Indeed, as some of my interlocutors in the African institutes remarked, there can be marked imbalances in terms of access granted by local chiefs to peasants depending on their kin and patronage networks, and differences in ethnicity, age, gender, or migration status. Especially for immigrant peasants and those in areas of high pressure on arable land, the assignment of land plots to households by village authorities is far from secured. “It can be taken from the peasant at any time, if for some reason the elders decide that the true owner of that piece of land is somebody else”, one of the Burkinabe researchers explained to me. These issues stretched far beyond the technical scope of the C-4 Project. Nonetheless, as Brazilian front liners quickly learned, they impinged directly on the possibilities of transferring Embrapa technologies to peasant land. Most germane to the project was the fact that this situation tended to discourage long term planning and farmers’ investment in the land plots they worked. And no-till was considered a technique that necessarily requires long term thinking, since many of the benefits driving its original development are not immediately evident in the short term. In terms of the project’s main problem – productivity –, the benefits of soil conservation are manifested less as immediately rising yields than as preventing their decrease in the long run. And while the agronomist or planner sees both, the peasant – my interlocutors insisted – sees only the former. As will be resumed in the next chapter, the question of evidence – how to convince farmers that the problem exists, and how to demonstrate that the proposed solution is working or will work – became one of the keys to the project’s technology adaptation and transfer strategy. Finally, no-till’s third and last pillar – crop rotation – involved yet another set of context making and scaling operations. Crop rotation is a major piece of context in Brazil’s experience with no-till cotton: if in much of West Africa cotton has been “king” since colonial times, in Brazil’s late-century agricultural boom cotton has thrived on the heels of queen soybean.

In the aftermath of the boll weevil crisis,hydroponic nft system cotton re-emerged during the “soybean cycle” 200 as a succession culture to that which is today the paramount crop in cerrado agriculture, largely aimed at export to Asian markets. In a common configuration, cotton is planted in the window that was opened in the cerrado agricultural calendar by the introduction of more precocious varieties of soybean, with life cycles as short as 100 days. This means that, between the harvest of soybean and the end of the rainy season, there is enough time to plant a second crop , and sometimes even a third one of pasture for feeding cattle. Even though some Embrapa researchers showed nuanced views about this highly intensive and technified production system,it was this configuration – rather than that of smallholder cotton production in the Northeast – that they presented most often to African partners. This seeming in congruence only appears as paradoxical, however, if one takes the scale of property size and capital-intensity. In fact, by and large, Brazilian and African peasants do not grow cotton for the same market: the latter produce for the same world market in which Brazilian large-scale farmers sell their cotton, while Brazilian smallholders produce mostly for domestic or niche markets such as organic or colored cotton. African peasant farmers are faced with higher demands in terms of productivity, timing, or quality standards. Technically speaking, in no-till crop rotation follows a logic similar to that of conventional agriculture: to recycle and better utilize soil nutrients, interrupt the cycle of pests, diseases and adventitious weeds, and improve soil structure by alternating root types. Project front liners did not foresee many difficulties here, as West African peasants already grew cotton amidst a diversified pool of crops, and did some rotation between them. This was however done differently than in the Brazilian cerrado. In West Africa, at current levels of technification of production, rain patterns typically allow for only one crop per year. In-between, there is a long dry season of around seven months – also known locally as “hunger season” – which is, according to many of my local interlocutors, getting increasingly lengthier “due to climate change”.

Other plants are therefore intercropped with cotton simultaneously, competing against it for land, labor and inputs.This complementary-competitive relationship between cotton and food crops has been one of the defining features of the system in West Africa, and, as will be seen in the next chapter, of peasant decision-making locally. The idea was that the improvement of cotton production within a mixed system would bring in its stead more and better food crops, and vice-versa. “I say that cotton can be the main food crop in these countries”, the project coordinator was fond of saying. This ambivalent coexistence between cotton and food crops is also a legacy of French colonialism. In its modern version,cotton was already born as an industrial and global crop. Since it did not grow well in Europe’s temperate climate, cotton was encouraged in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere by all colonial powers as an export item to metropolitan markets.More than any other crop, it shares the iconicity and global character of the economic sector that raised it to world prominence: the textile industry. A central stage of the origin story of Western modernity so powerfully recounted by Marx in Das Kapital, the textile industry and its associated cotton supply chain played an important part in the process that led to the abolition of the slave trade during the Pax Britannica, and from there to the scramble for Africa later on in the nineteenth century. The “cotton famine” during 1861-65 – a period of acute supply shortages caused by the civil war in the U.S., by then the largest world cotton producer – was a key factor in pushing Britain and other industrializing European nations to tighten their imperial grasp over tropical possessions in Asia and Africa . As Mamdani eloquently framed this link between nineteenth-century colonialism and Western Europe’s Industrial Revolution, “in [the] constellation of raw materials that would feed European manufacturing, the pride of place belonged to cotton. The three c’s that Livingstone claimed would together rejuvenate Africa were cotton, Christianity, and civilization”.In much of colonial Africa, cotton was, as Mamdani put it, the “archetypical forced crop” . As such, it participated in colonialism’s regime of compulsions that gave rise to the overall food versus cash crop dichotomization remarked in the previous chapter. In the case of West Africa, historians prefer to talk about a mixed system featuring both coercion and market incentives, which confronted peasants with “a set of constraints and opportunities over which they often had little control” .

Even today, no peasant farmer is, strictly speaking, forced to plant cotton; but they often have little option outside of it. This may be also reflected at the level of nation-states; as I once heard a group of Beninese agronomists teasing their Chadian colleagues as they arrived early in the morning for one of the project meetings, “What are you guys doing here anyway? Why do you even bother with cotton? You have oil!” As far as the technical make-up of no-till is concerned, however, production scale, market destination, or property size are not constraining factors per se. No-till is a highly flexible crop and soil management system,nft channel and there are endless possibilities of permutation within and between the three pillars; what adaptive research does is precisely to try to find the best fit according to each “context”. In Brazil, the system is applied to a broad variety of crops, from soybean to trees, from beans to pasture; it is found from cold regions in the Brazilian South to hot and humid Amazonic conditions; from large-scale, mechanized, input-intensive industrial agriculture to small agro-ecologic family farms. Moreover, its adaptive potential goes beyond the domain of “nature” proper, including “social” factors in terms for instance of what crops will be chosen , what outcome will be emphasized , or what kind of productive structure is available locally . Thus, adaptation to each production region, and ideally to each production unit, is an inherent feature of the technique itself: research is a continuous effort, even after technology transfer to farmers has been accomplished. It became essential, therefore, to enroll the African researchers into the project’s effort not just formally. In the world of development, participation in projects in itself is not so much the problem; as especially actor-centered approaches have shown, local actors have their own interests in engaging with foreign partners, and will do it even if for only as long as projects last . In the C-4 Project, the effort was, rather, to nourish a commitment with a longer term research enterprise – in other words, to achieve robustness beyond its organizational scope as described in the first section. In this sense, the C-4 researchers were encouraged to gradually take the reins of technical decision-making in the adaptive research process. Brazilian front liners recognized this as a slow and to some extent open-ended process: “What we’re doing here is sowing a seed. The benefits will be not for these children you see, but for their children and grandchildren”, the project coordinator would tell me every once in a while. Note that he did not say “the benefits, if there are any” – despite all the difficulties envisaged in adaptation and especially transfer to farmers, there was a confidence, which the African agronomists tended to share, that the technology was good, and that one day it could bring concrete benefits to West African peasant farmers. At this stage, however, no one could predict the exact form – or most likely, forms – that no-till and its accompanying systemic components would take in their new environment. As one of the Embrapa researchers put it, referring to the difficulties involving soil cover, “who knows, maybe in West Africa no-till will end up with only two pillars”.

As De Laet and Mol’s bush pump, no-till was regarded as fluid enough to remain functional even if one of its three legs went missing as it made its way across the Southern Atlantic. But while the project did take into account the potential constraints involved in transferring the Brazilian version of no-till to West African peasant farmers – especially the problem of cattle, land tenure and agricultural inputs –, not all were incorporated into the experimental work . Many, or perhaps most, of these ended up being bracketed out so that the Embrapa cooperantes would first focus on making sure that their partners in the local institutes acquire robust scientific mastery over the technique itself. The African front liners dealing most immediately with no-till, usually agronomists by training, had at least basic knowledge about its underlying logic, and local versions of no-till could be found in some patches of rural areas for instance in Burkina Faso.But these were quite limited in number and scope, and few of the local agronomists had received systematic training or done specialized research on the system previously to the project. An important exception was the project’s head agronomist in Mali, who worked for a few years on no-till as part of a project with the French CIRAD210 and wrote his PhD dissertation based on that experience. But even the agronomists from the other institutes seemed to have developed a particular interest in the technique, and along with it, in the project itself. In fact, my impression was that within this project, agronomists were more valued and enjoyed a leading role that they may not normally have in their institutes, at least when compared to breeders, weed scientists, entomologists and other researchers whose work tend to relate more closely to the development of commercial products such as improved seeds and agrochemicals. On the other hand , the kind of research work agronomists did often brought them closer to farmers and the latter’s own ways of taking care of the crops and the land. In the project’s two other technical components, the adaptation process unfolded at a slower pace.

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.

Elsewhere I have suggested how both Freyre’s original oeuvre and its subsequent popularization have been tied to postcolonial concerns stemming from Brazil’s historical experience of double colonization . Here I will retrace how the interest in culture Freyre bequeathed to Brazilian diplomacy has been shaped by a similarly multi-layered postcolonial topography, directed both inwards and outwards to the Brazilian nation-state.After reading Black Skin, White Masks, Freyre’s reference to the Brazilian mestizo sailors as “caricatures of men” has retrospectively stricken me as a somewhat Fanonian moment. But the situation here is different: it is not about seeing oneself being seen by a other, as tragically happened with Fanon in the train . This was a member of Brazil’s white elite looking at exemplars of the mixed-race Brazilian populace and seeing them as they would have been seen by a other – this time not a French child but an “American traveler”. Freyre’s gaze at the mestizo seamen is that of internal colonialism; but this inferiorizing gaze is itself profoundly shaped by another relation of subalternity, vis-à-vis a hegemonic other. In this sort of two-directional double consciousness – to use Du Bois’s term –, the Creole elite intellectual’s subjectivity is torn between these two relations, one where he is the master and the other where he is the slave, and where both counterparts are at once other and self to him. In these recollections,growing bags a disheartened young Freyre would have been comforted had somebody convinced him that those men’s “mongrel aspect” stemmed less from biology than from an unfavorable environment that made them “sick”.

A few years later, Freyre would – according to Pallares-Burke , in retrospect – identify that somebody with no one other than Franz Boas, the founding father of American culturalist anthropology. In a context of “intense preoccupation” with “Brazil’s destiny”, Boas’s defense of culture as an analytical alternative to race came in handy as a solution for the “age-old question” of miscegenation faced by Freyre and “others of his generation”. At that moment in Brazil, race-based thinking was not only prevalent among many scientists and intellectuals, but sustained a whitening ideology that proposed the augmentation of the European component of the Brazilian population through immigration as a way out of the degeneration straitjacket imposed by miscegenation . The Master and the Slaves’ tour-de-force therefore consisted precisely in turning what was up to then regarded as a hindrance to the flourishing of “Brazilian civilization” into a unique positive asset for the country’s nation-building at a moment when this was in high demand.The replacement of an analytics of race with one of culture allowed not only for discounting biological explanations according to which the solution to the problem of miscegenation would be a dubious whitening process,but for a shift in self-consciousness whereby Brazil came to see itself as more “civilized” than racially segregated nations like the United States. Even though Freyre’s story is itself more complex, what came down in history as Brazil’s nation-building commonsense was the notion of the Brazilian Volksgeist as a harmonious mixture of the three races, with the African component occupying center stage side-by-side the Portuguese.In the miscegenation of races prompted by the Portuguese’s supposedly inherent tendency to mix with tropical peoples would lay Brazil’s national character, its unique contribution to the Herderian garden of the common good – one could hypothesize, another echo of the Romantic vein Freyre shared with the Boasian school. As the dimension of culture was brought to the foreground, its underbelly – race – became eclipsed without however disappearing: it became a spectral presence in Brazil’s dealings with Africa and African-Brazilians.

As I have argued , Freyre’s postcolonial thrust was therefore not anticolonial strictly speaking, but was a response to a context of “double colonization” where the cultural legacy of the former Portuguese metropolis became not only a sort of “friendly colonialism”, but itself an element of subaltern affirmation vis-à-vis a new hegemony, that of Western Europe . But The Masters and the Slaves was also predicated on a sort of internal postcolonial thrust whereby Freyre tried to simultaneously rescue the lost prestige of his own subaltern region, the Brazilian Northeast, by elevating the status of its culture from regional to national. Colonial sugar estates in the Northeastern coast are, after all, the stage on which the foundational myth of Brazilian nationhood is played in Freyre’s masterpiece. By the time he was writing it, this region had long lost the political and economic weight it held during colonial times to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the Southeast. From the standpoint of this new domestic hegemony, the Northeast came to be seen in terms of the same dichotomies through which Brazil saw itself in relation to Western normativity – traditional/modern, backwards/progressive, rural/urban . Finally, a couple of decades later, Freyre’s ideas folded back into Portugal’s own colonial imaginary: while his 1933 classic focused on the cultural formation of the Brazilian nation, from the 1950’s onwards similar claims were extrapolated to the second wave of Portuguese colonization, in Africa and Asia . Lustropicalismo thus became a transnational alternative to Western European normativity based on “a distinct mode of ‘assimilation’ engendered by the Portuguese colonial presence in the tropics based on the three pillars of miscegenation, cultural fusion and absence of racial prejudices” . Just as the racial harmony ideology appealingly catered to nationalist appetites in Brazil, Lusotropicality was eagerly taken up by the ideological apparatus of the Estado Novo regime to shore up its colonial project against mounting independence struggles in Africa and international pressure by, among others, the United States, the United Nations, and the nascent non-aligned movement.

Many Brazilians joined Portugal’s ranks in this ideological struggle, not the least Gilberto Freyre himself, who “found a patron in the Portuguese government, and seized upon what he saw in the Portuguese African colonies as a present-day laboratory demonstrating the processes of cultural and racial mixture that he described in colonial Brazil” . Freyre’s vulgarized after-life in Brazil and in Portugal unfolded largely through channels like diplomacy, the educational system, and dimensions of popular culture such as music or soccer . As is often the case, in this process of popularization the richness of Freyre’s genius was reduced to a simplistic, usable version. As such, it was able to circulate farther and amalgamate into later waves of nation-building and international projection efforts in Brazil and elsewhere, reaching up to present South-South cooperation activities. Along this way, as we saw, contradictions inevitably sprang up between such imaginations about Africa and Brazilians’ concrete engagements with Africans. The way Brazilians’ views on Africa have been infused by Freyre’s ideas is highly suggestive of parallels with Edward Said’s Orientalism. In this, I am particularly inspired by Said’s claim that when the West looks at the East as its other,nursery grow bag it sees it less in its coeval actuality than in terms of imaginations that have more to say about the seers than those who are being seen – that respond “more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object” . Thus, as in Orientalism, in Brazil’s official discourse on Africa the latter does not always figure as an actual, coeval, heterogeneous continent; much too frequently, it is an imagined Africa, homogeneous and frozen in time somewhere between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries – when the last wave of African slaves arrived in Brazil. But differently from Said’s original notion, this imagination stems not from the imperial impetus of Western powers, but from ideologies supporting the construction of Brazil as a nation, and more specifically, the place of Africans in it. Here, the African appears less as an ambivalent other or as a clearly distinct part of the self than as part of a hybrid self that is distinguishable through dimensions like arts, music, bodily techniques, food, language – in one word, culture. Here I will refer to this modulation of Orientalist discourse as nation-building Orientalism. Nation-building has been a more commonly deployed term to describe the historical process that I am otherwise referring to here, following subaltern studies and Latin American postcolonial scholars, as internal colonialism . This terminological option conveys more clearly what is for me the key contrast vis-à-vis Said’s account of Orientalism: the empire-building character of British, French and U.S. discourse on the Orient. Other than that, the discursive mechanics follows similar lines, and the nation-building version of Orientalism may be even thought of as a historical outgrowth of it. Said himself had suggested as much when he envisaged the potential of this kind of discourse to travel beyond hegemonic centers and be appropriated by the subaltern: in Orientalism, he had wished to call the attention of “formerly colonized peoples” to “the dangers and temptations of employing this structure [Orientalism] upon themselves or upon others” .

This is precisely what Brazil and other post-colonial nation-states have done, in relation to subaltern groups such as Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples . But as our discussion of Freyre has shown, the addressee of nation-building discourse is not limited to those who are being internally colonized. This inward coloniality implicates an outward one, directed to hegemonic centers in relation to which post-colonial nations see themselves as subaltern, and from which they seek recognition. To become a donor is, as I have suggested in Chapter 1, one of the ways in which this pursuit of recognition has been currently carried out by Brazilian diplomats.Much of the mismatches and contradictions pointed out in this chapter, both historically and contemporarily, have to do with the notion of culture implicit in Brazil’s nation-building Orientalism. The culture Africans are assumed to share with Brazilians has an essence, is bounded, and has changed very little throughout the centuries; it has an ontological quality that is conducted through specific material and ideational channels , being therefore separable from other domains like politics, the economy, and so forth. Although anthropologists have helped create it, this is a notion of culture that most of them have abandoned by now. Norbert Elias’s classic historical discussion of the emergence of the German Kultur in opposition to the French and English civilization or civilisation had already pointed to how culture has always been, from its modern beginnings, fundamentally political: a productive notion in certain historical formations attending to situated political stakes; in short, a cultural politics. The foregrounding of presumed affinities in the domain of culture prevalent in Brazil’s views on Africa may seem to fall in line with academic arguments stressing the centrality of nontextual forms of “embodied subjectivity” in Africa’s trans-Atlantic diaspora, in prominent works such as Gilroy’s Black Atlantic .But from the point of view of this dissertation, what it indicates most forcefully is the peripheralization of both regions during the rise to hegemony of the West, and its dominance in other dimensions such as economy, political institutions, and knowledge. Thus, what would be the proper terrain for relations across the Southern Atlantic was eventually left to what is understood, according to Western modernity’s normativity, to belong to the domain of culture . This is also linked to the fact that, to a large extent, it is in this dimension that African-Brazilians have most often excelled in Brazil. Both fieldwork and the historical literature show that Brazilian diplomats, government officials, businessmen, or technical professionals were and are mostly fair-skinned; most black Brazilians involved in cooperation with Africa, on the other hand, have been “cultural” agents such as athletes, musicians, or actors. In other words, internal coloniality has largely reproduced its external counterpart, which relegated Africa itself to the most peripheral end of the world system . One of my suggestions therefore is that the insistence in bringing culture to the fore of Brazil-Africa relations is an outwards projection of an unresolved internal problem of how to deal with Brazil’s domestic race relations – what I wished to indicate here through the notion of nation-building Orientalism. In this sense, the problem is not that questions of race and culture have been misplaced or misconceived in Brazil’s diplomatic discourse on Africa; it is, rather, that these should not have been there at all, at least not at forefront position they have occupied throughout the decades. In this sense, assertions that domestic race-based movements would be an “internal arm” of Brazil’s Africa policy , or that quilombola communities and other African-Brazilian groups should mediate South-South cooperation efforts , may make little practical sense, especially in technical fields like agriculture.

Conversely, early season water deficits are typically avoided due to the risk of poor fruit set , and irrigation is often ramped up at the end of the growing season to prevent root damage due to low soil moisture at dormancy in some regions . Based on our observations, the North Coast vineyards effectively use irrigation to regulate water supplies, yet in the vineyards over the Lodi and Madera regions irrigation closely satisfies atmospheric water demands. Different viticultural strategies across vineyards are also noticed by the trajectories observed in LAI . Unstressed water conditions led to significantly larger canopies in the Central Valley vineyards, which play as feedback in terms of water demands. Thus, larger canopies have a greater transpiration potential, which is well satisfied based on our observations. Different production goals in terms of yield and fruit quality underline the magnitude of targeted irrigation inputs across California’s viticultural regions. While irrigation management in viticulture aims to balance maximizing yield and achieving high-quality fruit, different regions are subject to different fruit quality expectations. Such expectations are related to reputation and the overall expected fruit quality potential recognized as terroir .In the Madera region, a focus on high yield is more prevalent since the area does not seem to have a special recognition for wine production. The Lodi area has some recognition as an emerging wine region,nursery pots therefore production goals are not as biased towards yield or quality as in the former regions. Vine water use throughout the season is largely supported by irrigation. ETa fluxes represent vine water use across different viticultural regions and illustrate the use of irrigation management as a tool to accomplish distinct production goals within a viticultural production program.

For instance, growing season water use in the North Coast is about half in comparison to vineyards in the Madera region, and so it is the expected resulting yield.Based on our results, for any given meteorological condition, we would expect a wide range of ETa depending on the different aspects of viticultural management. Therefore, further developing tools that can accurately estimate plant water use and stress has been addressed as a key aspect of further advancing ET modeling methods and irrigation tools . As vineyards’ water demands highly depend on production goals and viticultural management, it seems unlikely that any derivation of ETc or ETo could provide enough information to effectively fine-tune irrigation while controlling stress levels. A comparison of daily ETo and ETa for vineyards in the three viticultural areas analyzed in this study shows that there is not a reliable relationship between these two variables across sites and years . When assuming a linear response between ETo and ETa is not possible to distinguish a consistent pattern in the regression coefficients underlying these relationships. The intercept range is greater than 5 mm day−1 while the slopes could lead to ETa estimates of near half to twice ETo. Independent of a given viticultural production goal, our results highlight the need for accurate estimates of ETa. Estimates of ETa in combination with ETo can provide a clear depiction of the amount of water demanded by a vineyard in comparison to a reference well-irrigated crop. Then, irrigation management could aim at a consistent ratio of these two variables that would satisfy plant water demands and regulate stress when needed. For the studied sites within the GRAPEX project, water managers in the North Coast vineyards might have more water available than their counterparts in the Central Valley; they routinely require accurate ETa information to regulate vine water stress to optimize the relationship between fruit quality and yield. On the other hand, when yield is a priority, such as in many vineyards across California’s Central Valley, water demands can be much higher. In these cases, optimizing irrigation to satisfy atmospheric demands throughout an entire growing season becomes more relevant, especially during drought years.

A comparison of daily ETa, ETc, ET0, and vine water demands following RDI strategies shows that irrigation management can lead to a wide range of vine water use . Our results also show that in all study sites, ETa tracks closely or is usually above ETc, indicating that limited stress conditions are prescribed across these vineyards. Consequently, important water-saving opportunities could be possible if RDI strategies were effectively implemented. Considering the time–frequency and latency resulting from satellite remote sensing ETa estimates, ground-based sensors can offer a unique complement to timely inform irrigation decisions within an RDI program. Unfortunately, there is limited availability of commercial products able to measure ETa, and further advancing these technologies might be a critical component to develop as part of irrigation management tool kits. Further studies within the GRAPEX project will integrate the relationship between water use and yield as well as fruit and wine quality for these vineyards. Those studies will aim to advance the understanding of how much water is needed to achieve a given production goal, and also explore potential water-saving opportunities while not compromising yield and quality objectives.This is the case of Embrapa, to which we now turn.Embrapa is currently Brazil’s chief provider of technical cooperation in agriculture to Africa and elsewhere, and even of Brazilian South-South cooperation at large. It is a publiclyowned national research institute, created during Brazil’s military rule in the early 1970’s as part of a broader governmental effort to enhance domestic food supply and open up new agricultural frontiers in the country’s hinterlands. This historical background is itself key to understand Embrapa’s cooperation, and it will be discussed in Chapter 3. According to its own self-account, Embrapa engages in two main types of international cooperation: scientific cooperation with Northern research institutions and other emerging economies in the global South; and “technology transfer to developing countries”, or SouthSouth cooperation. The first type follows the so-called Labex model, where Embrapa researchers spend time doing cutting-edge research in the facilities of partner institutions abroad, in the United States, France, England, and more recently South Korea and China.

The second type involves transferring technologies and building capacity in countries considered as being ata lower level of development than Brazil. The Secretariat of International Relations , a centralized units linked to Embrapa’s Presidency located at the institute’s headquarters in Brasília, is in charge of articulating and managing these activities, and many of Embrapa’s decentralized research units also have their own international relations personnel. When I did fieldwork, Embrapa offered four modalities of technical cooperation to African countries. The first were small-scale, short-term projects normally involving small teams of researchers from both sides . Embrapa researchers would eventually engage in this kind of cooperation even before the recent South-South cooperation wave. It typically involves study visits, technical training, and occasional transfer of small pieces of equipment and materials, and may also involve the production of new knowledge. I have followed up one such projects, with Ghana’s Center for Scientific and Industrial Research ,plastic planters which was not carried up to its conclusion. These smaller projects are supposed to be gradually phased-out in favor of more robust forms of engagement,the so-called structuring projects – this is a second modality, which will be described later on in this dissertation. A third modality of cooperation consisted in capacity-building trainings offered to trainees from Africa and elsewhere in a new center built for that purpose at Embrapa’s headquarters in Brasília, named Strategic Studies and Training . I participated in the first two trainings the center offered to Africans, in October 2010 and April 2011 . CECAT was literally built from scratch within a few months as part of the “PAC-Embrapa,” a generous supplement to the institute’s budget provided by Lula’s administration. Its small but hard-working team was recruited from other Embrapa units or hired anew, and a learning process was taking place as they accumulated experience with each new training cycle .Finally, there was the Africa-Brazil Agricultural Innovation Marketplace, a triangulation between Embrapa, the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa , and several Northern agencies. This virtual platform provided relatively small research grants for bilateral teams made up of researchers from Embrapa and partner research institutes in Africa.Its format seems to be the closest to established models in the international development community, notably the World Bank’s Development Marketplace. This is certainly due to the involvement of one major donor and major multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development , the FAO and the Inter-American Development Bank. I attended the forum of the first round of applications held in Brasília in October 2010, the only time when all 125 applicants gathered face-to-face. Due to the virtual and widely scattered nature of this platform, the Marketplace remained a secondary field site. To complement the ethnographic effort – and access to field sites was always negotiated ad hoc with the various actors, sometimes with success, sometimes not –, I conducted semistructured interviews with African and Brazilian participants in all these four modalities, as well as with ABC personnel working with Embrapa. Excluding the CECAT and Marketplace participants, to whom I had access mostly through informal conversations during the cooperation activities or after them through the internet, the remaining poll of more permanent actors in my research scope was no larger than twenty people.

While this reflects the circumscribed nature of Brazilian cooperation teams even in its largest initiatives, it has posed some challenges to writing and anonymizing research subjects. My narrative strategy is therefore a mixed one, combining omission of names and institutional or national affiliations, occasionally changing gender, expertise or other personal information, and, in some cases, slightly fictionalizing the narrative or making partial claims based on pieces of information that I assessed could be safely made available to other field interlocutors or the public at large. Here I will draw on my experience with all four modalities of cooperation, but the focus will be on the CECAT trainings and on a structuring project with four West African countries, the Cotton-4.In her ethnographic work on development as the “will to improve”, Tania Li described the aid apparatus in terms of a double process: what she called problematization and rendering technical . As was suggested earlier in this chapter, Brazilian South-South cooperation lacks a robust bureaucratic apparatus comparable to those of Northern agencies; neither does it have effectively centralized, standardized, across-the-board protocols for the design and execution of projects. Cabral and Shankland have recently characterized this as a “policy of no policy”. But as remarked earlier, here I am avoiding looking at it from a perspective of lack; indeed, more prominent during fieldwork were the ways in which what would be seen, from the perspective of “mature” development agencies, as lack may be turned into a positive asset for South-South cooperation. As both the historical and the organizational accounts above suggest, to look empirically at South-South cooperation in its own terms does not yield a coherent, alternative model to Northern development aid. It evinces, rather, a set of emerging interfaces loosely assembled around key nodes at the three organizational levels outlined here: principles, policy, and front line practice. Different from development aid as described by the literature, relations between these levels are not over-determined by a bureaucratized path that continuously recycles the messiness of practice back into the technicalities of policy; most often, these paths are loose, heterogeneous and intermittent. Principles are only partly translated into policy, and their deployment in front line practice has to do less with policy prescriptions than with the practical conditions under which cooperation is implemented. This section will bring some examples of the forms such relations may take, and suggest some of its differential effects vis-à-vis Northern aid. In their claims about South-South cooperation’s comparative advantages over Northern aid, which always implies a somewhat caricatured picture of it,emerging donors often argue that it would be better suited to other countries in the global South not only because of the supposedly similar experiences shared by provider and recipient, but because it would be tailored to each particular case. Indeed, due to its organizational architecture, Brazilian South-South cooperation is necessarily heterogeneous. Each initiative is to some extent tailored, because its technical content and implementation process are not over-codified by ABC’s policy and management apparatus, but are the task of the multiple institutions operating at the front line.

The first official account of Brazil’s South-South cooperation, published in 2010 by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency and the Institute for Economic and Applied Research , defines technical cooperation in terms of federal resources spent on “training and capacity-building activities, related administrative costs, and expenses with various materials and equipment” .Behind the apparent straightforwardness of the phrase South-South technical cooperation lies a sea of ambiguities and controversies for each term, not all of which will be discussed here.Among emerging donors, the preference for terms like cooperation or partnership over development or aid is a strategic marker of the claims to difference discussed above . But at least in Brazil, cooperação became the preferred word for what is better known in the North as development or développement because desenvolvimento is most promptly associated with a national endeavor. Sometimes, cooperação para o desenvolvimento is a term of choice that merges the two ideas. For aid, there is the Portuguese term ajuda, but in the field I never heard this term designating the cooperation provided by Brazil. In contrast with Africa, then, where development most often refers to a blurred interface between national states and foreign agencies , the notion of development in Brazil has been more thoroughly “nationalized”. The Green Revolution is a good example of how the Brazilian actors “nationalized” a model of agricultural development originally crafted at the level of the international development system. A similar process is taking place today in the construction of Brazil’s South-South cooperation apparatus, which has involved on the one hand borrowing models and procedures from the international development community , black flower buckets and on the other drawing on the sector-specific work Brazilian institutions have carried out domestically.

The first level is that of foreign policy, from where demands for stepping up South-South cooperation efforts have come, and where the general principles for delivering it are crafted as official discourse. The core institution here is Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Relations, commonly known by the name of its headquarters in Brasília, the Itamaraty Palace. Individual actors include diplomats and officials linked to diplomacy or other parts of the federal government. The second, intermediary level is that of policy and management, concentrated in a small cooperation bureaucracy centralized in the Brazilian Cooperation Agency , itself institutionally submitted to the Ministry of Foreign Relations. The third level is that of implementation, or front line practice, where one finds a wide range of institutions in charge of carrying out projects and other cooperation initiatives on African or Brazilian grounds. This dissertation will focus on the work of one such institutions, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation – like the ABC, also submitted to a federal ministry, that of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply. As the diagram seeks to show, Brazil’s South-South cooperation presents a singular kind of architecture where the mid-level of managerial policy is less prominent than the other two.In Northern development aid, on the other hand, even if in practice projects follow less “high modern” grand planning designs than “are pulled together from an existing repertoire, a matter of habit, accretion, and bricolage” , the level of policy is generally regardedas over-determining both front line practice and principles. It is in this sense, for instance, that Li and others will claim that the development apparatus depoliticizes relations by rendering technical historically constituted power asymmetries at the scale of both local politics and global political economy. On the other hand, after half-century of Western development aid, its principles have been largely rationalized into technical policy guidelines. Even a controversial mechanism such as aid conditionalities has been justified based on technical claims : while many recipients of aid see it as a humiliating assault on their sovereignty, donors brand it as an evidence-based tool for promoting good governance and ownership among them.

Finally, besides bureaucratic organization, significant differences are to be found in the other arm of the transnational development apparatus :the private industry of NGOs, academics, think-tanks, consultants and other development workers in charge of drafting, delivering and assessing projects, whose pipeline is fed by professionals trained in specialized development studies programs. Although it does exist at a small scale in Brazil and seems to be growing, this industry is not significant in the delivery of official technical cooperation. Different from Northern aid and similar to other emerging donors , in the provision of Brazilian cooperation there has been a prevalence of state institutions at all organizational levels, from principles and policy to implementation. Let us turn to the ones within the scope of my fieldwork.The fact that Brazilian cooperation is essentially foreign policy-driven means that, by and large, the demand for enhancing technical cooperation with African countries and others in the global South has come from Itamaraty.The institutions in charge of project implementation are however many – according to the 2010 IPEA/ABC Report, they can be counted by the dozens, and the vast majority are state institutions .The system is therefore highly decentralized at the implementation level, and the Brazilian Cooperation Agency is supposed to provide a core policy and managerial node to this otherwise widely dispersed network. The ABC is Embrapa’s main institutional partner in most if not all its technical cooperation activities in the global South; indeed, its agents were a continual presence within my ethnographic scope. The Brazilian Cooperation Agency came into being in the mid-eighties as a rearrangement of preexisting federal bodies involved in managing development aid received by Brazil. Since the recent spike in South-South cooperation, it has increasingly accumulated the function of coordinating of the full cycle of technical cooperation that is both received and provided. The agency is supposed to receive and negotiate demands for cooperation coming from countries in Africa and elsewhere, and channel Itamaraty’s funds for implementing them. The ABC is not a full-fledged, autonomous agency like the ones providing Northern aid; like many of their counterparts in the global South , it is a department and operational arm of the Ministry of Foreign Relations. High-level strategic planning is not, according to a recent report , part of the agency’s purview. The life of the ABC changed considerably during the Lula administration , when demands for South-South cooperation skyrocketed. The agency’s budget tripled accordingly, from a meager 19 million in 2006 to 52 million reais in 2010.Although a historic record high, this is almost negligible compared to the budgets of Northern agencies like USAID, which are counted by the billions. One of the ABC’s claims is that every dollar allocated to projects can be further multiplied if indirect costs are factored in. The most significant of these are salaries paid to front line staff.Since state institutions implement the bulk of technical cooperation, and it involves mostly capacity-building with only limited transfer of materials and equipment,french flower bucket most of this kind of expense would have already been covered by the Brazilian state. This is the case of Embrapa, whose staff includes highly qualified personnel, often research scientists holding PhDs and other advanced degrees.Staff has increased in the last few years along with the agency’s budget, albeit not at the same rate.But since it is not an autonomous agency, none of its personnel in fact “belongs” to it; they come, rather, from two main sources: Itamaraty and UNDP. The former’s appointees are career diplomats, chancellery officials or assistants, whom, in my experience, tended to occupy higher rank positions. Most of the agency’s staff was hired through UNDP as project consultants to carry out functions of project management, or operational tasks like translation. A practical effect of this configuration is that the ABC has exceptionally high staff turnover.Itamaraty appointees may be – and indeed, eventually are – relocated elsewhere, to diplomatic representations and embassies abroad.

And most UNDP employees are hired on short-term contracts, normally of one year with limited renewal possibilities. The rest of the staff – cargos de comissão appointed by the Agency’s Director, himself a diplomat – usually lasts only as long as the latter’s management cycle. It is at this level that strategic functions such as planning and coordination tend to be concentrated . For carrying out its mandate, the Brazilian Cooperation Agency has to rely heavily on other organizations: national institutions like Embrapa at the implementation level, but also international agencies at the level of policy and management. As of the writing of this dissertation, there was no specific legislation regulating the provision of cooperation by Brazilian institutions. In practice, this means that those implementing projects in Africa and elsewhere are not legally allowed to perform basic tasks such as buying and contracting abroad for the benefit of non-Brazilian institutions and citizens . A chief way by which the ABC has been getting around this is by partnering up with the UNDP or other international organization, which then acts as the implementing agency.Moreover, different from many Northern agencies and like most other emerging donors , the ABC does not maintain permanent offices abroad. Instead, the agency makes ample use of UNDP’s extensive worldwide network, present in almost every country, in order to procure goods and services as well as hire staff to work in Brazil’s projects. While some have remarked that this partnership allows to overcome “legal and bureaucratic obstacles [facing] Brazilian government agencies working overseas” , fieldwork indicated that, from the perspective of those working at the front line of projects, this may appear as itself an obstacle to practical engagements . Besides the red tape implied in this scheme – resources have to flow from the ABC to the UNDP office in Brazil, and then to UNDP’s counterpart in the recipient country before it gets to project front liners –, there are supplemental financial costs, as the United Nation’s agency charges a non-negligible fee for performing such bureaucratic mediation.The UNDP has been also providing support to the ABC for mapping and strengthening a network of South-South cooperation stakeholders, including a pool of volunteers and specialists as well as staff of the Brazilian embassies abroad.This and other emerging networks make up a nascent cooperation industry in Brazil formed by professional experts in managing and delivering cooperation.As already remarked, the implementation of official cooperation has been mostly a job for staff from national state institutions, rather than consultants and NGO workers trained in development studies and related academic fields, and experienced in the international development industry. Today, thus, Brazilian cooperation front liners’ professional affiliation and commitment lie not in the development industry but in their home institutions; for the most part, they do not rely on the provision of cooperation neither for a living nor for their career advancement. This is not a trivial fact in light of the literature’s claims about international development as a self-referential, inertial organizational apparatus. At a micro scale of cooperation practice, however, there seems to be no fixed correlation: while the work in South-South projects may bring personal or professional benefits to particular individuals, in other instances the opposite might as well be the case, like in the not uncommon situation when participation in a project implies removing individuals from their regular work activities back in Brazil. Not all technical personnel is willing to commit to cooperation projects abroad, and this acceptance seems to be always the outcome of situated negotiations between individuals and their home institutions. Moreover, if the Brazilian Cooperation Agency is taken as an organizational equivalent to, say, USAID or the World Bank, it would suggest the misleading conclusion that Brazil’s cooperation is fragile in all aspects of the project cycle, from strategy and design to execution and evaluation. Indeed, according to Mawdsley , with the exception of the main Arab donors, emerging donors’ cooperation institutions tend to be bureaucratically feeble: most Southern counterparts to the ABC also have “insufficient numbers of trained personnel”, are “constrained by path dependency”, and “lack power relative to other parts of government”. But if we look from a different scale, the relative institutional flimsiness of the ABC is “compensated” by the preponderance, upstream, of Itamaraty as a policy guide, and, downstream, of implementing institutions like Embrapa. This is salient especially in the case of the latter, which enjoys an institutional robustness and national prestige that the ABC can hardly dream of ever matching.Moreover, some implementing institutions are building up their own expertise for managing their South-South activities, including by establishing or strengthening of international relations units whose operational functions may even overlap with those of the ABC.

In contrast, Watsonville Slough had its highest SRP concentrations from fall through spring, with concentrations declining to an annual low point in mid summer . High SRP concentrations in the winter rainy season may be associated with increased surface runoff from agricultural fields located along the slough. Tile drains may also facilitate subsurface loses of phosphorus . In Carneros Creek, which is dry from approximately May until December each year, a third seasonal pattern emerged . SRP concentrations were moderately elevated at both upstream and downstream sites following the first winter rains, which suggests that soil phosphorus accumulates over the summer months and is flushed into the creek with the first rains. At Dunbarton Road where there is little cultivation upstream, sources may include natural decomposition in grasslands, cattle grazing, and rural residential land use; at downstream sites sources also include agricultural land use. At San Miguel Canyon Road, the downstream location, SRP concentrations increased again in the late winter and spring of 2002 and 2003, reaching very high levels that frequently exceeded 1 mg/L. Nutrient concentrations were highly erratic in 2002 and 2003, and subsequently declined in 2004, suggesting that nutrients originated from a point-source that has ceased to discharge. No seasonal concentration trends were observed in the upstream tributaries of the Pajaro River . At these locations SRP concentrations remained low throughout the year. We calculated the SRP load discharged by each tributary ,procona buckets and found loads varied seasonally corresponding with discharge . The SRP load was greatest at Chittenden during January and February, when discharge was also greatest. San Juan Creek was not sampled during this period, but likely accounts for a significant portion of the unaccounted load because it has elevated SRP concentrations and year round flow. In the Pajaro River, there is a strong seasonal trend in SRP concentrations .

Concentrations decline after the rainy season ends. Because SRP concentrations remain relatively high in the winter, rainfall probably transports SRP to surface waters. Furthermore, the loss of SRP from Santa Clara/San Benito Counties is highest during these rainfall periods . Because concentrations and export of SRP in the Pajaro River are rainfall dependent, it is difficult to determine long-term trends independent of recent rainfall patterns.Elevated phosphorus concentrations can cause excessive algal growth in waterways, and preventing excessive growth is the primary reason phosphorus concentrations are regulated. Algal biomass in the water column can be determined from the concentration of chlorophyll a, which indicates the degree of excessive algal growth. We monitored chlorophyll a concentrations at several sites in the Pajaro River watershed on a biweekly basis and compared these concentrations to phosphorus. The lack of a direct correlation between chlorophyll a and phosphorus levels indicates that P availability is only one of the factors controlling algal growth. Canopy cover and turbidity , algae-eating organisms , substrates that allow different types of algae to attach, and algae sources also play a role in algal growth and chlorophyll a concentrations. Furthermore, additions of nitrogen can stimulate algal growth in streams and rivers, which challenges the commonly held belief that phosphorus is the nutrient that controls the growth of algae in freshwater ecosystems. Our research group from the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems has begun efforts to assess the growth patterns of algae in order to determine how elevated phosphorus and nitrogen levels influence these patterns. Under state legislation known as the Agricultural Discharge Waiver that took effect in January 2005, farmers are required to develop farm water quality plans to protect surface waters along the Central Coast. One goal of our research is to inform growers of current water quality conditions in waterways adjacent to their land so that they can take steps to reduce their impacts on waterways while continuing to farm profitably. Because phosphorus is transported to waterways in storm and irrigation runoff, reducing soil erosion and surface runoff is an important step in reducing phosphorus losses from the farm .

Subsurface flow is also an important mechanism of phosphorus losses from the farm . Growers can address these losses by matching P demand in plants with fertility management, keeping P concentrations in soils at agronomically responsive levels , and managing irrigation to minimize or eliminate runoff. It is important to note that many growers on the Central Coast and throughout the state have already initiated practices to reduce the loss of phosphorus from their farms. The University of California has several research projects in progress to document the impacts of changes in farm management, and a number of government agencies and NGOs are working with growers to improve water quality .Despite growers’ efforts, the target level of 0.12mg/L or lower for ortho-P set by the RWQCB may be difficult to attain in the lower Pajaro River and Elkhorn Slough watersheds, where natural sources of phosphorus may be high, and tile drainage systems facilitate losses of phosphorus to surface waters. Even with changes in agricultural practices, the ambient water quality improvements may not be detected for several years, which makes enforcing the water quality regulations difficult on the short-term. Thus, long-term monitoring programs are important to determine the success of changing management practices.Nitrate contamination of freshwater resources from agricultural regions is an environmental and human health concern worldwide . In agriculturally intensive regions, it is imperative to understand how management practices can enhance or mitigate the effect of nitrogen loading to freshwater systems. In California, managed aquifer recharge on agricultural lands is a proposed management strategy to counterbalance unsustainable groundwater pumping practices. Agricultural managed aquifer recharge is an approach in which legally and hydrologically available surface water flows are captured and used to intentionally flood croplands with the purpose of recharging underlying aquifers . AgMAR represents a shift away from the normal hydrologic regime wherein high efficiency irrigation application occurs mainly during the growing season. In contrast, AgMAR involves applying large amounts of water over a short period during the winter months. This change in winter application rates has the potential to affect the redox status of the unsaturated zone of agricultural regions with implications for nitrogen fate and transport to freshwater resources.

Most modeling studies targeting agricultural N contamination of groundwater are limited to the root zone; these studies assume that once NO3 – has leached below the root zone, it behaves as a conservative tracer until it reaches the underlying groundwater or, these studies employ first order decay coefficients to simplify N cycling reactions . However, recent laboratory and field-based investigations in agricultural systems with deep unsaturated zones have shown the potential for N cycling, in particular denitrification, well below the root zone . For example, Haijing et al. found denitrifying enzyme activity as deep as 12 metersin an agriculturally intensive region in China. Lind and Eiland reported N2O production in sediments taken from 20 meter deep cores. Other studies have reported the capability of deep vadose zone sediments to denitrify in anerobic incubations with or without the addition of organic carbon substrates . Moreover,procona florida container in agricultural settings, especially in alluvial basins such as in California with a history of agriculture, large amounts of legacy NO3 – has built up over years from fertilizer use inefficiencies and exists within the deep subsurface . It is not yet clear how this legacy nitrogen may respond to changing hydrologic regimes and variations in AgMAR practices, and more importantly, if flooding agricultural sites is enhancing nitrate transport to the groundwater or attenuating it by supporting in situ denitrification. Denitrification rates in the subsurface have been reported to vary as a function of carbon and oxygen concentrations, as well as other environmental factors . While total soil organic carbon typically declines with depth , dissolved organic carbon can be readily transported by water lost from the root zone to deeper layers and can therefore be available to act as an electron donor for denitrification . Oxygen concentration in the vadose zone is maintained by advective and diffusive transport, while oxygen consumption occurs via microbial metabolic demand and/or abiotic chemical reactions . The effects of drying and wetting cycles on oxygen concentrations in the deep subsurface are not well documented. However, in 1 meter column experiments, there is some evidence that O2 consumption proceeds rapidly as saturation increases and rebounds quickly during dry periods . These variations in oxygen concentration can influence N cycling and thus, transport to groundwater. Variability in nitrate concentration has also been linked to heterogeneous subsurface properties, rainfall events, seasonality of flow and other local geochemical conditions across a diversity of settings However, a gap currently exists in quantifying N attenuation and transport from agriculturally intensive regions with a “deep” vadose zone while accounting for the many competing N cycle reactions and transformations, as impacted by different hydrological regimes imposed under AgMAR.

The application of AgMAR itself can vary in terms of the hydraulic loading and rates used, as well as the duration between flood water applications. These can in turn affect water retention times, O2 availability, consumption of electron donors and consequently, denitrification rates . For example, denitrification rates were found to increase with increased hydraulic loading and with shorter times between flood applications within the vadose zone of a rapid infiltration basin system used for disposing of treated wastewater . In shallow, sandy soils, high flow rates – above an infiltration threshold – were negatively correlated with denitrification rates, suggesting that an optimum infiltration rate exists for a given sediment stratigraphy to maximize NO3 – reduction . Given the immense stratigraphic heterogeneity in alluvial basins, such as in California’s Central Valley, a range of optimum infiltration rates may exist with implications for managing AgMAR differently based on the geologic setting of the intended site. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to: a) understand the effects of varying stratigraphy and hydrologic regimes on denitrification rates, and b) identify AgMAR management scenarios that increase denitrification rates, such that the potential for N leaching to groundwater is decreased. Herein, we focus on an agricultural field site in Modesto, California located within the Central Valley of California, which is responsible for California’s $46 billion-dollar agricultural economy . The field site typifies the deep vadose zones prevalent in this region, which are characterized by heterogenous layered alluvial sediments intercalated with discontinuous buried clay and carbon rich paleosols . These discontinuous, layered features, especially the paleosols and areas of preferential flow, are typically associated with enhanced biogeochemical activity, higher carbon content and availability of metabolic substrates such as nitrogen . These regions respond to and change depending on environmental conditions such as water content and oxygen concentration in situ that are influenced by the hydrologic regime at the surface and may be important for NO3 – attenuation and reduction prior to reaching the water table. Therefore, this study considers varying hydrologic regimes and stratigraphic variations that are prevalent in the region. More specifically, at the Modesto field site , large amounts of legacy N already reside in the vadose zone, while N fertilizer application and irrigation occurs throughout the spring and summer months. AgMAR, if implemented, occurs during the winter months as water becomes available. Therefore, we focus here on quantifying the effects of AgMAR on N cycling in the deep vadose zone and implications for NO3 – contamination of groundwater at this characteristic agricultural field site. We also investigate the specific AgMAR application rates that would increase the effectiveness of in situ denitrification under different stratigraphic configurations through the development and testing of a reactive transport model. We believe such an analysis provides important insights for the successful application of AgMAR strategies aimed at improving groundwater storage in a changing climate. Reactive transport models can be beneficial tools to elucidating N fate and transport in deep vadose zone environments. Herein, we develop a comprehensive reaction network incorporating the major processes impacting N transport and attenuation, such as aqueous complexation, mineral precipitation and dissolution, and microbially mediated redox reactions. While using the same reaction network, we implement several numerical scenarios to quantify the range of denitrification rates possible under different AgMAR implementation strategies and stratigraphic configurations . For the latter, we used four different stratigraphic configurations with a low permeability layer on top including i) two homogeneous textural profiles, ii) a sand stratigraphy with a discontinuous silt band, iii) a silt stratigraphy with a discontinuous sand band, and iv) a complex stratigraphy more representative of the field conditions investigated by electrical resistance tomography .

Our environmental correlation results provide evidence for a habitat filtering process in which agricultural adapters are promoted by vineyard expansion, while co-occurrence of and negative interactions between agricultural adapters and oak woodland birds provide evidence for indirect detrimental effects of land conversion. These findings support a more pluralistic hypothesis that community structure is not influenced solely by habitat filtering or by species interactions, but rather is influenced by both mechanisms and interactions between them. It is not surprising that agricultural adapters and woodland dependent birds co-occur in oak woodlands where they can take advantage of woodland resources, such as food or nesting sites that may not be abundant in the vineyard matrix. Habitat filtering can act as a driver of change in communities ; considering that vineyards favor agricultural adapters , the relatively high abundance of these species within the agricultural matrix may increase the probability of percolation of these species into oak woodlands. Accounting for the influence of the vineyard matrix and other environmental site and landscape variables, our results reveal negative interactions between several agricultural adapters and a host of native woodland species – some of which are species of conservation concern. To the best of my knowledge this is the first report of these types of indirect interactions, in addition to predation and parasitism, related to birds near agroecosystems. Vineyards appear to influence bird communities at different scales, with increased vineyard influence in small fragments of oak woodland, which are more likely to be used by agricultural adapters and perhaps more vulnerable to indirect spillover effects that could devalue the remaining wild lands. The species identified by our study as agricultural adapters are among the most commonly recorded species in Californian vineyards suggesting that vineyards likely promote these species more broadly. My results suggest that vineyard expansion threatens bird diversity not only directly via habitat conversion, but also by promoting changes in community composition and species abundance that then have indirect, negative consequences for species in remaining natural habitat. Over time,plastic plant pot competitive interactions could change the community composition of oak woodlands, undermining their conservation value.

The combined impact of habitat conversion and reduced habitat quality is concerning for bird conservation. For instance, body condition and fitness are important for successful migration for Neotropical and altitudinal migratory species and are related to habitat quality. Abundance of some Neotropical migrant species is associated with large forest patches and negatively associated with agricultural/urban landscapes . Equally important are impacts to species with declining populations, in our context Spotted Towhee, Orange-crowned Warbler, and Bewick’s Wren or oak woodland specialist species as Nuttall’s Woodpeckers. The method I used does not explicitly model species unidirectional interactions, instead it directly estimates reciprocal interactions . I assume negative interactions to be negative effects of agricultural adapters on oak woodland birds. Several mechanisms documented in other studies may help interpret our results. Firstly, direct biotic interactions may be at play. For instance, starlings are extremely aggressive birds that displace other species from nest sites they want to use, which are mainly cavities , and are considered among the most spread invasive species worldwide that threaten species with extinction . Aggressive behavior by native birds towards European Starlings has also been observed during nesting . Similarly, nest usurpation and/or depredation by starlings has been recorded . Studies in fragmented forest reported a higher predation by birds or parasitism by Brown headed cowbirds on Neotropical migrants birds in small than in larger fragments . I suggest that European starlings can have similar effects on oak woodland birds, but with a different mechanism. There is at least three mechanism of species loss, high predation, low dispersal abilities, and detrimental conditions of the environment .Other evidence of these direct interactions include American crows, which aggressively chase away other birds and eating the eggs and nestlings of other birds , and Brown headed cowbirds, which are a brood parasite of several bird species . Secondly, indirect biotic interactions also be a role but are more difficult to observe and understand than direct interactions and could make community dynamics difficult to predict . In some cases, the mere presence of one bird can affect another’s feeding behavior or the inter specific interactions of the community .

This gap in behavioral knowledge for some of these species could be elucidated with future research. Thirdly, changes in bird community composition could affect the ecosystems functions and services through promote or attenuate complex interactions, that can cause cascade effects that change the ecosystem properties and affect biodiversity . Changes in composition of the landscape matrix, in our study vineyard extension, influence the bird community composition. Other studies previously documented the importance of landscape context and habitat quality for wildlife communities. Species benefitting from exotic plantations were promoted by mechanisms such as habitat filtering , temporal changes in the surrounding matrix causing shifts in species interactions , and new species introductions that change co-occurrence patterns in a community . Some of the relationships in our analysis appear to have a complex pattern of interactions with an unclear mechanism, for instance, the negative relationship of Orange-crowned Warbler with shrubs at the plot scale. Previous studies report varying bird-habitat relationships depending on the landscape context or interaction between species, such as in the case of a negative relationship between some Neotropical migrants and forest patch size . It is probable that for some species the proportion of oak woodland forest will be a better predictor than the proportion of vineyards, but these variables have a highly negative correlation at the landscape scale so are hard to address independently. Different landscape scales may more accurately predict the relationship between landscape variables and different species according to biological and ecological traits . Fragmentation and agricultural intensification have led to reductions in beta diversity and biological community homogenization in many temperate and tropical systems . These changes in native communities can have cascading effects on ecosystem function and resilience . Here, I show that vineyards can lead to regional biotic homogenization of neighboring natural areas through the expansion of the vineyard matrix, by increasing the abundance of birds adapted to vineyards, and by increasing competition between agricultural adapter and oak woodland birds. It is unlikely that all species will be equally affected , as habitat specialists are more likely to be threatened than generalists .

The underappreciated, indirect effects need to be considered as the agricultural footprint continues to expand across California’s coastal ranges and vineyards regions globally. Agriculture land conversion is recognized as one of the main threats to biodiversity due to habitat loss and fragmentation. In this study I found that the effects of agricultural land can spill over into natural areas. I see a clear relationship between the extent of agricultural land and bird species detection rates in adjacent natural areas. More surprisingly, I detected strong negative interactions through co-occurrence patterns between agriculturally adapted bird species and oak woodland associated birds. This research provides evidence that competition from species adapted to agricultural land use could be another driver of biotic homogenization in addition to habitat loss and fragmentation associated with habitat conversion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of these types of indirect interactions beyond predation or parasitism between birds related to agroecosystems. Conserving biodiversity in agroecosystems is a global challenge . Agricultural impacts on biodiversity are widely recognized, and land use change and fragmentation are major drivers of species extinction and ecosystems degradation . Wine grapes are one of the most important crops in terms of land cover surface and economic relevance in Mediterranean type ecosystems worldwide,plastic planter pot which also overlapping with a designated biodiversity hotspot . Future projections for vineyards predict advancement to new areas, where climatic conditions will be favorable for wine grape production, in addition to demand from new markets, can increase vineyard expansion . Different strategies are proposed to increase biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes . Some studies indicate that biodiversity can best be conserved while increasing yield by dividing surface area into conservation zones and intensively managed agriculture . Others propose that increasing the quality of agroecosystem as habitat via agroecological management, enhances biodiversity. Still others propose an integration of both aforementioned strategies according the specific traits of the area of study/species . Finding new alternative approaches that enhance biodiversity within the agricultural matrix is part of the current policy efforts of “protect wildlife beyond the protected areas” of Chilean President M. Bachelet . The spatial configuration of the natural vegetation surrounding agriculture can significantly influence in the occurrence and abundance of bird species . It is recognized that increasing landscape complexity within agroecosystem can increase niche availability and thus host higher levels of biodiversity . An increasing number of studies indicate that remnant native vegetation can contribute to the persistence of birds. Birds can be favored by the presence of forest fragments , forest edges, and riparian vegetation in agroecosystems . Assessing the impacts of the native habitats on biodiversity in a dominant agroecosystem such as vineyards in central Chile is vital for conservation management within this biodiversity hotspot, and could provide management insight for other Mediterranean type ecosystems.

I used a natural experiment based on a gradient of landscape complexity within vineyards to investigate: whether bird trophic guilds change between continuous forests, fragments and vineyards, if changes in the presence and/or proportion of forest fragments influence birds communities, and if the proportion of continuous native vegetation influence birds communities. I hypothesized that vineyards promote some species, and that these functional guilds are different between vineyards and fragments within vineyards. My aim is to disentangle the changes in bird communities due to vineyards at different landscape scales. Conserving biodiversity in agricultural landscapes is an unresolved challenge, in particular in Mediterranean type ecosystems in where agricultural expansion and unique wildlife habitat overlap. I found that fragments of native vegetation within vineyards significantly retained bird communities in vineyard landscapes. Fragments significantly increased abundance and richness compared to the vineyards in which they are located, and also affected assemblages of endemics, insectivores, granivores and omnivores . An equally important finding is that the proportion of fragment native vegetation within a given landscape area affected similarly species than the mere presence of fragments. This highlights the important role of remnants of native vegetation within agroecosystem, particularly remnant size. Our evidence supports a land sharing approach, where more structurally diverse habitat within agroecosystems and habitat heterogeneity at landscape scale can enhance biodiversity in working landscapes . The results coincide with other studies finding that fragments, as well as hedge proportion and small woods within vineyards, support higher bird richness and abundance . In particular, the observed increase in insectivore birds due to large fragments is in agreement with other studies in vineyards . Insectivore species as Chilean swallow and House Wren, were more abundant in vineyards with fragments. Higher insectivore abundance could be associated to ecosystem services such as insect predation relevant to vineyard pest management . However, further research is required to better assess the impacts of biological control via bird predation of insects in Chilean agroecosystems. Fragments were particularly relevant for endemic species. Although fragments could be expected to favor mainly more mobile species such as Chilean Mockingbird and Dusky-tailed Canastero, this was observed also for the Dusky tapaculo, a rhinocryptid species which is less mobile . Other endemic rhinocryptids were excluded from the analysis due to their low rates of detectability within fragments and vineyards , indicating that these species are less likely to be found in anthropogenic environments. More focused research on these less mobile species would be needed to study their behavior. Forest patches were also relevant for Neotropical migratory species as White-crested Elaenia, showing that agroecosystems with large forest patches were indispensable for birds, and in particular for species that need connectivity at landscape scales . The results are consistent with existing literature demonstrating that vineyards support bird communities across the globe . Vineyards monocultures, without fragments of native vegetation favored a subset of species, all of them associated with open habitat and higher tolerance to anthropogenic environments.

We observed substantially higher odds of low neurobehavioral scores , among children living within 100m of a plantation compared to children living at >500m; the odds ratios were weaker among participants living within 101m to 500m of a plantation. Finally, we inspected GAM plots for the relationship between continuous distance and neurobehavior scores for the three subdomains with the largest effect sizes . These are qualitatively similar to the results of analyses of distance by category , exhibiting a decrease in Attention & Inhibitory Control and Language scores at close proximity but do not provide strong evidence of nonlinear effects. Only 12% of the study population lived within 100m of a plantation , which limited the power of our analyses of associations within very close distances to plantations. All results from linear regression analyses comparing growing area within 100m of participant residences to those living further than 100m from floricultural crops were null . In logistic regression analyses, children with the most growing area within 100m of their residence had higher odds of low scores in the Language domain , compared to children without any plantation land within 100m of their residence .We observed that close residential proximity to floricultural crops was associated with poorer neurobehavioral outcomes in the domains of Attention & Inhibitory Control, Language and Memory & Learning. Associations were strongest among children living within 50m of a flower crop and present to some extent among children living between 51 and 100m. These findings were partially corroborated by sensitivity analyses using areas of floricultural crops near homes as a related construct of pesticide drift from flower crops. Unlike short-lived biomarkers of exposure, proximity of a child’s home to agricultural crops may approximate the child’s ongoing and historical low dose exposure to pesticides through off-target drift or direct access to pesticide-treated areas. In the ESPINA study,black plastic nursery pots we previously described positive associations between AChE activity and the domains of Attention & Inhibitory Control, Memory & Learning, and borderline associations with the Language domain affecting boys more than girls .

Alterations in the same domains were observed in the present study, which is consistent with previous findings. Epidemiologic studies provide increasing evidence that pesticide exposure during key developmental periods may be a risk factor for a range of neurocognitive deficits later in life, including attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, developmental delay, slowed reaction time, and slowed motor control, poor verbal comprehension People living closest to agricultural crops are at increased risk of pesticide exposure. In our analyses, children living within 100m of a flower crop, and especially within 50m, had lower neurobehavioral scores compared to children living farther than 500m. These findings suggest that the amount of pesticide drift from crops onto nearby homes can especially affect the neurobehavioral performance of children living within 100m. However, alterations in neurobehavioral performance may also be present at greater distances but the limited statistical power of our study to detect smaller differences precluded us from assessing this further. In previous analyses of the ESPINA study, we observed positive associations between residential distances to flower crops and AChE activity, with the lowest AChE levels observed among children living within 232m of a greenhouse floricultural crop . This supports the construct of residential distance to flower plantations as a pathway of exposure to pesticides Furthermore, we previously observed that children living closer to flower crops had higher systolic blood pressures, which indicates that additional physiologic processes may be affected among children living near pesticide spray sites . Multiple investigations have studied the association between proximity of homes to agricultural crops and pesticide exposure . While maximal exposure attributable to pesticide drift, among these studies, varied from 60 to 750 meters, this collection of studies rather consistently indicates that homes residing closer to pesticide treated fields tend to have higher pesticide levels and that children residing closer to pesticide treated fields tend to reflect higher pesticide exposure levels using bio-monitoring studies. In this study, exposure was modeled as distance to the nearest plantation in the primary analyses, based on the assumption that increased distance reflects lower exposures. An alternative measure, area of plantations within varying buffer areas, which is likely a better proxy for exposure to pesticide drift, was also explored.

As expected, results showed consistent associations between these two related but different constructs of pesticide exposure, which strengthens our findings. Several studies have utilized residential proximity to agriculture as a metric of exposure to pesticides when studying its associations with neurodevelopment . A number of these studies used data from California State’s Pesticide Use Reporting System, finding positive correlations between proximity of prenatal residence to areas of agricultural pesticide applications and neurodevelopmental outcomes in early childhood, specifically ASD . In our analyses the observed effect size in the logistics models were small, but the magnitude may have been attenuated by the non-linear dose-response relationship shown in Figure 3. Furthermore, the linear regression models indicated that a difference of 100m in residential proximity to floricultural crops is associated with a greater likelihood of the child scoring in the sub-clinical ranges for the Language and the Memory and Learning domains by 9% and 24% respectively. In the context of measurable outcomes, this is clinically significant in that identifying children with delayed development warrants early intervention by clinicians as well as educators. The expected distance of pesticide drift from flower crops to nearby homes was smaller in our study population compared to those of other studies likely because rose production is enclosed within greenhouses. Greenhouses in Pedro Moncayo County have air circulation vents or windows, which could allow the escape of fumigated pesticides during and after spraying. However, these analyses suggest that pesticide drift, even in this setting, could still be problematic in the context of pesticide exposure affecting the neurodevelopment of children living nearby. This body of evidence coupled with the growing number of studies describing neurobehavioral alterations associated with pesticide exposures suggests that extending buffer zones or protective areas that separate the industry from the neighboring communities, could be an effective way to protect developing children from the adverse effects of pesticide exposure. The present study was subject to several limitations. Though a crude exposure assessment, the use of this exposure metric is supported by the existing literature and validated within our study population . Prevailing winds were not accounted for in the present analyses. This provides potential for non-differential misclassification of the amount of pesticide drift from plantations to homes and may have biased our findings towards the null . Also, while the vast majority of the floricultural production in Pedro Moncayo County includes roses, which are grown inside greenhouses, a small amount of production of other flowers also occurs in nonenclosed fields typically located near the greenhouses. For this reason, it is plausible that some of the pesticide drift from crops, and hence the associations observed in this study, may be a result of both greenhouse and open field floricultural production. Nonetheless, residential proximity to crops is a useful construct of exposure as it is an indicator of chronic pesticide exposure, and provides practical information about the distances in which populations may have an increased risk of pesticide exposure and/or adverse health. While it does not allow us to determine which specific chemicals are influencing this association,greenhouse pot it indirectly accounts for a mixture of the various agrochemicals used in floriculture. The floricultural industry in Pedro Moncayo frequently uses various pesticides including insecticides , many classes of fungicides and to lesser extent, herbicides .

Many of the studies assessing neurodevelopment and pesticide exposure, including the ESPINA Study, are limited in that they study bio-monitoring of few pesticides, even though it is unusual for one pesticide to be used without multiple others. It is plausible that pesticides or other neurotoxicant agrochemical exposures explain the neurobehavioral deficits seen among participants living near the flower crops. Determining the quantity and types of agrochemicals used over time and by location would improve precision but would be very difficult to ascertain in this agricultural setting. Another limitation related to exposure assessment is that we were not able to account for all potential routes of exposure to pesticides, including dietary intake. We did not have information on time-activity patterns, which would have provided better insight into participants’ outdoor exposures . There is also some uncertainty associated with using home location only to estimate exposure to environmental pesticides. Some children in the cohort went to school during the day, while younger children attended daycare or stayed home with a relative. Modeling exposure experienced across all daily activities and locations is beyond the scope of this current study; we choose to focus on exposures at the children’s home locations. Another limitation of this study is that neurobehavioral outcomes were assessed at only one point in time, and thus we are unable to assess if the neurodevelopmental effects are permanent. Additionally, the NEPSY-2 is based on a US normative sample. Although this does not affect the internal validity of our findings, it is unclear how accurately the cut-off values for “low performance” apply to this study population. This study has several strengths and thus contributes to our understanding of the effects of pesticide use in floricultural communities. This study is unique in that there was a wide distribution of participants’ residential distance to crops, and we had a considerable number of children living in close proximity to flower crops, which allowed us to estimate effect sizes at short distances. Additionally, all participants were examined during a period of relatively homogeneous flower production and pesticide use. Children in this study were examined during a period of lower flower production and pesticide use compared to other times of the year. In theory, this would reduce the off-target pesticide drift potential from crops, with resulting lower exposures to children living nearby. Considering that pesticide spray seasons may also have short-term neurobehavioral alterations in children , it is plausible that these observed associations would be stronger during peak exposure periods. Lastly the existing studies have focused on residential distance to agricultural open fields. To our knowledge, the present study is the first to characterize the associations of neurobehavior in relation to greenhouse agricultural production, which is generally though to result in reduced pesticide drift from crops. Many types of crops involve the use of greenhouses such as flowers, tomatoes, cucumber, a variety of herbs, lettuce, bell peppers, and eggplants. The present study findings may be applicable to such agricultural production. High rates of ecosystem modification and subsequent consequences for biota, climate and geochemical natural cycles characterize the Anthropocene . To date, agriculture has modified nearly 40% of terrestrial ecosystems and drives biodiversity depletion via multiple direct and indirect effects associated with wildlife decline . These mechanisms include intensive use of agrochemicals, conversion of natural areas to simplified monocultures, fragmentation associated with land use change, soil erosion and sediment runoff, and greenhouse gas emissions, among others . These negative effects of agriculture consequently impact on species, habitat loss, and lack of connectivity, generating synergic detrimental effects on biodiversity, ecosystem functionality and provision of ecosystem services . Reconciling agricultural production and biodiversity conservation goals is a global priority in light of future scenarios pertaining to food consumption and land use change . However, agricultural management is not homogenous and may differentially influence wildlife. Agricultural intensification which entails a shift from diversified small farming practice to large monoculture production relies on the use of agrochemicals and has taken a toll on biodiversity . Adoption of agroecological principles and wildlife friendly farming can favor habitat suitability for wildlife and maintain sustainable crop yields . Strategies to balance agricultural food production and wildlife conservation include land sharing and land sparing strategies . Land sparing proponents have focused efforts on increasing food productivity per land area often requiring high levels of agrochemical input, and argue that with high production in target crop areas, natural areas can be spared from conversion to crop production . One impact that this approach does not address is the agrochemical spill over and its negative impacts on non-target wildlife species leading – another detrimental externality resulting from agrochemicals .

Like other emerging donors, Brazil follows the global standard of providing cooperation in the project format. As I will argue in Chapter 3, however, it does so through a mode of engagement that is more hands-off and based on demonstration, in contrast with traditional aid, based on more bureaucratized and large scale kinds of intervention. Here I will approach this question through an idiom closer to my relational analytics, that of robustness.At least since Ferguson’s insightful chapter on the politics of knowledge in World Bank reports in The Anti-Politics Machine, discourse lingered for a long while as a prevailing analytical angle in the anthropology of development , remaining important even after potent critiques during the late nineties that continue to resonate today . To refuse discursive determinism is not however to deny the importance of discourse, but to pay close, empirically grounded attention to its relations with history and practice. The first three chapters will begin by approaching South-South cooperation discourse in three domains: Chapter 1, South-South / North-South politics; Chapter 2, culture and history in Brazil-Africa relations; and Chapter 3, nature and agricultural development in the tropics. Each will seek to show how official discourse participated in context-making efforts, and then move on to look at its relations with front line practice. In this dissertation, however I will refer to discourse in two senses, which I try to differentiate. Most of the time, discourse will refer to a working tool consciously deployed by certain groups of actors in the field – most notably that of the diplomats, but also those in politics,raspberry container size academia and other intellectual circles. I tried to mark this specificity by qualifying it as official discourse rather than discourse in general. Official discourse in this sense is mostly concerned with a self-account of Brazilian cooperation. But one of my most forceful observations during fieldwork was how distant it could be from the practice of front liners.

The various chapters will suggest how, rather than describing the latter accurately or even shaping it directly, official discourse is more often than not disconnected from it: it follows a logic and productivity of its own that is largely circumscribed, by organizational and sociality lines, to diplomatic and more political and intellectual kinds of circles. Not that there are no relations between diplomats and front liners ; they not only exist as may play a significant part in cooperation activities. But as will be seen, they unfold in ways that do not follow a linear, coherent referential bridge between discourse and practice. The other way in which I talk about discourse here draws on the Saidian-Gramscian Foucauldian analytics found in much of the U.S. literature in the anthropology of development . In it, the Foucauldian view on knowledge production as part of the apparatus of power is refracted by Said’s postcolonial inflection and/or by Gramsci’s deeply historical approach to hegemony and special attention to political economy. Here, I will largely follow these refractions. Some of the discursive elements I will approach are long lasting and do seem to provide a common grammar that is shared by virtually everyone on the Brazilian side. I traced discourse in this sense to certain historical processes, in special those involved in shaping Brazil’s postcolonial condition. This discussion, which I have also started to entertain elsewhere , will be made explicit in Chapter 2. There I draw, besides on Said himself , on works on the question of post coloniality and modernity in Latin America in general, and Brazil in particular . In particular, some notions put forth by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos such as double colonialism, internal coloniality, and situated post colonalisms were highly productive for making sense of Brazil’s postcolonial condition as well as of its past and contemporary relations with Africa . Here, I have coalesced these and other insights into an attention to how coloniality11 operates in two, interrelated directions: both externally and internally to postcolonial nation-states.

What is framed as the postcolonial condition in general usually focuses on the international dimension. Some Latin American authors, on the other hand, have sought to specify its domestic dimension through the term internal colonialism . Few however have made a sustained, empirical and theoretical, investment in looking at the relations between these two . While this dissertation will focus on how this double directionality has played out on the Brazilian side, this perspective could also be useful for looking at equivalent processes on the African side.12 I will introduce it in Chapter 2, through a discussion about a kind of hegemonic discourse on Africa that I term Brazil’s nation-building Orientalism. But like coloniality itself, this double directionality can be found in dimensions beyond discourse, from political economy to culture, from agricultural development to geopolitics. Some of these will be brought in the other chapters, albeit not as explicitly as in Chapter 2. Finally, the postcolonial inflection will reappear in Chapters 4 and 5, which will provide an account of an ongoing technical cooperation project between Brazil and four countries in West Africa. In these final chapters, I will try to bring these insights to bear on questions raised by science and technology studies and vice-versa – not unlike those who have been working at the scholarly interface some have been calling postcolonial science and technology studies.13 This discussion will bring us back full circle to the question of North-South difference raised in the first chapter, but now hopefully enriched by the analytics of relationality deployed more broadly here.This Introduction has already drawn on various analytical idioms of relationality found in anthropology and science and technology studies : interfaces, emergence, scaling, assemblages, context-making, socio-technical networks, situatedness, or robustness. These and others evoke works from science studies, such as those by Marilyn Strathern , Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway . To these I add insights from works that tread the path opened up by these authors, but introduce important new twists such as De Laet and Mol , Hayden , Da Costa Marques , or the Deleuzian approach put forth by Jensen and Rödje . Less frequently, a similar perspective has been brought to bear on discussions on development, although rarely incorporating the techno-scientific dimension of projects . We do not need to delve too deep into micro-practice to realize the centrality of relations to the phenomenon approached in this dissertation: it is in the very hyphen in South-South. As Chapter 1 will suggest, the duplication of the term brought into relation, “South”, is meant to evoke horizontality: a leveling opposition to the asymmetry explicit in the North-South configuration. As the hyphen in African- or Native-American, however, the one in South-South denotes less hybridism than an interface – which, I have been arguing here, is characterized by being in emergence. The character of this relation is therefore largely underdetermined; it is a work in progress being actively, and in some cases reflexively, performed by those involved in practicing and thinking it . As was already indicated,raspberry plant container the ways in which this interface is being worked will be approached here most frequently through an analytics of context-making, scaling and domaining, after some of Strathern’s discussions on gender, kinship and audit cultures.

This emphasis on the production of context came out of the empirical observation that interactions between actors from both sides of the Southern Atlantic have unfolded through relational channels which are much less consolidated than the ones underlying relations between, say, Mali and France. Correspondingly, given the largely unprecedented character of these relations, much of my field interlocutors’ efforts have been directed towards making a context for them, in a more intensive, less bureaucratized, and reflexive way than its Northern counterparts. In Strathern’s prolific oeuvre, context-making has appeared alongside related operations such as analogy-making, scaling, and domaining, all of which were also salient in the discourses and practices observed during fieldwork. As Brazilians and Africans are brought together into South-South cooperation’s emerging interfaces, their relational effort proceeds largely through analogies based on their respective experiences. In this process, some contextual elements are differentially assigned to preexisting domains and scales; some are brought to the fore, while others are left to evanesce in the background or are altogether eclipsed. Although these operations strive to coherence, quite often they lead to contradiction and ambivalence, especially as they straddle different interfaces and the lag between official discourse and cooperation practice. Indeed, when there is an over investment in certain analogies at a discursive level – most notably, between Brazil’s and Africa’s peripheral conditions, cultural outlooks, natural environments, developmental paths –, they not always correspond to practical relations. But as I will argue in Chapter 2, this does not mean, as those who have remarked some of these mismatches before me suggested , that official discourse is false, deluding, or naïve. There is, rather, certain diffuse functionality to it, including as an effort to open up a path for turning – to use a classic organizing duality in anthropology –metaphor into metonym: that is, to incite the establishment of mutually transformative, exchange-intensive interactions between Brazilians and their African counterparts. However, those who come up with the most explicit discursive analogies are not necessarily the ones who will work the hardest in practice to entice and nourish metonymic relations. Chapters 3 and 4 will focus on the work of the latter – the cooperation front liners – as they strove to make a productive context for their relations with their African counterparts during capacity-building trainings and technology transfer efforts. In these activities, as Chapter 3 will suggest, demonstration has been the prevalent mode of engagement. Here, demonstration is evinced from a contrast with the notion of intervention, which denotes conventional views on the global North’s prevalent mode of engagement with Africa .They show how capacity-building has been performed less as the imposition of abstract, authoritative techno-scientific knowledge than as the demonstration of a particular kind of experience in agricultural development and research, making explicit its socio-technical entanglements and enticing the audience to participate in context-making. Demonstration is the basis of key modalities of TT in agriculture in Brazil, African countries, and elsewhere. Context describes the site to which technologies will be transferred, which, in common policy views, denotes an inert background for a bounded object. Chapter 4 will draw on part of the STS literature, especially Latour’s actor-network theory and works on technology transfer inspired by it , to recast the process of technology transfer as a co-production between contexts and technologies. Vital to this end will be to bring more emphatically to the fore the question of power, which is not readily evident in Latour himself . For this, I will recruit in Chapter 5 the notion of sociotechnical controls. “Socio-technical” draws on an epistemological-methodological assumption that has by now become part of STS’s commonsense: that there is nothing essential about nature or society, the task being to trace how this ontological boundary is empirically made by scientists and those with whom they interact. Controls, on the other hand, are part of an idiom that came to the fore during fieldwork, especially during my time in Mali. It was enticed by a perception that what Brazilian and African researchers and technicians were doing in their experimental activities was less about constructing scientific facts than about deploying, or trying to deploy, practical controls – experimental controls, most obviously, but also sociopolitical controls. In fact, I came to see one type of control as inextricably linked to the other, and both as linked to the question of power at large: it matters where and when techno-science is being carried out, after all. Latour’s Salk Institute is not the same as Mali’s Institut d’Economie Rurale and even Embrapa research units – and yet these are part of a common global techno-scientific assemblage, but unequally so. The last chapter will foreground this paradoxical aspect of the cotton project, intimately tied especially to Sub-Saharan Africa’s postcolonial predicament, by proposing to view techno-science as being about controlling the flow of vitalities in both nature and society, in a multi-scalar network ranging from subterranean mineral molecules to the global rules of the World Trade Organization.

A total of 294 participants were included in either the prenatal or postnatal analyses. Participants included in this analysis did not differ significantly from the original full cohort on most attributes, including maternal asthma, maternal education, marital status, poverty category, and child’s birth weight. However, mothers of children included in the present study were slightly older and more likely to be Latino than those from the initial cohort. Women were interviewed twice during pregnancy , following delivery, and when their children were 0.5, 1, 2, 3.5, 5, and 7 years old. Information from prenatal and delivery medical records was abstracted by a registered nurse. Home visits were conducted by trained personnel during pregnancy and when the children were 0.5, 1, 2, 3.5 and 5-years old. At the 7-year-old visit, mothers were interviewed about their children’s respiratory symptoms, using questions adapted from the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood questionnaire . Additionally, mothers were asked whether the child had been prescribed any medication for asthma or wheezing/whistling, or tightness in the chest. We defined respiratory symptoms as a binary outcome based on a positive response at the 7- year-old visit to any of the following during the previous 12 months: wheezing or whistling in the chest; wheezing, whistling, or shortness of breath so severe that the child could not finish saying a sentence; trouble going to sleep or being awakened from sleep because of wheezing, whistling, shortness of breath, or coughing when the child did not have a cold; or having to stop running or playing active games because of wheezing, whistling, shortness of breath, or coughing when the child did not have a cold. In addition, a child was included as having respiratory symptoms if the mother reported use of asthma medications,plastic gardening pots even in the absence of the above symptoms.Three identical EasyOne spirometers were used . Routine calibration was performed every morning and 92% of tests were conducted by the same technician.

The expiratory flow-volume curves were reviewed by two physicians experienced in pediatric spirometry, and only adequate quality data were included in the statistical analyses. Some participants with adequate quality data for FEV1 did not provide adequate quality data to calculate FVC or FEF25–75. Young children have difficulty sustaining forceful exhalation after a deep breath that is required to produce a plateau in airflow and calculate FVC and subsequently FEF25–75. Each child performed a maximum of eight expiratory maneuvers and up to three best acceptable tests were saved by the spirometric device software. Latitude and longitude coordinates of participants’ homes were collected during home visits during pregnancy and when the children were 0.5, 1, 2, 3.5 and 5 years old using a handheld Global Positioning System unit . At the 7-year visit, mothers were asked if the family had moved since the 5-year visit, and if so, the new address was recorded. We used Geographic Information System software to geocode the new addresses and obtain coordinates. Residential mobility was common in the study population. We estimated the use of agricultural fumigants near each child’s residence using a GIS based on the location of each child’s residence and the Pesticide Use Report data . Mandatory reporting of all agricultural pesticide applications is required in California, including the active ingredient, quantity applied, acres treated, crop treated, and date and location within 1-square-mile sections defined by the Public Land Survey System . Before analysis, the PUR data were edited to correct for likely outliers with unusually high application rates using previously described methods . We computed nearby fumigant use applied within each buffer distance for combinations of distance from the residence and time periods . The range of distances best captured the spatial scale that most strongly correlated with concentrations of methyl bromide and 1,3-DCP in air . We weighted fumigant use near homes based on the proportion of each square-mile PLSS that was within each buffer surrounding a residence.

To account for the potential downwind transport of fumigants from the application site, we obtained data on wind direction from the closest meteorological station . We calculated wind frequency using the proportion of time that the wind blew from each of eight directions during the week after the fumigant application to capture the peak time of fumigant emissions from treated fields . We determined the direction of each PLSS section centroid relative to residences and weighted fumigant use in a section according to the percentage of time that the wind blew from that direction for the week after application. We summed fumigant use over pregnancy , from birth to the 7-year visit and for the year prior to the 7-year visit yielding estimates of the wind-weighted amount of each fumigant applied within each buffer distance and time period around the corresponding residences for each child. We log10 transformed continuous fumigant use variables to reduce heteroscedasticity and the influence of outliers, and to improve the fit of the models. We used logistic regression models to estimate odds ratios of respiratory symptoms and/or asthma medication use with residential proximity to fumigant use. Our primary outcome was respiratory symptoms defined as positive if during the previous 12 months the mother reported for her child any respiratory symptoms or the use of asthma medications, even in the absence of such symptoms . We also examined asthma medication use alone. The continuous lung function measurements were approximately normally distributed, therefore we used linear regression models to estimate the associations with residential proximity to fumigant use. We estimated the associations between the highest spirometric measures for children who had one, two or three maneuvers. We fit separate regression models for each combination of outcome, fumigant, time period, and buffer distance. We selected covariates a priori based on our previous studies of respiratory symptoms and respiratory function in this cohort. For logistic regression models of respiratory symptoms and asthma medication use, we included maternal smoking during pregnancy and signs of moderate or extensive mold noted at either home visit . We also included season of birth to control for other potential exposures that might play a causal role in respiratory disease , pollen , dryness , and mold. We defined the seasons of birth as follows: pollen , dry , mold based on measured pollen and mold counts during the years the children were born . In addition, we controlled for allergy using a proxy variable: runny nose without a cold in the previous 12 months reported at age 7. Because allergy could be on the causal pathway, we also re-ran all models without adjusting for allergy. Results were similar and therefore we only present models controlling for allergy. Additionally, for spirometry analyses only, we adjusted for the technician performing the test, and child’s age, sex and height. We included household food insecurity score during the previous 12 months , breastfeeding duration , and whether furry pets were in the home at the 7 year visit to control for other factors related to lung function.

We also adjusted for mean daily particulate matter concentrations with aerodynamic diameter ≤ 2.5 µm during the first 3 months of life and whether the home was located ≤150m from a highway in first year of life determined using GIS,blueberry pot size to control for air pollution exposures related to lung function. We calculated average PM2.5 concentration in the first 3 months of life using data from the Monterey Unified Air Pollution Control District air monitoring station. In all lung function models of postnatal fumigant use, we included prenatal use of that fumigant as a confounder. To test for non-linearity, we used generalized additive models with three-degrees of-freedom cubic spline functions including all the covariates included in the final lung function models. None of the digression from linearity tests were significant ; therefore, we expressed fumigant use on the continuous log10 scale in multi-variable linear regression models. Regression coefficients represent the mean change in lung function for each 10-fold increase in wind-weighted fumigant use. We conducted sensitivity analyses to verify the robustness and consistency of our findings. We included other estimates of pesticide exposure in our models that have been related to respiratory symptoms or lung function in previous analyses of the CHAMACOS cohort. Specifically, we included child urinary concentrations of dialkylphosphate metabolites , a non-specific biomarker of organophosphate pesticide exposure using the area under the curve calculated from samples collected at 6-months, 1, 2, 3.5 and 5 years of age . We also included agricultural sulfur use within 1-km of residences during the year prior to lung function measurement . We used similar methods as described above for fumigants to calculate wind-weighted sulfur use, except with a 1-km buffer and the proportion of time that the wind blew from each of eight directions during the previous year. The inclusion of these two pesticide exposures reduced our study population with complete data for respiratory symptoms and lung function . Previous studies have observed an increased risk of respiratory symptoms and asthma with higher levels of p, p’– dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethylene or p, p’-dichlorodiphenyldichloro-ethylene measured in cord blood . As a sensitivity analysis, we included log10- transformed lipid-adjusted concentrations of DDT and DDE measured in prenatal maternal blood samples . We also used Poisson regression to calculate adjusted risk ratios for respiratory symptoms and asthma medication use for comparison with the ORs estimated using logistic regression because ORs can overestimate risk in cohort studies . In additional analyses of spirometry outcomes, we also excluded those children who reported using any prescribed medication for asthma, wheezing, or tightness in the chest during the last 12 months to investigate whether medication use may have altered spirometry results. We ran models including only those children with at least two acceptable reproducible maneuvers . We ran all models excluding outliers identified with studentized residuals greater than three. We assessed whether asthma medication or child allergies modified the relationship between lung function and fumigant use by creating interaction terms and running stratified models. To assess potential selection bias due to loss to follow-up, we ran regression models that included stabilized inverse probability weights . We determined the weights using multiple logistic regression with inclusion as the outcome and independent demographic variables as the predictors. Data were analyzed with Stata and R . We set statistical significance at p<0.05 for all analyses, but since we evaluated many combinations of outcomes, fumigants, distances and time periods we assessed adjustment for multiple comparisons using the Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate at p<0.05 . Most mothers were born in Mexico , below age 30 at time of delivery , and married or living as married at the time of study enrollment . Nearly all mothers did not smoke during pregnancy. When cohort participants were 6 and 12 months old, most households showed signs of moderate or extensive mold at either visit. At age 7, based on maternal report, the majority of families was living below the Federal Poverty Level, 15.7% of cohort children experienced a runny nose without a cold within the past year, 16.3% displayed asthma symptoms, and 6.1% were currently taking asthma medication. Table 2 shows the distributions of wind-weighted fumigant use within 8 km of CHAMACOS residences during the prenatal and postnatal exposure periods. Methyl bromide and chloropicrin were the most heavily used fumigants during the prenatal period, with mean ± SD wind-adjusted use of 13,380 ± 10,437 and 8,665 ± 6,816 kg, respectively. Reflecting declines in methyl bromide use, the use of chloropicrin was greater than the use of methyl bromide during the postnatal period, with median values of 127,977 and 109,616 kg during the 7 years, respectively. When we examined correlations within each fumigant, use within 3, 5, and 8 km from the home was highly correlated for each fumigant . Fumigant use during the prenatal and postnatal periods was also highly correlated for methyl bromide and chloropicrin, but was not correlated for metam sodium use and was inversely correlated for 1,3-DCP use . We also examined correlations among fumigants and observed high correlations between prenatal methyl bromide and chloropicrin use and between prenatal metam sodium and 1,3-DCP use . There were negative correlations between prenatal methyl bromide and chloropicrin use with prenatal metam sodium and 1,3-DCP use .