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.