There, too, the identification of problems to be addressed stemmed both from local demands and the availability of expertise back in Brazil; capacity-building involved both abstract technical content and a demonstration of Brazil’s and Embrapa’s experience with these particular technologies; demonstration and adaptation proceeded through selective context-making and scaling operations; and – a point to be elaborated in the following chapter – the prospect of transfer to farmers brought to center stage of technical decision-making the question of how agency, or controls, were distributed across scales of context beyond the research institutes and the project scope.In its original context in Brazilian cotton agriculture, pest control became a major issue in the aftermath of the above mentioned boll weevil crisis during the eighties. The fight against this devastating pest was carried out in multiple fronts, in what is known as integrated pest management. This mode of control originally emerged in response to the adverse effects caused by the ample use of chemical pesticides in the aftermath of World War II,particularly the development of resistance to these products by major insect pests. As presented during the project’s capacity-building workshops and didactically exposed in banners in its demonstration fields, pest management includes the reasoned integration of different kinds of controls: chemical , varietal , and biological . The entomology axis of the project took all three into account,hydroponic channel but since the project was first drafted the experimental emphasis was placed on the last modality, biological control. As I once talked about the project with a Burkinabe entomologist who was not part of it, he was surprised and skeptical about the focus on biological control: “But is it really deployed in cotton farms in Brazil?”
Indeed, although Embrapa does have extensive research experience with the use of natural enemies to fight pests in maize, cotton and other crops, with one exception – sugarcane – this modality of pest control is not really widespread in Brazilian agriculture. This is even less the case in agribusiness, fundamentally reliant as it is on transgenic insect-resistant varieties and industrialized chemical inputs that may end up affecting pest and beneficial insects alike. In West Africa, chemical control is generally part of extension’s recommendations to cotton farmers, but its use is less widespread in food crops. As one of the Embrapa entomologists explained to me, “different from here [Brazil], their environment is relatively ‘virgin’ of massive use of chemicals. It is still possible to come up with an integrated pest management strategy that includes biological control in a significant way”. An integrated pest management strategy seeks to minimize excessive pesticide use by compensating it as much as possible with biological and varietal controls. This is based on an assumption that no insect is, in itself, a pest; it only becomes so after its population reaches levels capable of causing significant damage to the crops. In the project, the balance was focused on biological and chemical controls, since no cotton variety included in its breeding component had been specifically bred for pest resistance. The essays conducted by the entomologists consisted largely in observing how the Brazilian cotton varieties introduced by the project behaved in relation to the insects found in their new West African environment. Here as with no-till, travelling technologies were met with significant potential constraints as front liners glanced beyond research institutes to peasant cotton farms. In particular, an effective integrated pest control strategy requires that farmers carry out a periodic estimation of different insect populations by counting samples in their fields. Chemicals are supposed to be deployed only after a certain threshold, the so-called control level, is achieved. As with no-till, the ultimate parameter is crop productivity: research establishes the control level as that likely to cause economically significant damage to production. However, West African peasant farmers did not do measurements of insect populations.
Following recommendations by local extension, they usually followed the method of pesticide application “by the calendar”: that is, every fourteen days regardless of insect population levels. This poorly regulated use of chemical pesticides not only eliminated beneficial insects unnecessarily, but was leading to the development of resistance by major pests such as caterpillars . Others were health concerns due to lack of protection gear during the spraying of chemical pesticides, and of appropriate ways of disposing of their empty bottles. In the project plot, selective pesticides were applied according to sampling procedures, and the technicians who did the spraying were required to wear complete protection gear. Much like in no-till’s focus on long-term soil conservation and what happens under the ground, the entomology trainings insisted on a change of mindset regarding massive pesticide spraying practices. It was not obvious, however, that protection gear would be readily available to peasants, or even that they would be willing to wear them. As a peasant leader in Burkina Faso put it, “It’s hard to wear the protective gear, look at the sun, here in the Sahel it’s just too hot. You estimate where the wind is blowing before spraying, but then the wind changes direction and the pesticide falls all over your face. That night, the wife goes to sleep elsewhere [laughs].” Neither was it the case that peasant farmers could do insect samplings on a regular basis. As one of the C-4 entomologists explained to me, “during projects, there will be people from the project or paid by it to do this counting regularly; then it might work. But when the project is over, the peasants cannot afford to divert labor force to this task; they need to do weeding and other tasks, not just for cotton but for the food crops”. Again, these constraints were similar to many of those found for no-till, especially with respect to the control peasant farmers had on the socio-technical elements necessary to fully carry out the technical recommendations transferred by extension.
Experimental activities in this project component were at first subsumed to breeding: phytosanitary surveillance was the first task for which entomologists were recruited into the project. Great care was taken so that the Embrapa cotton seeds would not bring in dangerous invaders – it is believed that the boll weevil first arrived in Brazil coming from the U.S. precisely at a research institute. Brazilians would rejoice at how the African continent was “blessed” by the absence of this dangerous pest. Yet, the cotton plant is a target for many other insects. At the time I did fieldwork, the pests which Monsanto’s Bt cotton, grown in Burkina Faso, had been designed to combat were the chief ones affecting cotton production in the region at large: the socalled carpophage, or capsule-eating, caterpillars. The actual experiments in entomology had a much slower start when compared to the other two components. The project’s biological control focus was concentrated on the main pest species then present in the region, Helicoverpa armigera , a moth that feeds avidly on cotton bolls during its caterpillar stage. The idea was to make use of a natural enemy well studied in Brazil and elsewhere for cotton and other crops such as maize, cassava or tomatoes: a tiny wasp species named Trichogramma. This insect parasites the pest’s eggs by laying its own eggs inside them, thus killing them before the larvae can emerge and cause damage to the bolls. This method of control requires the production en masse of this natural enemy and its host in specialized laboratories. The head Malian entomologist in the project happened to have long-term experience with this natural enemy,hydroponic dutch buckets and promptly embraced the project. Even though his institute had basic entomology labs, sufficient for instance for breeding caterpillar eggs to feed the natural enemy, no infrastructure for massive production of the latter was available. A new, fully equipped laboratory for Trichogramma production along the lines of the ones found in Embrapa centers was part of the facilities that were being built by the project in Sotuba. Something even more important was missing from the context, however: the Trichogramma itself. In West Africa, there were no identified local species of this insect. Both the Malian entomologist and its Brazilian counterparts were certain that they existed, and that it would be worth looking for them locally rather than introducing exotic species from Brazil. In October 2011, I went on a field mission with them to look for caterpillar eggs infested with Trichogramma. They would do the search at random fields in cotton production areas, after asking permission from the local farmer or a relative to enter. The infected caterpillar eggs were tiny dark spots, and were searched visually, under the leaves or stuck to the capsules. Their agility in finding them was impressive; it took me a couple of hours just to learn how to differentiate a caterpillar egg from insect feces or a mere speck of dust. Eventually I did get the hang of it, and even if at that time of the year the high season for eggs had already passed, I was happy to give my humble contribution by finding a handful that seemed to be infected. The entomologists took whatever was found to the lab, where they carefully cut around the leaf pieces and put the eggs in cotton-sealed test tubes smeared with a drop of honey.
With luck, after a few days or weeks some larvae would emerge, and then be sent to Brazil for identification. As I followed up with them after my return to the U.S. in 2011 and2012, I learned that even though some of the eggs had hatched, none of the hatchlings were identified as Trichogrammas. This project task became part of the Malian entomologist’s personal quest: “I’m putting my own money into it, to pay for the gas, the food so that the technicians can go collect the eggs. I even dream about it at night”, he told me excitedly as I met him again for the last time. As a senior researcher, he is not far from retirement. If a Trichogramma is found and identified as a new species, it will be his legacy to world science, along with his technicians and his Brazilian partners. As I bade him farewell in November 2012 in what was to be my last field trip to Mali, he said again, “wish us good luck”. I replied that I was hoping the great event would happen still in time to register it in my dissertation.Plant breeding or variety improvement was one of the key areas of interest shown by the African partners. It includes not just conventional breeding, but conservation of genetic resources, germplasm exchange, and advanced fields like biotechnology and its regulatory science, bio-safety. Demands were made, and partly attended to, in all these sub-fields. While some parallel cross-breeding between the Brazilian and local varieties was carried out by the head Malian breeder, the focus during Phase I was on the transfer of Brazilian cotton varieties to the four African research institutes, and on building technical capacity among breeders. The project’s chief experimental activity in this component was the adaptation of ten cotton varieties spanning Embrapa’s portfolio of conventional cultivars. Eight of them had been bred for adaptation to environmental and productive conditions found in the cerrado agriculture. The ninth cultivar, a hybrid of herbaceous cotton and the mocó arboreal varieties typical of the Brazilian Northeast, had been bred for that semi-arid region, including for manual harvest and lower availability of fertilizers. The tenth was the most unique: a colored variety developed at the Campina Grande center. These and other Embrapa cultivars were still commonly grown in Brazil, even if, since the introduction of the first genetically modified cotton variety in 2005, seeds from biotechnology multinationals have been gaining steady ground in the cerrado agriculture.Unlike the other two project components, whose products appear explicitly in the complex form of systems, breeding has a more readily identifiable output: the improved cotton seed. But the apparent simplicity of the seed’s materiality eclipses the extensive socio-technical network that presided over its development, as well as the new one that must be put in place when the seed is sowed anew. In fact, even more than no-till or pest control, breeding is a science that must address multiple scales of the production system. New cotton varieties are bred not only according to so-called agronomic parameters .