One can point to some of these eclipsed elements in Latour’s ethnography itself

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 …

The three hectare piece of land put aside by the Malian institute for the project was unused land

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 …

The C-4 Project was remarkable for other reasons as well

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 …

Most if not all my Brazilian informants were utterly unaware of this historical fact

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, …

These studies suggest substantial non-occupational exposure to pyrethroids in the general population

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 …

Many returnees took advantage of their Brazilian connections to become themselves traders in slaves

These processes took place in tandem with the erection of an overarching global apparatus, in particular the United Nations system and the Bretton-Wood institutions . Early rapprochements between the dozens of newly independent nation-states unfolded largely under the auspices of – and were in a sense enabled by – this multilateral governance system. In particular, …

Water is not priced to signal the most-efficient uses these cases

A modeling approach that relies on analyzing the individual farm operation as the unit of interest, as proposed in the types of models described in Rosen and Sexton, and Zusman and Rausser, has two problems. The first is that it misses the influence of non-farm voters on district decisions, particularly in popular-vote and board-appointed selection …

The practice however releases carbon to the atmosphere and increases the probability of soil erosion

Similar results were found for tropical silvopastoral systems where the canopy cover and tree density were positively related with migratory bird flocks . In a comparison of different structural complexity, silvopastoral systems supported less diverse bird flocks than shade coffee in Colombia, but it is likely that shade coffee could support more bird species than …

The cost is that it may measure something different from the impact of climate on long-run profit

One possible measure is farmland value, which presumably reflects long run profitability, and which has been used quite extensively since Mendelsohn et al. introduced the so-called Ricardian approach for assessing the impact of climate change on agriculture. With this approach, one estimates a Ricardian or hedonic regression relating farmland value to climate variables and to other …

The main impact on MA changes during this sample period was from output demand

Even based on observed pK changes, CMA,pK=0.044. If weighted by the greater increases p*K, the MA demand augmenting impact of capital price changes would be C*MA,pK =0.056. The implied higher growth of virtual compared to measured price of capital could result from various factors. Its drivers could include substantive and rising adjustment costs , environmental or …