This is a different kind of engagement than the one described in the literature about traditional aid, based on a highly bureaucratized apparatus aimed at intervening in broad swaths of local realities in a planned manner, subsidized by authoritative knowledge specialized in the field of development – which I will synthesize here under the rubric of “intervention” . The concluding section will elaborate on the notion of demonstration to characterize this alternative mode of engagement, and suggest some of its effects on Brazilian cooperation’s potential for robustness.The previous section begun with the hope, manifested in President Lula’s words when he inaugurated the CECAT in 2010, that Embrapa’s technical cooperation would help raise Africa’s crop production to Brazilian levels. The account of the capacity-building trainings provided in this chapter made evident however how little technical and hands-on they in fact were. I was left wondering, then, exactly what type of capacity was being built there? My suggestion is that, rather than effectively transferring knowledge or technology across the Southern Atlantic, this work of capacity-building could be better characterized as an effort to make a context for relations that had little precedent. There was, above all, a clear diplomatic aspect to the trainings. With them, their sponsor, the Brazilian Cooperation Agency, realized its guideline of concentrating resources in order to make cooperation more standardized, less costly, and more visible to a wider African public. In each round of trainings, Brazilians had access to representatives from a broad sample of African countries at a relatively low cost. There were moments in which this drive became explicit, such as when the campaign of José Graziano, a former minister of Lula and then candidate to head the FAO,blueberry box was briefly discussed in CECAT and pamphlets were distributed to the African trainees. But most often, diplomacy’s intentions were loosely articulated, consisting simply in advertising Brazil to African countries.

In the words of one of the Embrapa speakers, “it is hoped not only that particular technologies will be discussed here, but that each of you will take home a message that Brazil is a brother country, which wants to share what it has learned with its African brothers”. The demonstration of Brazil’s “developmental success” involved elements and procedures that came out of Embrapa’s, not Itamaraty’s, experience as a research institute. I would like to conclude by suggesting that this mode of engagement through demonstration has two vectors. On the one hand, it relates to the broader organizational assemblage of Brazilian cooperation, which, as argued in Chapter 1, has led to a more “hands off” approach. On the other hand, it stems from the kind of work that Embrapa employees were used to perform domestically – and which also happens to resonate well with the general principles of South-South cooperation described in Chapter 1. Early on in this dissertation and elsewhere , I claimed that Brazilian cooperation has been inspired less by the international development apparatus’ expert protocols and policies than by sector-specific, domestic experiences, and that institutions operating at front line like Embrapa, and even their individual agents, enjoyed significant autonomy from the level of policy to design and implement projects and trainings. In the case of Embrapa, this has been reflected in the fact that demonstration as display of technological achievements is not something crafted specifically for its South-South cooperation activities. It is a major part not only of its techno-political domestic routine, but also of technology transfer in agriculture at large. In this sense, Embrapa cooperantes’ mode of engagement with African partners has been largely mirrored on their relations with the Brazilian government and public on the one hand, and farmers on the other. In the emic jargon, technology transfer, or TT, is the stage that follows Research & Development ; it refers to the transfer of technologies already validated by research to farmers. Agronomic research is itself carried out with an eye on adoption by farmers, for instance by taking into account the cost of technologies being developed.

In the Embrapa decentralized units visited by the African trainees, crop technologies are not confined to trial fields; they are set up in demonstration units that are both experimental sites and displaying windows for farmers and other kinds of lay publics. Embrapa researchers occasionally carry out terrain TT activities such as dias de campoand treino e visita . Many of these techniques are based on models disseminated globally by multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, but Embrapa and other local institutions have improved and adapted them over the decades. Even though extension services to farmers are not really part of Embrapa’s mandate, 164 the institute does engage in other modes of technology transfer. It has a TT department centered on seed production and “technological business” , for dealing with more entrepreneurial types of farmers. It also makes its own investment in reaching out directly to all kinds of farmers through different media . During the CECAT trainings, African partners were taken on a tour to Embrapa’s modern media facilities, including its own TV and radio studio, and a large graphic press for producing booklets, manuals, and other dissemination and publicity materials targeting farmers and the general public. Embrapa also participates regularly in other modalities of technology transfer held by the private sector, such as agricultural fairs and expositions. In all these, new technologies are demonstrated to farmers, who will adopt them only if they see advantages relatively to what they already deploy, usually conceived in the form of productivity gains or some other economic parameter. This is, as one of the cooperantes put it, part of an “open” system where technical recommendations are not imposed on farmers but demonstrated to them. It is up to the farmer to go on the market after the seeds, fertilizers, and whatever other inputs he decides he needs – be it at Embrapa or elsewhere. As will be seen in the chapters that follow in the case of cotton, this contrasts with the picture found in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, more akin to the colonial development “toolkit” mixing coercion and market signals, and to a “Green Revolution” model of technology diffusion166 where formal extension channels are top-down and “closed”, whatever falls outside of it being largely left to little regulated informal markets.

Finally, as we have seen, demonstration has also been part of Embrapa’s daily routine in another way, this time addressing less farmers than another kind of public: government and the Brazilian society at large. Since its early beginnings, the institution and its employees have been constantly called to give an account of themselves in terms of impacts on national development, lest they would run the risk of going underfunded or even perishing. In their demonstrations during cooperation activities, cooperantes were providing a similar kind of self-account, convinced as they were that part of the solution for their African partners,blueberry package at least from the point of view of research, would be to do the same. Therefore, by carrying out demonstration in both technical and non-technical domains, Embrapa cooperantes were not doing anything radically different than they used to do domestically. But here they were being asked by an external agency to address a public they did not have significant relations with. For these relations to multiply and produce concrete effects on the African landscape, researchers and other cooperantes did not count with the established channels they enjoyed in Brazil, linking them to other research institutions, farmers, politicians, the media, and so forth. As a result, Brazilians came to regard African partners themselves less as recipients of cooperation than as vital and necessary mediators for its initiation and reproduction. Much of the former’s efforts during the trainings were towards enticing the latter’s interest in the Brazilian experience, and their participation in the comparative effort being proposed. From these attempts at engagement, however, something may or may not come out. There are those who participate in international cooperation activities mostly as an opportunity to travel around, to meet and network with new people for a variety of purposes, or simply to save some money on daily allowances. Embrapa personnel consciously tried to avoid having trainees who privileged these motivations, but they had little influence over assignment procedures, which happened back in African countries. But even when this was not the case, networking could take a life of its own and become largely self-referred, as happens in much of traditional aid . In CECAT, indeed, rarely did interactions show a potential for robustness. This would require not only extending interpersonal and inter-institutional relations beyond the scope of cooperation itself, but embedding them in preexisting socio-technical assemblages. From the point of view of the Brazilian cooperantes, this kind of follow-up was a next step to be taken by the African partners, if so they wished. Demand-drivenness had to be therefore constant, not just a kick-start for beginning a relation – much the less a nice word to put on a PR brochure or institutional power point. Many of the Africa trainees did express interest for instance in returning to Brazil for long-term study, or in proposing joint scientific projects with Embrapa researchers. But most of them expected that further support for this would come from their partners; and although Brazil does have some provisions in this respect such as research funding and scholarships for the global South, they were limited in number and scope, and were not generally streamlined with technical cooperation activities.

Today, moreover, these same African countries, institutions, and even individuals are being courted by a growing number of international partners – just like Brazil, China, Australia, India and many others have been eager to generously share with Africa their successful agricultural experiences. But rather than creating a smooth, enclosed context for themselves, these relations become inevitably caught up in Africa’s rugged “entangled landscapes”, where “multiple spatialities, temporalities, and power relations” meet and combine in manifold, overlapping assemblages. The two chapters that follow will describe one of these assemblages, formed around the C-4 Project in West Africa, and look at how context-making, demonstration and the question of robustness have appeared in the case of a full-fledged technology transfer project.A corollary to this naturalization is that, as the technology travels from center to periphery, it is no longer seen as having social ties to its departure point. That is why, in policy oriented views on technology transfer, this process is reduced to closing the gaps between the technology and its new, less developed context: this, a truly “social” one. Correspondingly, people – local farmers, researchers, technicians, policymakers – become the chief challenge: in order for the gaps to be closed, they are expected to change themselves according to the new technology, more than the other way round. Indeed, STS scholars working from / on the global South have variously noted how, in Latin America and elsewhere, the “social” entanglements of techno-science come to the fore more visibly . Much of this perception stems from the perceived lag between techno-scientific practices in the peripheries and those in the centers. What happens, then, when technology travels along a South-South axis? It must be clear by now that, more than geographic locations, center and periphery indicate a kind of relation, and that South-South relations may be ambivalent and even contradictory in this respect. Thus, as I will try to show below, in the C-4 Project relations were asymmetrical in terms of the direction in which knowledge, technologies and resources flowed, and of the relative availability of these on both sides. Yet, they were not marked by the intervention, imposition, or patronizing – in one word, the verticality – often remarked for Northern aid. Moreover, similarly to what was argued in the previous chapter for the capacity-building trainings, more than “rendering technical” , engagement through demonstration most often denaturalized the travelling technologies by laying bare some of their socio-technical entanglements on both the provider and recipient sides. The transfer process therefore appeared as a co-production between technology and context in a more explicit and reflexive way than is described in the STS literature referenced here. Neither is this literature sufficiently attentive to two key dimensions of technology transfer foregrounded in my account: the scaling moves that are performed by the actors themselves, and the asymmetries they perceive not only between recipient and donor countries, but between different levels of context within these countries.