they have translated into fears about competition for foreign investment and for consumer markets for tropical commodities. During the Kubitschek administration , which boiled its interest in Africa down to economic relations, a major concern shown by Brazilian diplomats and policymakers related to Africa’s privileged commercial ties with Europe, which remained in place even after independence. In the view of some, this was an “unfair” advantage , given African countries’ cheaper labor force and their preferential access to European markets for agricultural products also exported by Brazil such as coffee, cocoa and cotton. When looked at with contemporary eyes accustomed to Brazil’s undisputable prominence as a top world exporter of agricultural commodities – a stark contrast with many African countries’ struggle with their own food security —, such concerns with competition may seem at best overrated, at worst morally questionable. It should be kept in mind however that it was during the 1960’s and 70’s that many African countries knew their best economic moment, including in the agricultural sector. Yet, even after Brazil’s “agricultural revolution” in the 1970’s and the simultaneous stagnation of productivities in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, concerns with real or potential commercial competition have not entirely subsided.

On the contrary, this was an uncanny undercurrent to many conversations I had in the field that rarely came to the fore forthrightly. Some of the few occasions where such concerns were publicly aired and even defended were during debates in the National Congress on South-South cooperation with Africa and in the press coverage that accompanied them. In these debates, such positions were generally associated with members of the powerful farm lobby and their associates in government and society at large . These and other domestic concerns with national development have been an important drive behind Brazil’s policies for Africa, but they were not always aligned with diplomacy. This tension has been perhaps nowhere more pointed than during the early years of the golden period of Brazil-Africa relations, when two major African issues interpellated Brazil directly: South African apartheid and Portuguese colonization. Both were issues against which virtually the entire African continent and much of the Third World had firmly closed ranks. And in both cases, Brazilian diplomacy failed to take a clear oppositional stance, acting with hesitancy and ambiguity in the United Nations. Although these two issues are central to the academic literature on Brazil-Africa relations,in commonsense they are almost totally eclipsed. This may also be true of many of those working at the policy and perhaps even diplomacy level, given that even today we come across statements by Itamaraty personnel such as that what unites Brazil and Africa are “emblematic facts, such as Brazil’s support to political emancipation of African countries, joint efforts in overcoming underdevelopment, Brazil’s condemnation of the apartheid regime in South Africa”.Yet, it hasn’t been forty years since Portugal’s African colonies became independent, and even less since the apartheid regime collapsed. The historical literature tells us that, like most other nations South and North, successive Brazilian governments did condemn the apartheid regime in principle. However, even in the period of independent foreign policy, commercial and strategic interests would prompt silence when it came to supporting concrete measures against South Africa in the United Nations . Faithful to their Occidentalist alignment, the Brazilian military considered this African country an important and reliable ally of the West in a continent otherwise marked by fluid coalitions and leaders prone to strategically playing the communist vs. capitalist card. The easy story behind Brazil’s hesitancy in supporting the independence of Portugal’s African colonies, on its turn, is that of the “sentimentality” towards its “friendly colonizer” .

Indeed, Portugal’s stubborn attachment to its colonies even while independences were being rapidly achieved all around them seemed beyond comprehension by those in more “rational” societies such as the U.S. . Caution should be taken however not to take the facile road of accounting for Portugal’s moves as merely irrational or emotional, nor to overestimate the significance of these affective drives . Portugal’s stubbornness was in part a matter of missed timing. As Vale de Almeida pointed out, “African colonies became ‘real’,plastic pot important factors for the economy and self-representation of the country [Portugal] precisely at the moment when anti-colonial protest started” . As for Brazil, the eventual shift in attitude towards these two issues indicates that there is more to the story than sentimental attachments or even geopolitics. The Geisel period in particular was marked not only by the heyday of Brazil’s so-called economic miracle, but by what some scholars have called a renegotiation of dependence: that is, efforts at diversifying Brazil’s pool of trade partners away from the United States towards not just Africa, but also Japan, Western and Eastern Europe and the Middle East . Another major drive related to the 1970’s oil shocks: at a moment when Brazil’s energetic vulnerability was much higher than it is today, exporting manufactured products to Africa was a way of offsetting growing oil imports especially from Nigeria, which by the late seventies had displaced South Africa as Brazil’s main commercial partner in the continent . Brazil’s pragmatic shift was, moreover, hastened by an immediate constraint: a geopolitical alliance between Sub-Saharan Africa and Arab countries that threatened Brazil with an oil embargo due to its “recalcitrant stances” on South-African apartheid and Portuguese colonization in Africa . In Geisel’s foreign policy, this shift was rationalized in terms of the doctrine of “responsible pragmatism”, and allowed for moves that would be otherwise incomprehensible from a strictly ideological point of view. Thus, in November 1975, during the harshest period of Brazil’s anti-communist military regime, it was the first Western country to recognize the independence of Angola – under a Marxist guerilla government, Agostinho Neto’s People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola . According to D’Ávila , this was a belated attempt at redemption from the lack of firm commitment to decolonization in other parts of Lusophone Africa, which had bred acrimonious resentment from independence leaders from Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique to the point where the Brazilian government was not even invited to the latter’s independence celebrations in June 1975. Even if Brazil’s long-awaited gesture was made obsolete by the Carnation Revolution that happened months earlier, in April 1974, the recognition of Angola’s independence would, it was hoped, demonstrate to African leaders, to their Arab allies and ultimately the rest of the Third World that Brazil was not a “toy in the hands of U.S. interests in Africa” . A legacy of this moment was Brazil’s special relationship with Angola, which persists to this day even with China’s huge strides in that country during the past decade or so.By the end of the eighties, however, the commercial ties achieved during the golden years of Brazil-Africa relations had come mostly undone. As it turned out, Brazil’s 1970’s economic miracle was short-lived, eventually collapsing under the weight of a severe and long-lasting debt crisis. Relations with Africa suffered accordingly, as economic recession sweeping both sides of the Southern Atlantic “cooled down Brazil’s dreams of becoming a world power and crushed Africa’s expectations of economic autonomy” . Relations would not reintensify until Lula’s presidency beginning in 2003. Like in the 1970’s economic miracle, Brazil sees itself in a moment of economic and geopolitical emergence. But this time, in a changing international context where the North is arguably losing ground to so-called emerging powers, most notably China, it is hoped that such emergence will be for good – and so will the country’s commitment with Africa. In his latest book, Saraiva even made a case for a rupture with Brazilian diplomacy’s decades-old discourse on Africa. In his view, during the Lula administration there would have been a shift away from the fanciful culturalist idiom of affinities to a more realistic idiom of indebtedness. Rather than clinging to Africans’ imagined contributions to Brazilian civilization, this new discourse would recognize “slavery, rather than the official cordiality of culturalist discourse” as Brazil’s fundamental historical link with Africa, as well as the unequal socio-economic inclusion of African descendants that unfolded from it. Indeed, during the last decade or so, the hegemony of the racial harmony ideology has been visibly shaken by the rise of race-based movements in Brazil. Affirmative action claims have gradually gained ground especially during the FHC and Lula administrations , most visibly in the form of quota policies in public universities and civil service. Yet, just as Brazil’s diplomatic body has been, historically, a fertile ground for the proliferation of the culturalist grammar, it seems to be less permeable to these and other challenges to it. So how far have these recent discursive displacements gone in constituting a real shift? My fieldwork experience indicated that Saraiva’s recent celebration of a change in Brazil’s discourse on Africa should be taken with a grain of salt. As himself one of the crafters and champions of this new discourse in policy making circles,this celebration is possibly better understood as an attempted self-fulfilling prophecy. As such, it tends to gloss over some of the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize what could perhaps be a transition to a different rhetoric. Although the displacements underscored by Saraiva are indeed perceptible, they do not seem to be sufficiently robust, widespread or concerted to constitute a shift. Sometimes what I heard in informal situations would even go in a direction other than indebtedness: claims about Africans’ own responsibility in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, that Africans had their own slaves, and so forth.

Dutta et al. found similar re-aeration patterns in a 1 m column experiment in a sand dominated soil, with re-aeration occurring quickly once drying commenced. Even with the presence of a limiting layer, defined by lower pore gas velocities and higher carbon concentration, a sandy loam channel acted as a conduit of O2 into the deep vadose zone maintaining a relatively oxic state and thus decreasing the ability of the vadose zone to denitrify. In systems with higher DOC loadings to the subsurface, oxygen consumption may proceed at higher rates creating sub-oxic conditions in the recharge water and more readily create reducing conditions favorable to denitrification in the subsurface . We note here that microbial growth, which was not modeled in this study, could also affect the rates of O2 consumption and re-aeration, which could lead to underestimation of O2 consumption . Overall, denitrification capacity across different lithologies was shown to depend on the tight coupling between transport,square flower bucket biotic reactions as well as the cycling of Fe and S through chemolithoautotrophic pathways. Under large hydraulic loadings , overall denitrification was estimated to be the greatest as compared to the lower hydraulic loading scenarios .

The main reason for the higher denitrification capacity was the significant decline in O2 concentration estimated for this scenario, whereas such conditions could not be maintained below one meter with lower hydraulic loadings under scenarios S2 and S3. However, nitrate was also transported deeper into the column under S1 as compared to S2 or S3. Tomasek et al. found the reverse in a floodplain setting, where intermittent indundation with flood water, comparable to our S2 and S3 contexts, resulted in higher rates of denitrification in the zone that was always inundated, due to priming of the microbial community and pulse releases of substrates and electron donors. Future studies examining the impact of AgMAR on denitrification should include processes such as mineralization to see if the same behavior would be observed. It seems that there may exist a threshold hydraulic loading and frequency of application that could result in anoxic conditions and therefore promote denitrification within the vadose zone for different stratigraphic configurations, although this was not further explored in this study. In another study, Schmidt et al. found a threshold infiltration rate of 0.7 m d-1 for a three hectare recharge pond located in the Pajaro Valley of central coastal California, such that no denitrification occurred when this threshold was reached. For our simulations, we used a fixed, average infiltration rate of 0.17 cm hr-1 for our all-at-once and incremental AgMAR scenarios, however, application rates can be expected to be more varied under natural field settings. Our results further indicate that the all-at-once higher hydraulic loading, in addition to causing increased levels of saturation and decrease in O2, resulted in leaching of DOC to greater depths in comparison to lower, incremental hydraulic loading scenarios .

Akhavan et al. 2013 found similar results for an infiltration basin wherein 1.4% higher DOC levels were reported at depths down to 4 m when hydraulic loading was increased. Because organic carbon is typically limited to top 1 m in soils , leached DOC that has not been microbially processed could be an important source of electron donors for denitrification at depth. Systems that are already rich in DOC within the subsurface are likely to be more effective in denitrifying, and thus attenuating, NO3 – , such as floodplains, reactive barriers in MAR settings, or potentially, organically managed agroecosystems .This finding can also be exploited in agricultural soils by using cover crop and other management practices that increase soluble carbon at depth and therefore remove residual N from the vadose zone . While lower denitrification capacity was estimated for scenarios S2 and S3, an advantage of incremental application was that NO3 – concentration was not transported to greater depths. Thus, higher NO3 – concentration was confined to the root zone. If NO3 – under these scenarios stays closer to the surface, where microbial biomass is higher, and where roots, especially in deep rooted perennial systems such as almonds, can access it, it could ultimately lead to less NO3 – lost to groundwater. While there is potential for redistribution of this NO3 – via wetting and drying cycles, future modeling studies should explore multi-year AgMAR management strategies combined with root dynamics to understand N cycling and loading to groundwater under long-term AgMAR. Simulation results indicate that wetter antecedent moisture conditions promote water and NO3 – to move deeper into the domain compared to the drier base case simulation.

This finding has been noted previously in the literature, however, disagreement exists on the magnitude and extent to which antecedent moisture conditions affect water and solute movement and is highly dependent on vadose zone characteristics. For example, in systems dominated by macropore flow, higher antecedent soil moisture increased the depth to which water and solutes were transported . In a soil with textural contrast, where hydraulic conductivity between the topsoil and subsoil decreases sharply, drier antecedent moisture conditions caused water to move faster and deeper into the profile compared to wetter antecedent moisture conditions . In our system, where a low-permeability layer lies above a high permeability layer , the reverse trend was observed. Thus, a tight coupling of stratigraphic heterogeneity and antecedent moisture conditions interact to affect both NO3 – transport and cycling in the vadose zone, which should be considered while designing AgMAR management strategies to reduce NO3 – contamination of groundwater. Furthermore, dry and wet cycles affect other aspects of the N cycle that were not included in this study . Specifically, the effect of flood water application frequency on mineralization of organic N to inorganic forms should be investigated to assess the full N loading amount to groundwater under AgMAR. Pyrethroids are the most commonly utilized residential insecticides partly due to the generally held belief that they pose minimal risk to human health. In addition, there are numerous worldwide applications for pyrethroids in agriculture, horticulture, public health and textiles . They have insecticidal activity in their parent form and donot require metabolic activation to exert their neurotoxic effects, which are mediated by increased open time of voltage-gated sodium channels . The initial symptoms of acute occupational pyrethroid intoxication include parasthesia consisting of burning and itching sensations on the skin or dizziness that develops approximately 4–6 h after exposure,black flower bucket although dermal symptoms can manifest after minutes of application. Systemic symptoms can occur up to 48 h after acute exposure . Pyrethroids are classified as Type I or Type II pyrethroids. Type I pyrethroids are esters of primary or secondary alcohols, whereas Type II pyrethroids are esters of secondary alcohols with a cyano group at the  -carbon of the alcohol component. The acid andalcohol moieties both contain chiral centers, leading to the possibility of several stereoisomers for each pyrethroid, which may exhibit isomer-specific insecticidal activity . The type II pyrethroid,  CM, is derived from the 8- stereoisomers that comprise the pyrethroid cypermethrin, which is one of the most common pyrethroids in agricultural and residential use.  CM is a racemate of two cypermethrin stereoisomers: – -cyano-3-phenoxybenzyl–cis-3–2,2-dimethylcyclopropane carboxylate, and – -cyano-3-phenoxybenzyl–cis-3– 2,2-dimethylcyclopropane carboxylate , which are considered the two most stable cis-isomers . The major detoxification pathway of  CM is through hydrolysis by esterases and hydroxylation by cytochrome P450s . In vitro studies have shown that alcohol and aldehyde dehydrogenases can also contribute to the metabolism of pyrethroids . Dosing studies with  CM and cypermethrin in 6 human volunteers indicate an elimination half-life range of 8–22 h for a single dermal exposure . The assessment of human exposure to insecticides such as pyrethroids is often based on quantification of metabolites excreted in urine . The major urinary metabolites of  CM in humans are 3-phenoxybenzoic acid and cis-3–2,2-dimethylcyclopropane carboxylic acid , which are conjugated prior to being excreted in the urine .

3-PBA is a metabolite common to a large number of pyrethroid insecticides, while cisDCCA is a more specific metabolite and useful urinary biomarker of exposure for  CM, permethrin and cyfluthrin . Thus, urinary concentrations of 3-PBA may serve as a general biomarker of pyrethroid exposure, while cisDCCA represents a more specific biomarker for human exposure to  CM. Currently, there are no published studies specifically assessing the occupational exposure to  CM. One pyrethroid study investigated occupational exposure in Chinese cotton workers spraying deltamethrin, fenvalerate and a deltamethrin methamidophos mixture . Hardt and Angerer evaluated occupational exposure in individual workers after applying a mixture of up to 7 synthetic pyrethroids, including  CM. Another study described occupational exposure to permethrin and fenvalerate , and a number of other studies have documented general pyrethroid exposure in non-occupational settings utilizing 3-PBA as a general biomarker of pyrethroid exposure . The primary objective of the present study was to investigate occupational exposure to CM by quantitating the daily urinary levels of cis-DCCA and 3-PBA before, during, and after the application of CM in a cohort of Egyptian agriculture workers who were spraying  CM on cotton fields daily for up to 10 consecutive days. A biomonitoring study on a subset ofthis Egyptian agriculture worker population determined that 94–96% of the dose was due to dermal exposure . While chlorpyrifos exposure has previously been characterized in these individuals , this is the first study to describe a longitudinal assessment of exposure to  CM.A detailed description of the study setting was previously published , and a previous chlorpyrifos bio-monitoring study on a subset of this Egyptian agriculture worker population estimated that 94–96% of the dose was due to dermal exposure . Briefly, the present study was conducted in Menoufia, one of 29 governorates in Egypt, which is located in the Nile River Delta north of Cairo. Daily urine samples were collected from a cohort of 37 Ministry of Agriculture workers which were divided into three job categories: applicators who spray the insecticide on the cotton crop with a backpack mistblower sprayer; technicians who walk the fields with the applicator in order to point out particular areas which need attention; and engineers who direct the work mainly from the edge of the field. These workers were assigned to 3 regions where  CM was sprayed daily in 3–5 h work shifts for up to 10 consecutive days in the summer of 2008. The workers provided daily spot urine samples before, during, and after the insecticide application cycle. The urine samples used for analysis were collected just prior to start of the work day, on 24 h intervals at approximately 3 pm. One technician was included in the demographic analysis, but did not provide any urine specimens during the pyrethroid application and was therefore excluded from the current study. Samples were placed on wet ice in a cooler and transported to Menoufia University , where they were stored at −20 ◦C until being shipped to the State University of New York at Buffalo on dry ice for analysis. Creatinine concentrations were measured using the Jaffe reaction ; urinary cis-DCCA and 3- PBA concentrations are expressed as micrograms or nanomoles per gram creatinine. All protocols and questionnaires were approved by Institutional Review Boards of Menoufia University and Oregon Health & Science University, the institute administering the parent grant that funded the field studies.The Type II pyrethroid CM is metabolized by hydrolytic cleavage of the ester bond to form the metabolite cis-DCCA, while the alcohol moiety is further metabolized to 3-PBA likely by oxidative enzymes such as cytochrome P450s and aldehyde dehydrogenase . Urinary levels of cis-DCCA and 3-PBA were measured in the Egyptian cotton field worker to estimate their exposure to  CM over the course of the spray schedule . The results show great variability from worker to worker, even within the same job category. The 3 field stations demonstrate 3 distinct exposure scenarios, including different length of spray period and peak metabolite levels during the application. Accordingly, not all applicators were highly exposed, while several individual engineers and technicians were highly exposed. To our knowledge this is first study to conduct a longitudinal assessment of occupational human exposure specifically to  CM. This cohort is unique because the workers were applying a single pesticide for up to 10 consecutive days. Similar to the previously reported occupational exposure to chlorpyrifos exposure in this cohort , applicators had the highest levels of urinary metabolites and thus greater exposure to the parent compound, while technicians and engineers had lower exposures.