While the C-4 countries were making their plight known worldwide, Brazil was taking action and pressing a case against the United States at the WTO based on the claim that their cotton subsidies breached free trade rules. Even though its case seemed strong, to face the U.S. in such a dispute is far from a trivial matter; Brazilian diplomats and government officials were well aware of the high costs and political risks involved in such an action. The C-4 countries declined to join in as formal parties; according to a diplomat I talked to, they were scared off by ill advice from “foreign NGOs”.Nonetheless, these African countries offered political support to Brazil, and it was during this process that a technical cooperation project to improve cotton production in the C-4 countries was idealized by Brazilian diplomats along with their African counterparts at the organization’s headquarters in Geneva. During discussions in 2007 at the level of the WTO Cotton Initiative, Embrapa confirmed its willingness to become the implementing institution in this enterprise . In 2009, the WTO board issued an unprecedented decision granting Brazil the right to retaliate against the United States. After a period of negotiations, Brazil chose instead to settle for financial compensation to its cotton producers. The U.S. government agreed to pay every year an amount equivalent to the estimated losses incurred by Brazilian farmers due to American cotton subsidies, as long as they remain in place. During my last stages of fieldwork, the word going around in Brasília was that a small portion – 10% – of this yearly fund of around U$140 million would be channeled to South-South cooperation, in the form of technical cooperation projects on cotton in Africa and South America. As 2012 came to a close and so did Phase I of the C-4 Project, it was expected that Phase II would benefit from part of these funds. This background makes the C-4 Project particularly interesting and somewhat unique,blueberry packaging box since its very existence is directly linked to processes pitting North against South at the scale of global trade – an arena where, despite the complexity of internal alliances, if one looks at a certain distance the hemispheric opposition takes on a relatively clear shape.
In spite of its fundamentally technical character, the project regularly reports to the Brazilian delegation in Geneva, and from the point of view of Brazilian diplomacy it became a flagship project – a model of South-South cooperation, even before its first results were given enough time to mature and take shape. In early 2011, for example, it was described by an Embrapa manager as an example of “how it is possible to secure long term outcomes, with socioeconomic impact on the countries involved”,at a moment when “outcomes” had not even left the experimental fields. As a result, even though front liners were perfectly aware of the need to proceed at the right pace in order to enhance the project’s potential for robustness, they seemed to face added pressure relatively to other, lower-profile projects. In other words, in this case technical failure was not an option because politically, the project had already been born successful.It was the first of the structuring kind to be implemented by Embrapa in the African continent. As such, it was a pioneer project, and a frequent reference in statements by diplomats, Embrapa officials, and in reports on Brazil as an emerging donor produced by Brazilian institutions and the international development industry.From the point of view of the emerging interface between Brazil and Africa discussed in Chapter 2, the C-4 Project is somewhat unique for encompassing countries that, different from those involved in Embrapa’s two other structuring projects in Africa, 176 have had little or virtually no historical relations with Brazil. All of them are French speaking and, with the exception of Benin , they are predominantly Islamic, landlocked, and are situated closer to the Sahelian band than to the coast, where the Brazilian presence in West Africa has been historically concentrated. They are among the poorest in Sub-Saharan Africa and, with the exception of Chad, have no major reserves of strategic resources. Moreover, this project focused on a crop for which the competition concerns discussed in Chapter 1 and 2 have relatively lower relevance. As some of my interlocutors were quick to point out, despite the importance of cotton for the C-4 countries’ export revenues, even when taken together their cotton output did not amount to 5% of the world market .
And even though Brazil is one of the leading world exporters of cotton, this commodity ranked behind others such as soybeans, sugar, coffee or meat in the country’s exports, and most of its production was absorbed domesticallyI am not sure how incidental this is, as considerations about commercial competition are likely to be taken into account during alliance-building in trade negotiations. Nonetheless, this means that this project seems to have been largely spared domestic pressures stemming from competition fears, and therefore possible pressures against it coming from the strong agribusiness support base in Brazil’s federal government coalition. Like most others, the C-4 Project was conceived at the high tide of Brazil’s South-South impetus during the Lula administration. When his successor Dilma Rousseff took office in early 2011, she quickly closed the resource tap for cooperation, as part of wider budget cuts. Cooperation with Africa was also hit hard, as during the Rousseff administration the pendulum of South-South relations swung back to Brazil’s historical priority, its South American neighbors. Still, the cotton project was likely to feel the blow less than other bilateral projects, because of the extra resources to be provided by the U.S. compensation fund. As I completed this dissertation, it was bound to move forward into a second phase due to begin in late 2013 – which means that, at this stage, any balance on its outcomes cannot be but provisional. The sections that follow will outline three assembling movements that unfolded from diplomacy’s foundational gesture: recruiting institutions and their members to take part in the project; crafting the project document and kick-starting its implementation; and assembling the socio-technical context to which the Brazilian technologies would be transferred.
The project’s core organizational architecture was reflected in the composition of its highest decision-making instance, the steering committee: one member from the Brazilian Cooperation Agency , two from Embrapa , one from the United Nations Development Program , and one from each of the four African institutes: Mali’s Institut d’Économie Rurale , Burkina Faso’s Institute de l’Environnement et des Recherches Agricoles , Benin’s Institut National des Recherches Agricoles du Bénin , and Chad’s Institut Tchadien de Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement . The committee met every year, in Brasília or in one of the C-4 capital cities, and concentrated the project’s management functions and joint decision-making processes. One of them was Embrapa’s cotton center, based in Campina Grande in the Brazilian Northeast, but with an important nucleus in Goiânia . Most of the researchers involved in the project worked in this center. Embrapa’s decentralized units are subjected to, but enjoy some autonomy from, the headquarters in Brasília, where the Secretariat of International Relations is based. Between Campina Grande/Goiânia and Brasília there was an important inter-institutional channel on the Brazilian side that commanded, for instance, the choice and availability of the researchers who would go to Africa to participate in trainings and experiments,blueberry packaging containers or the organization of study visits and other projects activities that took place in Brazil. Various researchers and managers from the cotton center played a central part in the project’s early stages, before a coordinator for Phase I was hired. Personnel from this research center were likely to come to the fore again during Phase II, when the current coordinator is supposed to leave. Another second set of actors included personnel from the Brazilian embassies in the C-4 countries . Brazilian ambassadors, their families and embassy officials of all ranks played a major support role during project implementation. Even on a more personal key, it makes a difference to have one’s countrymen to show you around and even provide emotional support in countries that speak a different language and count with a minimal presence of Brazilian expatriates . Brazilian researchers and managers who came to Bamako to work in trainings, technical missions and other project activities were regularly in contact with embassy personnel. It was common for the ambassador in Bamako to throw convivial welcome dinners in the charming four-story house located by the banks, and with a great night view, of the Niger River – a far cry com the imposing fortress aspect of embassies from the U.S. or European countries. They were always available for whatever kind of support that turned out to be necessary, a kindness that I have also enjoyed at points, both in Mali and in Burkina Faso.
The role of the Brazilian embassies was also operational. In a way, they made up for the lack of a network of cooperation offices abroad like the ones available to larger donor agencies such as USAID or the French AFD . In fact, the three Brazilian embassies in the C-4 countries were established simultaneously with project negotiations: Benin in 2006, Burkina Faso and Mali in 2008. In the intricate bureaucratic pathway whereby the project budget was transferred from Itamaraty to African grounds, some funds have passed through the embassies’ accounts. Occasionally, they have also intermediated the international transfer of genetic material . Finally, ambassadors and their families were also recruited to play a foremost role in a kind of project activity that is possibly as important as the technical work itself: official visits to project grounds. Several ABC and Itamaraty officials , besides Malian government officials from all levels , have visited the project parcel in Sotuba . These kinds of visits also happened in the other C-4 countries. Many of them were broadcasted in local television, radio, newspapers, and the internet. Visibility for the donor is not just a means, but itself one of the goals, of cooperation. At this level, the Brazilian diplomats’ role was eminently ritual, and their dealings with African politicians, at least as far as the project is concerned, did not seem to go much beyond that. Differently from France and other Northern donors present in these countries since much longer, Brazilian diplomats do not usually meddle in local politics. African partners, especially from Mali, repeatedly remarked the importance of ambassador visits to project grounds, besides other high authorities such as the Brazilian foreign minister in 2009. “It’s unprecedented”, one of them told me; “the French ambassador has never bothered to come and see a project here [in IER].” “I still remember, first time the Brazilian ambassador [in Mali] came”, another pointed out, “the first maize we planted had barely germinated; we didn’t have much to show yet, but he came anyway”. The importance they saw in this, especially at the early stages of the project, was that it made them more confident about the Brazilians’ commitment and the importance they ascribed to this project. These were, after all, partners with whom most African researchers had never dealt before, who came to them suggesting an alternative model of technical cooperation they had no previous experience with. Like most others, this project was originally a request that came to Embrapa from Itamaraty, which also set aside the funds for it: 5 million dollars. Although not particularly impressive if compared to budgets from major Northern and multilateral agencies, this has been the largest apportion of funds for a bilateral project implemented by Embrapa in Africa.At that time, Embrapa’s regional office in Ghana was still in place, so it played a key role in articulating the project with the cotton unit back in Brazil. After the Secretariat of International Relations re-centralized the coordination of all projects at the Embrapa headquarters in Brasília in 2010, it came to play the managerial role, which it shared with the Brazilian Cooperation Agency. UNDP became a necessary operational broker, for the project to make acquisitions and payments outside of Brazil. Given the legal configuration described in Chapter 1, project funds must flow from the ABC to the UNDP office in Brasília, and from there to the UNDP office in Bamako, before they could be spent according to what was prescribed by the project – sometimes after a few other local hurdles were transposed.