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.