Author: naturehydro

This information is provided to allow the reader to have ready access to trade data in a form that facilitates consideration of export gains for California agriculture. The bottom line is that the KORUS FTA would make U.S. products relatively cheaper in Korea and, as a result, the Korean market for U.S. products would expand. Further, the larger difference in tariffs on agricultural goods means that there is substantial potential for gains from the KORUS FTA in agricultural trade for the United States and California.The United States and South Korea formally announced their intention to start negotiations leading to a free trade agreement on February 2, 2006. After negotiation sessions in Washington, D.C., and Seoul, follow-up meetings were held in Seattle, Washington, and on Jeju Island in South Korea in late October 2006. The negotiations were very strenuous given the complexity of trade relations between the two countries coupled with the short deadline to conclude the negotiations . In the United States, negotiations were authorized under trade promotion authority legislation. The most recent trade promotion negotiation authority was granted to the president under the Bipartisan Trade Promotion Act of 2002 and expired on July 1, 2007 . The TPA requires a 90-day presidential notification to Congress of intent to sign the agreement. The KORUS FTA was finalized on the last possible day, April 1, 2007, and on June 30, 2007, trade officials representing the United States and South Korea signed it. Once an agreement is signed, the U.S. Congress must pass implementing legislation before the trade agreement can take effect. There is no binding deadline for such legislation and implementation of FTAs has often been delayed until long after the agreements were signed. Under the TPA legislation, Congress must either pass or reject an agreement as signed and may not amend it. Trade observers consider this provision a requirement for any trade negotiation to proceed.

Clearly,vertical farming tower for sale trading partners would find it futile to negotiate with the United States if the agreement reached could subsequently be unilaterally changed by Congress. Besides the World Trade Organization negotiations in the Doha Round, the United States has used TPA to engage in free trade initiatives in the western hemisphere, East Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, North Africa, and southern Africa. The United States has completed free trade agreements with Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Central America-5 , Israel, Australia, Chile, Jordan, and Morocco and has signed an FTA with the Dominican Republic, Peru, Oman, and Bahrain .2 Under a simple definition, an FTA is a pact between or among two or more countries under which tariffs and similar non-tariff border restrictions are eliminated among the parties to the agreement. Many, if not all, FTAs achieve less than full free trade. Even when barriers are removed, the gradual scheduling of liberalization and other rules make the agreements complex . Korea has FTAs with Chile , Singapore , ASEAN-10 , and EFTA-4 . Korea has negotiations under consideration with Japan, Canada, Mexico, and India .3 Korea is also considering FTAs with New Zealand and Australia . Korea’s existing FTAs allow only limited access for agricultural trade. For example, the Korean FTA with the ASEAN-10, signed in May 2006, excluded a number of agricultural items, including rice . Previous Korean FTAs also contained provisions intended for gradual market opening, such as schedules for phasing out tariffs and non-tariff barriers. Furthermore, those FTAs granted a preferential status to the Kaesong Industrial Complex, which houses South Korean companies near the North Korean city of Kaesong. Likewise, previous FTAs signed by the United States have included tariff reduction schedules and provisions for dispute resolution and related issues. Even though the United States and Korea have been political allies for many decades, they have a history of trade disputes that goes back long before the WTO entered into force in January 1995.

Since 1995, the two countries have fi led thirteen cases involving bilateral trade problems, seven by the United States and six by Korea. Six of the seven U.S. cases against Korea have involved problems with non-tariff protection in agriculture .South Korea has experienced phenomenal change in the last half century. It has gone from an extremely poor agrarian economy using nineteenth century technology at best to a wealthy modern society at the cutting edge of applied science and with some of the world’s most advanced technological firms dominating the economic landscape. In two generations, Korea went through changes that took 100 years or more in the United States and Europe. As GDP doubled and then doubled again and again, annual income went from only a few hundred dollars per capita to more than $20,000 per capita today. Meanwhile, manufacturing and services expanded and the share of agriculture in the economy declined from about 30% in 1970 to a little more than 3% now. The changes in dietary patterns in Korea were equally rapid. As recently as 1982, about 32% of monthly food expenditures went to cereal consumed at home. By 2005, that share had fallen to just 6%. Consumption of all other products at home, except processed products, has also fallen somewhat while food consumed away from home has jumped from just 6% of monthly expenditures to about 46% . The huge shift in expenditures on food away from home also indicates the nature of Korean society, in which most people live in urban apartments. They spend long hours away from home involved in school, work, commuting, and other activities. Of course, many of the food expenditures away from home are for food preparation and related services that are not included in food costs for home consumption. The same issues are reflected in data for the United States, where expenditures away from home have risen rapidly in recent decades. The rapid change in the Korean diet may also be gleaned from changes in nutrient consumption. In 1980, fully 75% of Korean calorie intake came from carbohydrates while 12% came from protein and 13% came from fat. By 2004, carbohydrate intake had fallen to 61% of calories and fat had risen to 26% .

The increased fat intake has been driven by increased consumption of meat and dairy products and the greater role of processed snacks and other processed foods in the diet. It also reflects the different composition of food consumed away from home. In the context of this economic and social revolution, agriculture has changed but not to the degree that industrial and service economies have. Under tight protection from imports,hydroponic vertical farm rice continued and even expanded as the dominant crop with 37% of acreage devoted to rice in 1970 and about 50% currently. Horticultural production has expanded substantially while barley and potato acreages have declined. The arable land devoted to fruit production has expanded from about 2% in 1970 to 8% today and greenhouse production grew from almost nothing to 2% of arable land . The dairy and beef industries have expanded to meet part of the increased domestic demand. Farm size has grown slowly in Korea but remains far below the average farm size of other industrial economies other than Japan. Korean agriculture has been like Japanese agriculture in another characteristic as well: protection from imports has kept much of agriculture insulated from competitive pressures from abroad, helped maintain rice as the dominant crop, and relied on high prices rather than farm size increases as the mechanism by which to maintain farm incomes relative to non-farm incomes. Per capita farm income in Korea grew along with the national average until the last decade. Since the early 1990s, per capita income of the farm population went from rough parity with the non-farm population to about 80% of non-farm incomes today . At the same time, a demographic transformation has occurred in the age pattern of the farm population . In 1970, more than 50% of the farm population was less than 20 years of age and only about 5% of the population was older than 65. In 2004, about 30% of the population was older than 65 and only about 15% was under 20 . This huge and rapid shift means that there are few young families with children left among farm families. There will be a huge turnover among farmers and, given the lack of successors available, farm consolidation is inevitable.Table 1.b reports the value of total merchandise trade for the two countries for the period 2000–2007. The United States incurred a significant trade deficit each year, while Korea has produced a trade surplus each year. The United States trades much more than Korea; in 2007, U.S. total trade was more than four times Korean trade in value. However, considering the relative size of the economy, it is important to note that trade has a more significant role in the Korean economy. In 2007, annual trade totaled about one quarter of U.S. GDP but about 80% for Korea. For the period 2000–2007, U.S. exports to Korea averaged close to $26 billion and about 3% of total U.S. exports go to Korea. U.S. merchandise exports to Korea declined sharply in 2001 but bounced back gradually, reaching the pre-slump level by 2005. During 2006/07, U.S. exports rose substantially, reaching $33 billion.

In the same year, Korea was the seventh largest export market for the United States. Major export items from the United States to Korea include semiconductor chips, manufacturing equipment, aircraft, and agricultural goods. Korea is equally important as a source for U.S. imports as it is the seventh largest import source. Consistent with the overall U.S. trade deficit, the United States incurs a deficit in bilateral trade with Korea. The trade deficit was $14 billion at the beginning of the century and has remained in the range of $12 to $14 billion in recent years. Even though U.S. exports to Korea grew substantially, U.S. imports from Korea also increased and the trade deficit has changed little. Almost all imports from Korea are manufactured goods. Unlike the United States, which has run a trade deficit overall for decades, Korea has run a trade surplus for many years. However, the trade surplus in general is not large—about 5% of the country’s exports—because Korea has to rely on foreign sources for much its raw materials. Over the time period considered, Korea expanded trade rapidly, doubling exports as well as imports. Consistent with the global importance of the U.S. economy, the United States represents a much larger proportion of Korean trade than Korea does of U.S. trade. In 2007 Korea represented, at most, 3% of U.S. trade as a buyer of U.S. goods and as a seller in the U.S. market. During that same year, the United States had about 9% of the Korean market and about 12% of total exports by Korea were destined for the United States. Korea’s trade has been dominated mostly by three countries: the United States, China, and Japan. in a similar magnitude for both imports and exports as the United States but the EU is excluded from the list of individual countries.Prior to 2000, Japan and the United States traded the position of top source of imports into Korea. However, since 2000, Japanese exports to Korea have surpassed U.S. exports and Japan has remained as the top source of Korean imports. With the emergence of China, the United States’ relative position in Korea declined further. As shown in Table 1.c, since 2004 China has replaced the United States as the second source of Korean imports after Japan. China also is the largest market for Korean goods, having replaced the United States in 2003. Major Korean exports to the United States include cellular phones, cars, semiconductor circuits, televisions, fl at panel screens, and construction vehicles .Agricultural goods are important export commodities in the United States. Table 1.d provides values of agricultural trade for the United States and Korea for recent years. In 2007, agricultural trade occupied about 9% of U.S. merchandise exports and 4% of merchandise imports . The U.S. agricultural sector consistently produces a trade surplus and contributes to reducing the trade deficit .

Whether these ameliorants, or sorbents, such as zeolites or biochar, are effective agronomic treatments will depend on the system’s vulnerability to N losses. Experiments in controlled conditions have shown that sorbents can optimize NH+ 4 release considerably . Other technological interventions currently available include plastic mulch, now in widespread use in parts of China . While developed as a water conservation measure, plastic also heats soil and thereby accelerates N mineralization as the growing season progresses . However, the long term application of plastic mulching can lead to pollution that damages soil health and threatens long-term food security . Manipulating the microbes responsible for soil N cycling could be a fruitful frontier for future research. We are only now learning the functional importance of the myriad plant microbe associations that form the plant microbiome, and emerging evidence that plants can stimulate rhizosphere microbes to oxidize soil carbon implies that plants might also be bred or engineered to harness the micro-biome for N release. Or that the micro-biome might be intentionally composed to include microbes capable of mineralizing soil organic N when triggered by plant N demand. Additionally, slow-release N fertilizers or even cover crops might be created with an enhanced ability to release organic N when similarly triggered. Management of fertilizer N in paddy soils is notoriously difficult due to loss of N through NH3 volatilization from the floodwaters. The deep placement of urea granules is one technology to enhance N capture by rice and reduce losses, although demanding in terms of labor . Climate mitigation practices to reduce methane emissions from paddy rice call for periodic drainage ,raspberry cultivation pot which will make N management all the more difficult as organic N mineralizes to NH+ 4 that will then undergo nitrification to NO− 3 during drained periods with subsequent loss via denitrification upon re-wetting.

Losses can be mitigated with management that avoids the presence of excessive mineral N pools in the soil at these high risk time periods, such as split N applications, retaining crop residue, and keeping N balances in check.Precision agriculture is a farm management approach that seeks to identify practices that optimize the use of farm inputs . As a result, precision management relies on technologies that enable intensive data collection, processing, and evaluation needed to properly characterize and synthesize temporal and spatial variability. Theoretically, the variance in yield and environmental outcomes is attributable to measurable climatic, edaphic, and management factors. Precision agriculture is not exclusively focused upon N management, but improving NUE is a common goal given the potential variance of crop N demand across the landscape and with time. Site-specific management can help tailor N applications, improve NUE, increase profits, and/or minimize risk of N loss . NUE, as a performance outcome, can also be used to evaluate management decisions in fields characterized by high spatial and temporal variability in biophysical conditions . Coincidently, a cornerstone of tactical N management is fine-tuning in-season N management to meet crop N needs based upon the status of the plant. For example, the N nutritional index can be used to determine whether the crop N concentration is sub-optimal relative to the critical N dilution curve at maximum yield , while the N sufficiency index can assess status by referencing a well-fertilized area . A rapid, non-destructive assessment of field or sub-field NUE depends upon the remote or proximal sensing tools and algorithms that reliably monitor N concentrations in the crop . The working assumption is that crop N sufficiency status is functionally related to plant N either expressed as a concentration or accumulation in the leaf or plant. Though not always consistent across growth stage and fertilizer rate, chlorophyll or protein indicators can be used as proxies for N status due to the strong relationship between Ncontaining compounds and N content .

Many different vegetation indices are widely used to estimate crop N content or accumulation, alleviating confounding factors from soils or water, which are generally calculated from the leaf or canopy reflectance values of wavebands in the visible and near infrared regions . Rapid developments in sensing technologies coupled with machine learning have increased our abilities to accurately predict yield and non-destructively estimate plant N status . However, challenges persist for practitioners , including the influence of growth stage, cultivars, and N management across space and time, as well as the limitation imposed as indices approach saturation levels. Furthermore, canopy sensing data is often instantaneous, infrequent, and does not capture the N status of the entire plant , thus potentially missing dynamic N behavior in the plant pertinent to making timely recommendations. To combat these limitations, Fu et al. recommends that hyperspectral data be integrated with crop growth models and radiative transfer models to improve assessments. The variance in crop and soil data can also be used to delineate sub-field management zones through the combination of sensing, geostatistical, and interpolation techniques . However, when developing site specific N recommendations, precision agriculture tools must also account for the dynamic nature of soil N and crop uptake efficiencies across landscapes . Furthermore, recommendations that rely primarily on vegetation indices cannot guide pre-planting or pre-emergent N decisions. Therefore, an integrative site specific N management approach links georeferenced decision support models to dynamic biogeochemical models that simulate outcomes based upon relevant crop, soil, weather, management, and enterprise factors . Models that simulate N status can then be validated through field measurements collected throughout the growing season. Therefore, precision agriculture technologies are compatible within an adaptive N management framework, in which site specific empirical data is used to improve model accuracy on a field or sub-field level . Ultimately, data from these various sources can be fused through machine learning or other techniques to provide on-the-go assessments and automated recommendations . Crop sensing and georeferenced management data could be used to calculate and map NUE spatially and temporally for assessment purposes. As a performance indicator, NUE can help evaluate fertilizer management within the context of yield and crop quality goals, and even diagnose factors contributing to inefficiencies of fertilizer use . As an environmental indicator, NUE estimates can help farmers assess the risk of N losses from farms or fields, or relative to regional or supply chain estimates .

Variable rate N fertilizer technology could substantially reduce N losses by matching the low plant N demand in low fertility sub-field areas with appropriately reduced fertilizer rates,low round pots as could planting these areas to perennial conservation or bio-energy species. With current technology, the best way to capture unused N after the main crop’s growing season is by using cover crops planted to grow quickly following senescence of the main crop. The N that cover crops remove from the soil solution is N that is not lost to the environment and instead can be remobilized from cover crop biomass to provide N to the following year’s main crop. Although plants cannot use atmospheric N2 directly, it has been known for over a century that diverse bacteria and archaea, known as diazotrophs, can convert atmospheric N2 to NH3 through BNF and that the NH3 produced can be utilized directly or indirectly by plants for growth . Diazotrophs can be found in bulk soil, within the rhizosphere of plants, physically-associated with plant roots and other organs, and even inside plants within specialized, N fixing organs called nodules . Rates of BNF by free-living diazotrophs in soil are typically low, between 1 and 20 kg N ha−1 yr−1 , although associative N fixation by microbes in the rhizosphere or on plant surfaces may contribute significantly to plant growth in low-N input systems . In contrast, BNF in nodules is highly efficient, and in high-yield environments can exceed 300 kg N ha−1 yr−1 as nutrient exchange between plants and their intracellular bacterial endosymbionts is highly targeted , avoiding losses of plant-C and bacterialammonia to the soil and associated microbiome. However, BNF in nodules is confined largely to legumes and a few nonlegume plant families , while most crop species, including cereals, are unable to access atmospheric N2 in this way. The escalating global N problem has sparked renewed interest in BNF as a partial solution, deployable through: development and use of legumes and rhizobia with increased BNF potential; development of more-effective associative N fixation in non-legumes, especially the major cereals; and potentially through the engineering of nodule symbioses or even plants capable of fixing their own N . BNF in grain legumes remains an important source of N in many cropping systems, where it contributes to higher NUE, although the relative contribution of legumes in agriculture has declined with the increase in N fertilizer use. This was partly due to the emphasis on cereal production in the policies of the Green Revolution, which replaced traditional cereal-legume crop rotations in countries like India, leading to scarcity of grain legumes and even imports from Africa . Therefore, there is tremendous scope to increase the contribution of legume BNF to agriculture, via systems agronomy and plant breeding approaches , and by improving the effectiveness and resilience of rhizobium strains used as inoculants . Growing legumes, as grain or green manure crops, and recycling shoot biomass to the soil generally improves soil fertility, increases the yield of the subsequent crop, and reduces the requirement for synthetic N.

Many reports cite more grain production in cereals grown after a legume, than after a nonlegume or after a fallow . Legumes are often used in short-term rotation, such as cornsoybean, or in continuous corn with a legume winter cover crop. These systems offer farmers many benefits, and help to solve environmental problems associated with N use in agriculture. In many developing regions of the world, legumes are used extensively to meet protein requirements. Nevertheless, in past decades, the widespread availability of synthetic Nfertilizer and low yields of legumes relative to cereals have resulted either in a stagnation or a decrease in the area under cultivation of legumes in different regions . There are several environmental and economic constraints limiting legume yield and profitability that may be responsible for a decrease in legume cultivation. In a recent review, Vanlauwe et al. argued that although considerable progress has been made in understanding grain legume agronomy, the relationship between legumes and rhizobia populations, the benefits of BNF to farming systems, and the spatial and temporal integration of legumes in these systems are important knowledge gaps that prevent the formulation of recommendations that would further enhance the contributions of legumes to farming systems in Sub-Saharan Africa . They recommend integration of BNF in breeding programs and improvements in overall agronomy to maximize the potential of symbiosis through eliminating various soil and other environmental constraints. Legumes are also an attractive option for mixed-crop systems where two crop species are grown simultaneously in the same field. But despite advantages of inter cropping that include greater resource use efficiency, including NUE, inter cropping remains ‘at the fringes of modern intensive agriculture’ . This may change when the benefits of inter cropping are realized, with a recent estimate that globally increased NUE of cereal-legume inter cropping reduces the requirements for fossil based fertilizer N by about 26% . Challenges will include planting using the same implements, weed management, and harvesting. There is growing interest in the development of effective associative N fixation for cereal crops, especially maize, rice, and wheat , and as well for perennial forage and bio-energy grasses . These range from simply isolating, testing, and deploying the most effective natural plant-associated diazotrophs of target plant species, based primarily on plant growth promotion , to current attempts to edit the genomes of such bacteria to remove genetic controls that prevent N fixation and NH3 release in agricultural soils containing potentially high levels of mineral and organic-N . Decades of genetic, genomic, and biochemical research and technology development provide a basis for attempts to edit or engineer diazotrophs for optimal association with non-legumes . However, it is difficult to estimate small amounts of BNF in the field and many recent claims of large amounts of fixed N in cereals result from flawed application of measurement methods .

Studies in the California Delta have suggested that while C loss and subsidence rates have both been declining over time relative to the rapid losses after initial drainage, the relative importance of SOM mineralization losses has been increasing. Deverel and Leighton estimated that 67% of subsidence since 1995 could be attributed to SOM losses on a neighboring Delta island, a value which agrees with work from other drained peat lands showing an increase in the relative importance of mineralization over time.The estimated annual subsidence by this method was 0.11 cm yr-1 at Site 1 and 0.07 cm yr-1 at Site 2. Some caution is needed, however, in interpreting these subsidence estimates because of the assumptions involved in calculating them, particularly the use of the soil bulk density and fraction of subsidence due to SOM loss. Yet these results are in close agreement with Hatala et al. who estimated 0.10–0.14 cm yr-1 subsidence loss at this site using eddy covariance tower measurements to develop and C budget. Both these studies suggest that rice systems reduce subsidence relative to regional averages of 1–3 cm yr-1, and rates measured in a maize field at the same site of 2.5 cm yr-1. Our analysis also indicates that after the first four years since conversion to rice agriculture, seasonal flooding is however not adequate to achieve soil gains similar to those observed in constructed wetlands. Measuring subsidence directly in a dynamic, intensely managed agricultural system is difficult,hydroponic net pots and thus all methods provide only estimates. Methods using extensometers to estimate the surface elevation relative to fixed anchors [c.f. 16] require specialized equipment and many years to examine a trend in the data.

In this context, using this N budget approach may be preferable as it is less resource intensive and can easily be integrated with a farmer’s management practices on a small portion of land, and further study that could refine bulk density and consolidation measurements including an assessment of temporal change in these factors would be valuable to more directly link SOM-N mineralization estimates with ongoing subsidence in the field.alifornia has led the nation in farm sales since 1950, largely because of the state’s specialization in high-value fruit and vegetable crops. California’s farm sales of $54 billion in 2014 included $20.8 billion worth of fruits and nuts, $8.3 billion worth of vegetables and melons and $5.4 billion worth of horticultural specialties such as greenhouse and nursery products. The value of field crops such as cotton, hay and rice was $4 billion, making crop sales of $38 billion almost three-fourths of the state’s farm sales. Livestock and poultry sales were $16 billion, including $9 billion from milk. Fruit, vegetable and horticultural crops accounted for 90% of the state’s crop sales and two-thirds of its farm sales. The production of many fruits and vegetables is relatively labor intensive, with labor representing 20% to 40% of production costs. California growers reported paying $11.4 billion in wages in 2014, making labor costs over 20% of farm sales. Almost 45% of these labor costs was for support activities for crop production, primarily payments to farm labor contractors, custom harvesters and other non–farm businesses that bring workers to farms. Hired workers, rather than self-employed farm operators and their families, do most of the work on the state’s largest farms that produce almost all labor-intensive FVH crops. Most California farm workers were born in Mexico, and 60% of crop workers employed on the state’s crop farms have been unauthorized for the past decade, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey, which is 10 percentage points higher than the U.S. average of 50%.

Farm employers say that farm workers present seemingly valid documentation and Social Security numbers when they are hired, so they do not know who is unauthorized. Several factors, including increased production of labor-intensive crops, a tightening of border controls that has slowed arrivals of new farm workers, and proposals to give some unauthorized foreigners a temporary legal status, have intensified interest in current and future farm workers, with farm employers arguing that there are farm labor shortages and worker advocates countering that there is only a shortage of wages to attract and retain farm workers. While California regularly reports the number of jobs on farms across the state, it does not report the number of wage and salary workers who fill them. Our objective was to provide a clearer picture of California’s agricultural workforce by determining the actual number of wage and salary workers in agriculture.The state’s Employment Development Department obtains data on farm workers and wages paid when it collects unemployment insurance taxes from employers. Employers who pay more than $100 in quarterly wages are required to register with the EDD and pay taxes of up to 6% on the first $7,000 of each worker’s earnings to cover the cost of unemployment insurance benefits for laid-off workers. We extracted all wage and salary workers reported by California agricultural employers in 2014 and tabulated all of their farm and non–farm jobs and earnings in the state; we excluded wage and salary workers in forestry, fishing and hunting. This allowed us to assign workers with more than one job to their primary industry, that is, to the NAICS code of the employer where they had their maximum earnings. We excluded about 800 SSNs because of apparent problems, such as excessive number of jobs reported in a quarter .Average employment on the state’s farms is derived from employer reports of workers on the payroll for the pay period that includes the 12th of the month. Most farm workers are paid weekly, so an average 410,900 workers employed in 2014 means that this is the average employment of workers on agricultural payrolls during the second week of the month. Workers employed during the month but not during the payroll period that includes the 12th are not included in published average employment data because it is a monthly snapshot, summed and divided by 12 months. Our analysis, however, captures these additional workers because we obtain data on all wage and salary workers hired by agricultural employers at any time, including farm workers, managers and office workers.

Figure 1 shows average employment in California agriculture since 1990. Average employment rose 10%, reflecting a decline in direct-hire employment on crop farms , stable employment in animal agriculture , and a 50% increase in crop support employment , most of which is with farm labor contractors. Since 2010, average employment reported by crop support establishments has been rising by 10,000 a year, so that in 2014 non–farm crop support firms brought more workers to crop farms, an average of over 205,000, than crop farms hired directly, 175,000. In 2014, two-thirds of average employment in crop support services, 207,600, involved farm labor contractors. Very few workers are employed in livestock support services. Average employment can be considered to be an estimate of full-time equivalent jobs, but it is not the total number of farm workers. When average employment in California agriculture was 410,900 in 2014, there were 829,000 unique SSNs reported by agricultural establishments, a two-to-one worker-to-job ratio . In 2012,blueberry grow pot when average employment was 395,400, there were 802,600 unique SSNs, also a two-to-one worker-to-job ratio. There was a similar two-to-one ratio of workers to average jobs in 2007. The 829,000 people employed in agriculture during 2014 earned $11.4 billion from agricultural employers and another $4.5 billion from non-farm employers. Average earnings for all workers with at least one farm employer were over $19,000 in 2014, while average earnings for workers who had their maximum earnings in agriculture were $16,500, up almost 8% from $15,300 in 2012. The California jobs of the workers reported by California farm employers can be tabulated, and workers can be assigned to the NAICS or commodity in which they had the highest earnings. For example, approximately 692,000 of the 829,000 workers employed in agriculture had their highest earnings from a farm employer in 2014, and 499,000 of these primary farm workers had only one agricultural employer . In 2014, the crop support and fruit and nut sectors had the lowest average earnings, with $12,719 for crop support and $17,600 for fruits and nuts. This explains why the overall average earnings of primary farm workers were only $16,500 even though all commodities except crop support and fruit and nut had higher average earnings, such as the $29,223 average earnings in cattle ranching. Over three-fourths of the $11.4 billion in agricultural earnings were from three NAICS codes: 1151 crop support activities , 1113 fruits and nuts and 1112 vegetables . Other major sources of agricultural earnings were NAICS 1114 greenhouses and nurseries and 1121 cattle and dairy .

By assigning all of the state’s 829,300 farm workers to the NAICS code of the employer where they had maximum earnings in 2014, we identified several groups. First, almost 692,000 of farm workers had their maximum earnings from agricultural establishments, including 392,000 whose maximum earnings were from NAICS 1151 crop support establishments, 154,000 whose maximum earnings were from NAICS 1113 fruit and nut establishments and 45,000 whose maximum earnings were from NAICS 1112 vegetable establishments. There are over 20 agricultural NAICS codes, but three sectors — crop support firms , fruit and nut farms, and vegetable and melon farms — accounted for 85% of all primary farm workers in 2014. Second, almost 500,000 farm workers, or 72% of primary farm workers, had only one job in 2014, meaning that three-fourths of workers whose maximum earnings were from agricultural establishments worked for only one agricultural employer in California. These “one-farm employer” workers were in the same three types of establishments as all primary farm workers: 288,000 were in NAICS 1151 crop support establishments, 103,000 were in NAICS 1113 fruit and nut establishments and 31,000 were in NAICS 1112 vegetable establishments. A closer look at workers whose maximum earnings were in particular NAICS codes found that 103,000, or two-thirds of the 154,000 directly hired fruit and nut workers, were employed by just one fruit and nut establishment. Similarly, over 288,000, or almost three-fourths of the 392,000 workers whose maximum earnings were in crop support, had only one crop-support employer, although crop support employees may work on multiple farms during the year. Over three-fourths of workers in livestock production were employed by one livestock establishment. Third, there were 94,000 primary farm workers with at least two farm employers in 2014. Of these, half had their maximum earnings from NAICS 1151 crop support establishments , but only an eighth of crop support workers had two farm employers. About 20% of those whose maximum earnings were from fruit and vegetable growers had at least two farm employers. Almost 72,000 farm workers had at least one farm and at least one non-farm employer in 2014, and almost 60% of these workers had their maximum earnings from NAICS 1151 crop support establishments, followed by 18% whose maximum earnings were from fruit growers. The most common non-farm jobs were in manufacturing; professional, scientific and technical services; and accommodation and food services. Finally, some 26,000 workers whose maximum earnings were in agriculture had at least two farm employers and at least one non-farm employer. Over half of these workers had their maximum earnings in crop support services and over a quarter in fruit and tree nut farming . The combined 220,500 workers with at least two employers in 2014 were most often employed in the same county. For example, over 8% of these two employer workers had two jobs in Kern County, followed by 6% with two jobs in Fresno County and 5% with two jobs in Monterey County. Approximately 22% of workers with two jobs in 2014 were employed in 1113 fruits and nuts and 1151 crop support, followed by 5% to 6% who combined 1151 with 5613 employment services, 1113 fruits and nuts with another 1113 job, at least two 1151 crop support jobs, and 1112 vegetables with 1151 crop support.The number of wage and salary workers employed on California farms is of great interest because of fears that farm labor shortages could reduce the state’s production of labor-intensive crops.

To obtain an initial sense of the dispersion of agricultural production across market catchment areas, I use a comprehensive database of the caloric value of food crops in Africa to assign an approximate caloric level per unit weight to all staple carbohydrates and convert production data into calories. The median market catchment area had a 2010 population of 2.37 million and has an average production per capita of 1,863 kcal per day of staple carbohydrates during my study period. Average production ranges from 0 to 10,347 kcal per person per day with 63 markets producing less than 1,000 kcal per person per day and 54 markets producing more than 3,000 kcal per person per day, suggesting significant opportunities for net trade between markets.My model uses the notation and basic framework of the one-commodity, two-market rational expectations storage and trade model of Williams and Wright 1991, chapter 9, which I extend to include the storage and trade of 6 grains across the network of 230 African markets and the world market built in the previous section. I embed this storage and trade model within a simple general equilibrium setting by including a composite outside good. While the six grains are subject to trade costs between locations , the outside good has no trade costs so that its price is the same in all locations, and I choose units so as to normalize its price to 110. Production of the outside good is used either for final consumption or for trade and storage services in the agricultural sector. In my simplest baseline case reflective of the short-term, I abstract away from production decisions by letting production of both the 6 grains and the outside good be an exogenous endowment that is unaffected by price changes. In an extension presented at the end of this section, I explicitly model production in each sector and allow for reallocation of factors of production between sectors in response to price changes.

In each location,dutch bucket for tomatoes a representative consumer chooses monthly consumption of each grain and the outside good to maximize utility and a representative competitive grain trader with rational expectations chooses monthly storage, trade, and local sales of each grain to maximize profits. I proceed by considering each of these agents in turn. Having estimated both the demand parameters and the cost parameters, I proceed to use the estimated parameters to solve the model for equilibrium storage, trade, consumption, and prices of every grain in every market in every month. Before proceeding to my counterfactual analysis in the next section, it is important to verify the goodness of fit of the baseline estimated model. Of the four equilibrium variables, the only one I observe at the monthly, market level is prices, so I focus on comparing the model-generated equilibrium prices to the price data. Figure 1.5 shows the actual maize price series from the 4 markets in Kenya and Tanzania from figure 1.1 together with the model-generated price series for these markets. In general, the correlation of the levels of the actual and model-generated price series is high. The correlation coefficient for the average prices for a given market and crop is 0.787. Within markets for all pairs of two crops, the model correctly predicts which crop has a higher average price 83.3% of the time. The correlation of the model-generated prices and the price data within a particular price series seems lower, although the goodness of fit is more difficult to measure. The median correlation coefficient within price series is 0.385. As is clear from the sample price series in figure 1.5, there are many month-to-month price fluctuations that cannot be explained by the parsimonious data used by the representative traders in my model. It is also the case that the correlation coefficient does not fully reflect the goodness of fit of the price series.

The maize price series from figure 1.5, for instance, have within series correlation coefficients of 0.136 , 0.217 , 0.171 , and 0.174 for this period despite the fact that the overall shapes of the series appear quite similar between the data and the model. In addition to monthly, market-level prices, I also observe annual, country-level trade flows as reported in national trade statistics and compiled by CEPII’s BACI project , which includes 37 of my 42 countries of interest as well as the rest of the world, which I group together into a 38th country. Although these data are much less detailed than my model-generated trade data , I can aggregate up my monthly, market-level equilibrium trade quantities and compare them to the annual, country-level data. In table 1.11, I compare net trade flows in the model and the data at different levels of aggregation. The first four rows compare net trade flows at the country level without distinguishing between specific origins and destinations, while in the bottom four rows I attempt to make this distinction by assigning observed trade with non-contiguous partner countries to the adjacent country through which such trade would have to pass so as to enable comparison with my model-generated trade flows. Correlation coefficients between net trade flows in the model and the data are generally very high, although they are somewhat lower at the lowest levels of aggregation. Despite high correlation coefficients, the model appears to perform only moderately well at predicting whether net trade flows are positive, negative, or zero in the data. However, this is largely due to sign discrepancies for very small or zero net trade flows. Once trade flows below a minimum threshold are dropped, the model predicts the correct sign for net trade flows for well above 80% of observations at all levels of aggregation. Discrepancies between the model and the data — particularly for small trade volumes — are likely due in part to the existence of significant informal grain trade flows across borders in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, which are not captured by official trade statistics.

Tschirley and Jayne2010, for instance, cite estimates of informal, unrecorded cross-border trade flows of maize between Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe exceeding 100,000 t/year. Having estimated the model and established that it can reproduce both the price data and annual, country-level trade data reasonably well, in the next section I conduct my counterfactual analysis in which I compare equilibrium outcomes under the baseline model to outcomes under counter factuals in which I change some of the demand parameters, cost parameters, or exogenous variables. Standard errors in table 1.12 were obtained using a computationally-intensive bootstrapping procedure with 40 iterations. For each iteration, I re-solved the model for equilibrium storage, trade, consumption, and prices under both high and low trade costs using different demand and cost parameter estimates obtained by re-sampling the data used to estimate each parameter with replacement. Due to the lengthy run-time, I limit my iterations to 40 and do not report standard errors for the later counter factuals in this chapter. In addition to the direct effect on price levels, lowering trade costs also affects local price volatility. In absolute terms, the average standard deviation of prices for the 511 grain price series falls from 0.188 to 0.123 under low trade costs. However, in relative terms, the average coefficient of variation increases from 0.330 to 0.387 due to the fall in the mean prices. In absolute terms,blueberry grow pot the frequency of grain prices over 1 USD/kg falls dramatically from 12.5% to 0.9% when trade costs are lowered. In relative terms, the frequency of grain prices exceeding double the series mean increases slightly from 2.0% to 2.1%. Lowering trade costs does therefore appear to be effective at preventing local prices from far exceeding regional and international levels as they have during events like the Horn of Africa famine , but relative price volatility remains significant as high storage costs and similar agricultural calendars within regions mean that seasonal price fluctuations continue to be substantial . The aggregate results in table 1.12 do not reflect the heterogeneity of the effects of reducing trade costs across African markets and countries. Table 1.13 summarizes this heterogeneity by grouping markets and countries according to the sign of the changes they experience in their average grain price index, their net agricultural revenues, and their overall welfare when trade costs are lowered.

The 181 markets and 37 countries in Group A are primarily net grain importers and experience changes similar to the continent-wide aggregate with falling prices and revenues and increasing welfare. The 14 markets and 2 countries in Group B are primarily net grain exporters who experience price increases, revenue increases, and welfare increases under lower trade costs. This is not the case for all exporting regions: the 24 markets in Group C are net exporters that experience price decreases, revenue decreases, and welfare losses. These are mostly landlocked surplus regions that experience negative terms-of-trade effects when the urban and coastal regions they trade with are able to access cheaper grain imports from the world market. Finally, a small group of 10 markets and 2 countries in Group D experience price decreases, revenue gains, and welfare gains due to their particular crop mix and/or their changing export position over time. The results discussed thus far reflect the effects of reducing trade costs in the short run when factors of production cannot reallocate between sectors. In the longer run, the large price changes that my model predicts under lower trade costs are likely to lead to the reallocation of factors of production. In the majority of markets , the decrease in the relative price of grains would lead to a shift of factors of production out of agriculture and into the outside good sector. Using my production model developed previously, I use the actual harvests and the baseline equilibrium prices to back out the implied productivity shocks Bimt and then re-solve the counterfactual with an endogenous supply response using different values for the price elasticity of supply η. Roberts and Schlenker estimate the year-to-year price elasticity of supply for staple grains at 0.097. In the longer run, η may be larger , while a value of η = 1 would be considered unusually high in the agriculture literature. My model and estimation strategy included several important assumptions. In this section, I explore the effects of relaxing some of these assumptions. When defining market catchment areas, I allocated all agricultural production in my 42 countries of interest to the 230 markets in my network. As an alternative, I define market catchment areas for all 263 markets on my initial ideal list and then drop production in the catchment areas of the 33 markets for which I was unable to obtain price data. Re-solving the model for both baseline and counterfactual scenarios using these revised production data does not change my results substantially. Results for all indicators in table 1.12 are well within 95% confidence intervals constructed using the standard errors reported there. For my baseline estimation, I used the Cobb-Douglas elasticity of substitution and set the price elasticity of demand for grains to match the estimate of Roberts and Schlenker 2013 . Both of these values are at the lower end of elasticity estimates in the literature. In table 1.15, I compare my baseline results to results obtained using larger elasticities in my estimation. Each time I change an elasticity, I re-estimate the other demand parameters using the new elasticities, re-solve the model under both existing high trade costs and counterfactual low trade costs, and report the aggregate effects of lowering trade costs in table 1.15. Increasing the elasticity of substitution σ to 3 has virtually no impact on my aggregate results. Increasing the price elasticity of demand to −0.5 leads to less of a fall in expenditure on grains and net agricultural revenues, as consumers increase expenditure more under lower prices. However, the average fall in the grain price index is nearly the same as before, with net grain imports from the world market increasing by nearly eight times as much to cover increased demand. The overall welfare increase from decreasing trade costs does not change significantly from my baseline case. I next analyse the effects of my assumption about trader expectations, which is necessary for model tractability but is likely to lead to underestimates of equilibrium storage by eliminating the effects of uncertainty.

In addition, the number of households that rely on a single water supply source is only 22 on average, and more communities have access to surface water as drinking water supply source.About half of the final Ag-MAR parcels are associated with extremely and very highly vulnerable communities; most are located within Tulare County . A total of 1,334 parcels are associated with communities with high and moderate vulnerability, while 150 Ag-MAR parcel are associated with low vulnerability communities. Among the Ag-MAR parcels associated with extremely, very highly, and highly vulnerable communities, about 68% of the parcels have excellent soil suitability and are planted with vineyards . Likewise, Ag-MAR parcels associated with moderate and low vulnerability communities have predominantly excellent soil suitability and the majority of the parcels are either vineyards, planted with field crops, or idle . There are fewer Ag-MAR parcels surrounding rural communities in the southern part of the study area where large urban centers provide less opportunity to implement Ag-MAR as a mitigation strategy. Figure 7a also indicates that there are some communities, particularly in the western and southwestern part of the study area, where no suitable Ag-MAR parcels could be found within the well capture zones. In fact, suitable Ag-MAR parcels could only be identified for about half of the 288 communities,vertical hydroponic nft system leaving 139 communities without nearby Ag-MAR sites. For these communities, Ag-MAR potential was mainly diminished by soil suitability and lack of surface water conveyance infrastructure . Of the 149 communities for which suitable Ag-MAR parcels could be identified, 88 communities had at least 10 associated Ag-MAR parcels, and 60 communities had at least 20 associated parcels.

There were 61 communities with less than 10 associated parcels, 14 of which had only one associated parcel.Although a wide variety of decision support tools are available for general surface and groundwater management and drinking water quality in California ; none of these tools provide information on mitigation or remediation options for chronic groundwater overdraft or contamination. This study is the first effort to systematically explore the potential for targeted Ag-MAR to directly improve the drinking water supply from groundwater in rural communities. In past decades, MAR has been used to achieve varying objectives , however, implementation of MAR is often limited by challenges of recharge water availability , locating suitable groundwater recharge zones, regulatory constraints, and funding obstacles . Ag-MAR overcomes many of these challenges due to low capital cost and permitting requirements , and with appropriate planning can be used to provide multiple benefits to a region including stabilized domestic and agricultural water supply, flood control, and climate change mitigation . However, Ag-MAR implementation in the southern CV might be constrained by the existing surface water conveyance capacity, which Hanak et al. deemed inadequate for capturing and moving high flows to suitable recharge locations. Conveyance capacity data were not available for this analysis, but according to Hanak et al. represents one of the major limitations for MAR implementation. In this study, almost 3,000 land parcels suitable for Ag-MAR ranging in size from 0.2 to 260 ha have been located within the well capture zones of rural communities. Of the 288 rural communities included in this analysis, 253 communities rely on groundwater as their main source of drinking water. However, suitable Ag-MAR parcels could only be identified within the capture zones of 149 of the 288 communities, 144 of which are reliant on groundwater for their drinking water supply. Most of the communities for which no nearby AgMAR parcels could be identified are located near large urban areas or near the CV rim, where topography and a lack of conveyance infrastructure prohibit Ag-MAR. A complex political and socio-economic environment around water governance in the region has historically prevented more inclusive water management but for these communities, other types of MAR , well head treatment, or incorporation into nearby public water supply systems might be the only options to improve the quantity and quality of drinking water supplies.

For reference, 118 of the 288 communities studied have no access to public water supply sources but 56% of these communities are within the boundaries of existing public water supply systems.MAR site selection studies using GIS-based MCDA approaches have been developed in many regions across the world . The majority of these studies use slope, land use, geology and soil type as the main criteria for identifying MAR sites . Similarly, our study uses soil characteristics and land use as the main criteria to determine Ag-MAR site suitability, but differs from earlier studies in that we refine suitable sites by linking the GIS analysis with deterministic groundwater modeling and particle tracking to only select sites with potential to benefit the drinking water supply in rural communities. The integration of groundwater modeling and particle tracking also ensured the inclusion of climate and hydrogeological data in the analysis. However, the groundwater modeling also introduced uncertainty in the estimated well capture zones, due to the spatio-temporal resolution of the model and because a quasisteady-state groundwater flow field was used for the particle tracking. The generalized groundwater flow field likely does not capture local spatio-temporal dynamics in the flow field caused by seasonal pumping, which can change or reverse some of the flow directions depicted in Figure 5. These seasonal dynamics should be considered in the final selection of Ag-MAR locations using field-level studies. In addition, in groundwater-dependent regions where an integrated surface water-groundwater model is not available, well capture zones may need to be derived from field observations. The Ag-MAR locations identified in this study relied on the integration of regionally specific data for the southern CV, but the methodology can be applied to other groundwater-dependent regions. To implement the Ag-MAR site suitability analysis, regional soil or geomorphology data can be used instead of SAGBI, and land use and surface water hydrology can be inferred from air photographs and satellite images.

Similarly, data descriptive of the socio-economic status of rural communities in groundwater-dependent regions or adverse environmental effects of human activities and groundwater overdraft on rural populations can be substituted with locally available demographic data or remote sensing data , respectively. In regions where little geologic or physiographic data exists, nft hydroponic system growing availability of high-resolution remote sensing data of land surface and subsurface characteristics may be useful . Many previous MAR site suitability studies were conducted to inform sustainable groundwater management , to serve as guidelines and decision support for farmers and policy makers , or to raise general interest for MAR development . However, as showcased in this study, GIS-based MCDA can also be used to identify priority areas for intervention or disaster management if site suitability analysis is combined with vulnerability analysis . This combination can be particularly useful in water resources management because the outputs can provide easily interpretable visual information, help refine the spatial focus of the problem, support priority development, and allow for assessment of different management scenarios before field-level investigations begin.To date, few MAR site suitability studies have conducted a sensitivity analysis or validation of recommended sites . Previous MAR suitability assessment studies have used indirect methods to validate MAR locations , while few have used numerical models and in situ observations . With this study, we propose to guide selection of suitable MAR sites by ensuring quantifiable benefits to groundwater levels, storage, water quality, and land subsidence. Although water management agencies maintain multiple MAR basins in the southern CV, most of these facilities have not been implemented to benefit the domestic water supply to rural communities. The Tulare Irrigation District has a 42 ha MAR basin located south of the Okieville community that has been operational since the 1940 . The recharge basin overlays the capture zone of the community’s southern groundwater wells. Its location was accurately identified by this study as suitable Ag-MAR location . Data from Okieville domestic wells show groundwater quality improvements from MAR, including lower nitrate, uranium and arsenic concentrations, which are well below the groundwater concentrations of nearby communities . These indicate that our methodology has positively identified locations where recharge can improve the drinking water supply of rural communities in a region of our study area. Although many studies have used GIS-based MCDA for MAR suitability studies, there is no consensus on appropriate criteria, weights, and methods as these are generally dependent on the study objective, data availability, and local experience .

The assignment of weights to each thematic layer or feature is one of the most subjective factors of MCDA and thus, one of the main sources of uncertainty . To address this issue, AHP is increasingly used to convert subjective assessments of relative importance into a set of weights , though sometimes the relative importance of themes may not be discernable . In this study, local experts in hydrology and human ecology similarly recommended the use of equal weights for thematic layers in both the site suitability and community vulnerability analyses. However, future iterations of these analyses will require the active involvement of local stakeholders , a process that may benefit greatly from the integration of AHP into the GIS-based MCDA . One main difficulty when estimating suitable recharge areas is the spatial and temporal variability of the physical system. We acknowledge that our analysis mainly uses land surface characteristics to determine suitable Ag-MAR sites, while subsurface characteristics were not directly included. Other factors not accounted for in our analysis include water availability, water quality, unsaturated zone transport, and willingness of landowners to flood agricultural land. Although robust quality control measures were taken, the accuracy of our results relies on the integrity of input data. Issues of accuracy and completeness of proprietary, hand-digitized, or self-reported data are inevitable, hence field-level studies of local surface and subsurface characteristics should be completed as part of project scoping and pilot testing. They are also essential to assess soil surface conditions, the presence of potential unprotected wellheads, capacity of connected surface water conveyance systems, feasible Ag-MAR water application amounts , and cropping and agro-chemical application history to determine potential legacy contaminant loading in the unsaturated zone that could be mobilized by recharge . Although nitrate loading to groundwater has been assessed at larger scales in California’s CV , parcel-level data on fertilizer application rates and nitrogen removal by crops is not publicly available, preventing the assessment of legacy nitrate loading in the unsaturated zone. Future improvements of this methodology should include the addition of contaminant transport modeling or site-specific simulation of drinking water contaminants to address this gap. Climate projections and impacts on surface water availability for recharge require further investigation . As shown by Bachand et al. , despite its semiarid climate, the southern CV faces frequent flood risks. Along the Kings River, flows have exceeded the flood stage almost once every 7 years in the last 4 decades, creating total losses exceeding $1.2 billion . Kocis & Dahlke showed that excess surface water from high flows occur on average every 4.7 out of 10 years with total amounts reaching up to 1.6 km3 between November and April in years when high flows are available. Water scarcity is expected to increase as the southern CV experiences more frequent and longer droughts and more frequent extreme events during wet years . Integrated water management solutions like Ag-MAR are urgently needed to stabilize groundwater supplies in the region.As the world strives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, natural forest regrowth and active tree planting are frequently proposed as mitigation pathways to sequester carbon through increases in above- and below-ground biomass and soil organic matter . This reforestation process requires land. Although the portion of the Earth’s land surface used for agriculture continues to expand , a growing literature uses remotely sensed biophysical and land cover data to map the distribution of so-called “abandoned agricultural land” in high, middle, and low income countries. Goga et al. and Yin et al. estimate a great deal of abandoned agricultural land, whereas Crawford et al. and Potapov et al. indicate far less and even diminishing amounts. This estimation discrepancy may be due to differences in land cover measurement, but we argue that it also likely arises from the omission of information about landholding status and the complex landholder decision-making process.

For researchers endowed with the abstraction habitus of techno-scientific practice, it did not take much to see the benefits of no-till even if most of them would not become salient until after a few cropping seasons. The agronomists and other researchers I met seemed indeed well convinced by it. “But the farmer”, some of them told me, “whatever we say it’s no use. The farmer needs to see it”. This is a refrain Brazilian researchers would promptly recognize. Indeed, many of the demonstration techniques deployed by the project were visual. The main one was the pit , a hole usually around 4-5 feet deep dug by a test plot in order to expose a vertical slice of soil . This technique was deployed in the no-till fields in all participating institutes, to display the compaction layer and the different plant roots. Indeed, within only a couple of years, the difference in length between the cotton roots in the no-till field and in its control counterpart was remarkable. The roots of the different cover crops were also a common target of demonstration through this technique; the brachiaria pits in particular unveiled a whole underground root ecology that is normally not visible, and therefore not taken into account, by farmers and even researchers. The pit displayed elements that were not immediately visible without the mediation of scientific artifacts: even when comparative variables measured in the experiments had not yet shown significant differences between no-till and the control situation, for instance, the underlying problem could be quite readily visualized in the materiality of the compaction layer.Panels were another visualization device deployed at the parcel, to address a key problem found in the milieu paysan: inappropriate fertilizing. Given local farmers’ little access to soil analysis, visual identification came to the fore as an alternative, though much rougher,grow lights way of estimating nutritional deficiencies in cotton and other crops . “Some of them are easier; if the cotton leaf is yellow, the peasant knows he should add urea [i.e., nitrogen]”, one of the local researchers explained.

The reason why it was easier to identify nitrogen deficiency as opposed to others was more practical than cognitive: it had less to do with the clarity of the symptom itself than with the fact that this was the only nutrient for which peasants counted with a disaggregated fertilizer. For other basic agronomic nutrients, most notably potassium and phosphorous , fertilizers were provided by the cotton companies in a single formula, the complexe coton, making it harder to disaggregate what symptoms were linked to which nutrient deficiency. There were multiple other visualization devices, such as pictures of insect pests and natural enemies in catalogues brought from Brazil or already available locally , removal of the cotton plant’s leaves so that its architecture could be examined, collection of in-depth soil samples to show in detail the composition and texture of the compaction layer. Other sensual channels for demonstration like smell or touch also boiled down to a minimum the need for scales, thermometers and other artifacts; these non-human mediators were not always available in the recipient context – most obviously among peasants, but sometimes even in the research institutes. Finally, some pieces of equipment were the object of demonstration at the parcel. The main attraction was the wheeled pulverizing machine, a device I also came across during the CECAT trainings. It had been developed in Embrapa for small-scale agriculture, and was able to carry more liquid and cover more lines than the common back sprayer used by West African farmers, while sparing the laborer of a quite heavy load. Also commonly demonstrated was a plastic bottle device for applying granulated fertilizer; it was cheap – in fact, virtually free – and easy to make. It also reduced the harshness of labor for, when tied to a stick, it could be used standing up straight rather than bending down , besides guaranteeing homogeneity in the distribution of fertilizer dose per hole – an important benefit from the researchers’ point of view.

These were all potential technologies in the waiting to be one day transferred to farmers – their deployment in the project parcel was therefore also experimental. Peasants who visited the parcel did seem to show interest in them, but without the provision of support to their local production and sale, dissemination of brand new artifacts seemed unlikely. The technologies displayed at the parcelle were therefore aimed principally at researchers, technicians, extension agents and farmers – that is, those directly involved in growing cotton. But the project parcel also targeted another audience that was almost as important: government officials, politicians, diplomats, journalists from television and other media, local schools, and occasionally, ethnographers and other academics. As remarked in Chapter 4, visits of this kind were an important project activity, as they sought to assemble a public around it that was essential to sustain the overall network. This lay audience was generally incapable of judging technical matters; it was able however to make a basic aesthetic judgment. Therefore, besides appropriately following all technical parameters, the parcel had to be, above all, beautiful. This aesthetic aspect was also emphasized in other project activities such as the construction of the lab buildings, for which the Brazilians were commended for their care with “presentation and cleanliness”, as the first project coordinator put it. Similarly, in the project fields, plants had to be uniformly tall, green, and loaded with – depending on the time of the year – yellowish flowers or snow white cotton capsules. They had to look alike all across the field, aligned very straight to fill up perfect rectangles and squares. The alleys between the fields had to be free of weeds, with the grass cut short. The whole area had to be clean, with no random objects or garbage thrown around. Panels had to be unsoiled, visible and placed on the right spots.

Two chiwaras were tied up to either side of the vitrine gate, providing a charming finishing touch to the whole scene . Finally, these systematic methods were compounded by another kind of demonstration that happened at the parcel, of a more subtle and practical kind, which was routinely embodied by the only researcher fully dedicated to it, the project coordinator. This was the demonstration of a certain work ethics, which, even if involving much discipline and some degree of ascetism, was not the Calvinist ethics made famous by Weber. It consisted above all in continuous presence and care,led grow lights from very early morning, as farmers themselves do, until later in the day : supervising the work of technicians, doing hands-on work, running multiple research and administrative errands that inevitably appear on a daily basis. The reason for this deep commitment was, above all, practical – as remarked in Chapter 4, among some of the Brazilian cooperantes there was a sense that this project could not afford to fail, and therefore that the parcel, as its most visible face, could not be allowed to “go bad”. This is something that could easily happen if the controls introduced by the project were removed. The beauty and exemplarity of the project parcel was sustained by a delicate composition of controls that were both technical and social: from the rigorous execution of experimental protocols to continuous vigilance against animals, crop looters and other external hazards; from constantly touching base with UNDP and other financial channels so that resources would keep flowing at the pace and magnitude necessary, to making sure that partners in the local institutes were up to date and committed to the project’s routine work. Moreover, this can also be seen as a strategy of enrollment in the Latourian sense, addressing other front liners through display of exceptional commitment and dedication, and some personal challenging. As both an experimental and a demonstration field, therefore, the parcelle was a highly controlled environment, both in a technical and in a social sense. On the one hand, it was protected from external disturbance: it was fenced, guarded, continuously surveilled; it was constantly supervised and acted upon so it would remain aesthetically and technically appropriate; there was a continuous effort to keep local front liners from being diverged from it to other tasks and interests. On the other hand, the parcel was also controlled in a positive sense: those who worked on it enjoyed resources that were not always available to those outside, most notably the peasants but also some of the local researchers and technicians; plants, soil and other non-humans were continuously nourished by vitalities and protections that they would not otherwise enjoy; its aesthetic and technical qualities resonated farther than its boundaries through a selected public that was being formed as the experiments unfolded. Multiple elements of context were therefore brought in in a controlled manner, and this was true not just of material but conceptual entities. Most notably, the milieu paysan could not be brought into the parcel but in an abstract and standardized form; actual peasants would go there to compare the new technologies with something other than what most of them did in their own fields. In the parcel, this abstracted milieu paysan met the new technologies that came from Brazil, who had also been disembedded from their original context.

In the experiments, these were brought together into yet another interface, at the most micro of the scales to be approached in this dissertation. There, they were compared by making non-human actants relate to each other in certain ways and by nourishing them differentially in certain directions; the plan according to which this happened was the experimental dispositif, to which we now turn.The C-4 researchers deployed the term dispositif to refer to the experimental design orienting the tests in the parcels. It is what made the parcel more than just a demonstration site, but, as fundamentally, an experimental one, aimed at testing the behavior of travelling artifacts and techniques in a new environment. It is also that which allowed for scaling down broader contexts – the filière and the milieu paysan – into the parcel’s bounded time-space. As noted, this was done by converting the cotton sector in the C-4 countries into the so-called témoin, or control situation. This control situation worked as yardstick for evaluating the performance of another, which added new elements to it: Brazilian cotton varieties and cover crops, and the three pillars of no-till. This was done by measuring and comparing the behavior of plants and other actants in the two situations according to common factors. This comparison between local system and the local system including the travelling technologies was not one-to-one but multi-factorial, that is, the experiments involved statistically mediated comparisons of multiple factors at the same time. This was done following a common design in agricultural experiments, the so-called split-plot: the experimental field was delimited and successively sub-divided into units of equivalent area, forming a nested configuration in which each sub-unit was “treated” according to a factor that varied quantitatively or qualitatively, so that the effects of differential treatments in each of them could be compared both within the same and across different cropping seasons. This way, the project’s three components were simultaneously brought together in the overlapping treatments performed in each sub-unit. While a set of treatments defined for instance the cereals to be grown as main crop , another prescribed association with different cover crops for each of them. The following year in the same plot, a set of treatments would define the cotton varieties to be sowed, and another would prescribe no-tillage or tillage. Other than the variations in treatment prescribed by the dispositif, the remaining factors were kept constant: environmental conditions such as rainfall and presence of insects, fungi, and other small forms of life, and basic crop management operations such as sowing, fertilizing, thinning, weeding and harvesting. Each treatment was repeated in as many sub-units as possible for the results to be considered statistically reliable – or, as one of the researchers put it, “scientific”. The technicians and researchers then measured, at certain dates and for each sub-unit, the effects of these controlled interventions on variables established beforehand as relevant: crop yields, plant biomass, physic-chemical characteristics of the soil, plant density and height, appearance of first flowers and leaves, or, in the case of cotton, both agronomic and technological indicators .

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 .

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.

Besides concealing a generalized lack of knowledge about actual Africa, this kind of discourse discourages the intensification of public debate on South-South alignments and Brazilian foreign policy at large . Indeed, Brazil’s views on, and policies for, Africa have not been nearly as thoroughly subjected to internal debate and critique as has been the case for instance of Europe’s Africa Orientalism.A debate of this kind would be important not for the sake of critique per se, much the less for gratuitously “bashing Brazil” – as I was surprised to hear once from a senior anthropologist in Brazil. If anything, an awareness of the contemporary complexity and historical density of Africa and of its relations with Brazil would be important as a “reality check” and beacon for field and office operators, as well as policymakers, involved in the provision of cooperation. I disagree however that this knowledge gap should be filled exclusively, or even predominantly, by the hiring of development experts and consultants.For the reasons discussed in Chapter 1 , I would give precedence to the learning that is already taking place on the ground, especially since much of knowledge production subsidizing Brazilian projects in Africa has occurred directly between Brazilian and African front liners, with little mediation from specialized bureaucratic apparatuses . In Orientalism, Said disparaged at the “total absence of any cultural position [in the West] making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately discuss the Arabs or Islam” . As this chapter suggested, in Brazil such passions are generally reserved to domestic debates,plastic growing bag such as the recent ones on racial quotas. In this case, cultural domination in the sense put forth by Said is less about Brazil’s relations with Africa than about internal power relations. His assessment therefore does not necessarily hold for Brazil’s nation-building Orientalism on Africa.

My experience with cooperation front liners convinced me, on the contrary, that it is possible to have a less fanciful and passionate view on Africa and its problems. Whether this virtuality will be in any way actualized, is a whole other story. In order for this to happen, relations with Africa will have to multiply and become robust enough to outgrow the discursive hold of nation-building Orientalism – in other words, to create more of a context for itself. Indeed, this is how the remainder of this dissertation will look at cooperation activities at the front line. The next chapter will suggest how early steps in this context-making direction were being taken by contemporary cooperantes working in the domain of agriculture, during capacity building trainings and other technical cooperation activities implemented by Embrapa. Significantly, in this case there was a discursive privileging of dimensions other than culture, such as natural environment and developmental temporality. And even though Embrapa’s official discourse remains, as Itamaraty’s, fundamentally based on an affinities idiom, as one moves to the front line of its cooperation activities analogies between Brazil and Africa turn from Orientalist assumptions detached from practice into the very “stuff” on which the cooperantes work.If culture has been the object of ample investment by Brazil’s official discourse on Africa throughout the decades, in contemporary South-South cooperation its ontological double – nature – has joined it on center stage. This chapter will discuss how these two sides of the modernist divide have been articulated in the case of a particular socio-technical sector, agriculture. In this regard, official discourse has been also based on claims to similarity and sharedness, but privileging two other domains: natural environment and the temporality of peripheral development. Many of these assumptions are also shared by other emerging donors , but in the case of Brazil-Africa relations the focus has been on a particular developmental experience: agriculture tailored to the tropical savannahs, the Brazilian version of which is called cerrado.

This chapter will begin by looking at how narratives about nature and the temporality of development appeared in official cooperation documents and studies, and in the capacitybuilding trainings held in Embrapa’s new center in Brasília. Here, the work of cooperantes largely involved demonstrating Brazil’s agricultural experience, and proposing a comparison with its African counterparts. For the most part, this exercise did not take the form of taken-forgranted analogies based on long-held imagined affinities, such as in much of Itamaraty’s discourse on culture. But neither was it based on standardized methodologies framing African realities according universal expert knowledge aimed at planned intervention, as with much of traditional development aid . It involved, rather, the demonstration of a situated experience: that of Brazil’s cerrado agriculture, in which Embrapa itself played a major part. As will be argued, more than “rendering technical” , these demonstrations ended up rendering explicit much of the heterogeneity that underlays any developmental experience, through necessarily selective and situated context-making and scaling operations grounded in the Brazilian cooperantes’ own experiences and politics. For this, they drew less on general guidelines found in cooperation policy than on Embrapa’s own domestic experience as a public research institution. As will be suggested, this experience has sedimented particular strategies, based on demonstration, for dealing with its main sponsor , the public at large, and various kinds of Brazilian farmers. These demonstrations were not mere contemplative exercises, however. In the case of South-South cooperation, they had a performative intention: to entice the African partners to join in and extend the comparative effort being proposed from their own situated perspectives. Therefore, rather than inscribing a divide between “trustees” and those “subject to expert direction” , this modality of engagement requires the active participation of recipients in order for it to gain any robustness – something for which Brazilian cooperation’s “hands off” approach shows mixed possibilities.In Brazil-Africa cooperation materials, the highest currency of the natural similarities assumption refers less to geology than to edaphic-climatic conditions.

The latter are normally cast under the rubric of tropicality, of a tropical environment shared between the two regions and expressed in arguably similar patterns of soil, vegetation, and climate. Like most everything else in contemporary discourse, the pervasiveness of the trope of the tropics is not something new. During what Saraiva called the golden years of Brazil’s Africa policy in the seventies,wholesale grow bags the idea of tropicality was extensively deployed in both political and commercial forays. Brazilian manufacturers, for instance, would target Nigeria’s burgeoning consumer market by advertising domestic appliances especially suited to tropical areas. According to one of the ads from that period, which brought soccer star Pelé as poster boy, these appliances, “tested at the source: a tropical country, Brazil”, were made to work “no matter the conditions of heat, humidity and voltage fluctuations” . The notion of tropicality to qualify natures and peoples existing at a certain latitudinal range of the globe is, as many have shown , part of Europe’s “discursive construction of tropical nature” during its colonial outreach to the New World, and then to Asia and Africa. This has involved a view on the tropics as an environment radically different from that of Europe, “where the superabundance of nature was believed to overwhelm human endeavor and reduced the place to nature itself” , and whose inhabitants were closer to nature than those living in temperate regions. Even if, like in Freyre’s lusotropicalismo , when appropriated by the colonized the notion of tropicality may have been pressed into a different kind of service, this has not meant a clean break with the colonizer’s view. It is remarkable for instance how, even in today’s cooperation discourse, claims to similarities between Brazil and Africa typically evoke dimensions similar to those foregrounded by their European predecessors: either nature, or “softer” social spheres like culture. This movement of postcolonial re-appropriation of the tropical can also be found in the domain of agriculture, especially in Embrapa’s status as a world-class institution in research and development of technologies appropriate for tropical agriculture – a reputation for which the institute has made not only significant investment in technical training and research, but also in PR and communication. Since much of Sub-Saharan Africa shares Brazil’s tropical nature, Embrapa’s singular R&D achievements are promoted as a comparative advantage of Brazilian cooperation not only over Northern aid, but also over other emerging donors that are not situated in the tropical strip such as Russia, Arab countries, Eastern European countries, or, in part, South Africa and China. But while the emphasis of Stephan’s remarkable account of Europe’s Orientalist views on tropical nature is on Latin American forests, where nature is mysterious, sumptuous and overwhelming, in Brazil’s cooperation the pride of place is reserved to the tropical savannahs. And the reason is no mystery: it was on the Brazilian savannahs – the cerrado – that the biggest expansion of the country’s agricultural frontier happened, during the last quarter of the past century. Here, views reproduce, again, Europe’s “nature Orientalism”, for instance in their ambivalence: tropical nature is both generous and plentiful, and unruly and wild. Thus, while early colonial investments in cotton and other cash crops in Sub-Saharan Africa were based on a poorly grounded “belief in tropical abundance” , Europeans quickly learned about the great effort required to make agriculture succeed in tropical environments. By the mid-twentieth century, on the eve of Embrapa’s inception, there were even doubts as to whether a high-productivity kind of agriculture along the lines of that found in temperate regions could ever thrive in tropical areas. As Embrapa’s PR extensively highlights, Brazil’s experience would prove it wrong: differently from the rainforest, the Brazilian savannah has been fully conquered by technique, turning from a barren wasteland into Brazil’s thriving breadbasket.

Even if Brazil has run agriculture projects in all corners of the African continent, the savannahs have been indeed the privileged biome, both discursively and practically. Discursively, it has been the preferred locus of assumptions about natural similarities and the possibilities of reproducing Brazil’s developmental experience in Africa. It has also been the stage for Embrapa’s two largest projects in the continent: the Cotton-4 in West Africa and the Pro-Savannah in Mozambique. It is in a recent Embrapa study on the Nacala corridor in Mozambique called Paralelos that we find what is probably the most outstanding expression of the spatial dimension of such claims to similarities . The book itself is an interesting hybrid of technical and political document; different from regular scientific works, its hard copy design is beautifully designed, and indeed it has been the object of much ritual gift-giving between Brazilian and African officials since it was released in 2010 . As the picture below, reproduced from the book, elegantly.Each map included in the book brings a spatialized overview on soils, relief, climate, land use and cover, accompanied by ground level pictures of landscapes found in Mozambique. These spatial paralleling devices, especially in the form of comparative maps, were quite common in official documents and power point presentations showed in CECAT. Rural landscapes in Mozambique and elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, such as in the numerous ground level pictures displayed in Paralelos, can be remarkably similar to those found in many parts of Brazil. An Embrapa researcher once told a group of Ghanaian trainees about a trick he played with his friends after returning from a trip to Angola, where he would show pictures of natural landscapes and have them guess whether they had been taken there or in Brazil; according to him, they would often be clueless. Indeed, as a Brazilian myself I could not avoid sharing such sense of déjà vu, especially when travelling by road in West Africa. If, as remarked in the previous chapter, even the human landscape in rural areas sometimes evoked impressions of familiarity, resonances in terms of topography, plants, animals, waters, and weather were almost absolute. Such comparative exercises were quite common in informal conversations between the Brazilians in all West African countries I visited. “It’s the same thing, the very same thing”, one of the Embrapa researchers put it categorically. He paused. “But only there [in rural areas]. When we come to town, it’s all different.” These micro-impressions expressed by Brazilians working in Africa echo a macro-trend formulated by academics: as one moves from nature to society, from rural to urban areas, similarities become less evident and may, at certain points, turn into sharper divergences.

Each of these has its own experience in domestic development and/or in cooperating with foreign agencies, and for the most part they have no contact with each other. Projects will therefore vary widely, sometimes even within the same institution, as is to some extent the case of Embrapa. Besides heterogeneity, another differential effect of South-South cooperation’s organizational outlook relates to flexibility and autonomy in implementation. Mawdsley suggested that one of the differences between emerging and traditional donors has been greater “dynamism”, “speed” and flexibility . In the case of Brazil, the absence of a pre-determined, standardized portfolio of expert solutions seems to allow not only for greater flexibility in translating principles and policy into practice, but also greater autonomy and some degree of experimentation at the lower end of the policy-front line spectrum. The limited amount of resources available especially for bilateral projects, for instance, may mean that their implementation takes the form less of an ambitious intervention over a broad slice of local reality guided by predefined technical prescriptions, than an initially circumscribed and somewhat openended enterprise that gradually expands along with its learning curve. Different than what was suggested by Mawdsley , however, this does not necessarily mean that project execution will proceed at a faster and smoother pace. In fact, the mediation apparatus that needs to be put in place for transferring resources abroad, normally through UNDP, adds an intricate layer of red taping that may weight heavily down on project activities on the ground,plastic nursery plant pot as will be further discussed in Chapter 4. Another set of effects resonates with the South-South principles of non-intervention, non–conditionality and demand-drivenness.

In some iterations of Brazil’s discourse, these principles appear as a negation of the country’s historical experience as a recipient of aid from the North, marked by impositions of various kinds, conditionalities in particular. South-South cooperation therefore makes a principled point of not imposing itself on recipient countries, but responding to their demands. The first cooperation model tried by Embrapa in Africa – a regional office located in Accra centralizing cooperation all over the continent – sought to apply the demand drivenness principle quite literally. It involved an “over-the-counter” mode of operation whereby African agents would come to them with their demands. This model was eventually changed with the centralization of cooperation in Brazil in 2010, for reasons that are both operational and political. Now most demands get to Embrapa through its international relations unit in Brasília, mediated by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency . In practice, projects may be, and occasionally are, offered to African counterparts. But one of the points to which the discussion in this chapter leads is that, from an organizational point of view, like most of its Southern counterparts Brazilian cooperation would not have the capability to impose itself on recipient countries anyway. The institutional presence of Brazilian cooperation in Africa is minimal, and it would not have the financial or organizational capacity to monitor, for instance, the implementation of conditionalities. This spares recipients from the bureaucratic burden that development aid usually adds to their already fragile institutional apparatuses and may make them even more dependent on foreign expertise and funds . But on the other hand, this non-interventionist approach brings other kinds of challenges, as it requires more extensive engagement by recipients in all stages of project design and implementation.

This requirement evokes a prominent issue in the development aid scene at large, that of ownership , or how to make local actors carry the projects forward after the donor leaves. This is an element of the Aid Effectiveness Agenda that has been addressed by Northern donors in bureaucratic terms – for instance, by incorporating aid projects into the recipient countries’ own policy systems. Even if ownership has not been explicitly incorporated in Brazilian cooperation’s official policy as such , it is something that individual actors, especially at the front line, care about deeply. Lack of ownership was among the reason why, for instance, the project between Embrapa and Ghana’s CSIR that I was following up in 2010 was eventually abandoned – the latter was not able, or willing, to invest in its last stage, which would demand a significant apportion of local funds for the trainings that were planned to take place next. But in other cases , the organizational configuration of Brazil’s cooperation could end up promoting ownership in the sense that, by requiring that recipient countries, institutions and individual actors invest their own, scarce resources in order to carry South-South projects forward, they would be encouraged to own them. Even if, as we shall see in later chapters, on the ground things are not as straight-forward, the point to retain from this chapter’s perspective is that to promote ownership by making African counterparts share some of the project costs is, again, as much a matter of principles as an effect of Brazil’s limited cooperation resources and particular organizational architecture. Finally, an analogous point could be made with respect to the provider vs. recipient dimension. In my experience with Brazilian initiatives, even if there was an asymmetry in terms of resources and capabilities between Embrapa and the African research institutes, the difference between providers and recipients did not appear as a “trustee-subject” boundary .In the C-4 Project, for instance, African partners were required to play a leading role in the production of diagnoses about the local situation and in the technology adaptation process.

If this concurs to fulfilling South-South principles of horizontality and mutual exchange, it seems to be, again, less a matter of applying principles through a clear policy path than an effect of the capabilities available to Brazilian cooperantes as they come to engage with local actors without a specialized apparatus for producing development-related knowledge. This may be the case even with more elusive assumptions about Brazilians’ supposedly higher socio-cultural capabilities for functioning in other Southern contexts . In Brazil’s cooperation for institution-building in East Timor, for instance, Brazilians’ presumed greater cultural openness for socializing with the locals was eventually made real by their poor fluency in central languages like English or French, which made socialization with other expatriates difficult.As I observed during fieldwork, the language barrier may also encourage the deployment of more practical and tacit idioms, such as joking relations, hands-on work,seedling starter pot and communicative mediation of technological artifacts and other non–humans. In this case and the others, what I wish to suggest is how assumptions about Brazilian South-South cooperation as being different than Northern aid may end up becoming true not because of an alternative, “Southern” bureaucratized path systematically linking principles to front line practice through policy, but due to characteristics at the level of organizations and resources that, from the point of view of established aid institutions, would be regarded as lacking. Finally, another effect of South-South cooperation’s organizational outlook is that those implementing it do not have the same mechanisms as their Northern counterparts for “recycling” failure back into the project pipeline .Especially now that smaller projects are being phased out in favor of structuring projects such as the Cotton- 4, Embrapa is likely to have fewer initiatives in Africa, and each of them will become more visible. Since, as remarked, domestic support for South-South cooperation is far from consensual, and implementing institutions are porous to pressures and influences by governmental sectors other than diplomacy, project failure could become a big issue for the institutions and individuals implementing them. As Leite also noted, many in Embrapa are indeed concerned about the potential for inefficiency that increased demand for South-South cooperation coming from Itamaraty could entail. Moreover, in contrast with scientific cooperation with Northern institutes, in technical cooperation with Southern countries there are no evident immediate returns from the point of view of the institution’s own interests – let us not forget, neither Embrapa nor most other implementing institutions are development agencies. The institute certainly benefited from the generous resources provided especially during the last years of the Lula administration.

CECAT’s infrastructure, for instance, has been useful to other ends like internal trainings, and it is hoped that some benefits may eventually accrue from technology transfer projects, such as access to new markets for Embrapa’s technologies. These and other dilemmas are being confronted as I write, and point to yet another effect of the emerging assemblage outlined here: its open-endedness. These aspects are not fully captured by the established approaches in the anthropology of development discussed here.This chapter argued that, like other emerging donors, Brazilian South-South cooperation is in a process of emergence, characterized by the formation of a unique assemblage made up of new interfaces that bring together, under the aegis of foreign policy, preexisting institutions, discourses, individuals, practices, and politics. What is certain is that it is changing and will continue to change, and if the forward drive unleashed during the Lula administration is not reversed , it could be that the current picture will eventually give way to a more stable and policy-oriented assemblage. However, it is unlikely that, even in this case, Brazilian cooperation will ever look like the picture described in ethnographies of Northern aid; but neither will it ever constitute an entirely alternative model to it. The historical genealogy proposed in this chapter indicates that South-South cooperation, even if discursively constituted in terms of an opposition to Northern aid, emerged from within a global apparatus built under Northern hegemony. As a result, Brazil’s process of emergence as a donor has been highly ambivalent and even contradictory, both internationally and domestically. While South-South cooperation involves a quest for recognition at a global scale, it has also been shaped by the domestic politics of foreign policy and its relations with other governmental and economic sectors such as agriculture. This double directionality is key for making sense of Brazilian cooperation at various levels, as the following chapters will continue to show. A similar point can be made regarding the organizational aspect, which was described here in light of a double claim commonly found in the anthropology of development literature: about development aid’s self-referential character, and its bureaucratization and de-politicization effects. A look at the organizational assemblage of Brazil’s South-South cooperation against this backdrop yielded a three-leveled architecture that is in a sense an inversion of Northern aid’s: instead of prevailing over discursive principles and implementation practice, the level of managerial policy is weak relatively to them. Rather than constituting a specialized, bureaucratized model alternative to its Northern counterpart, Brazilian cooperation has relied significantly on global bureaucracies such as UNDP on the one hand, and on the sector-specific experience of national institutions like Embrapa on the other. This state of affairs has an interesting effect. While South-South cooperation upholds principles that are largely crafted in opposition to Northern aid, it has no coherent bureaucratic apparatus to systematically translate them into practice. Yet, as I have argued in the last section, some of the effects of Brazilian cooperation do go in the direction of some of these principles, such as demand-drivenness, non-conditionality, mutual exchange, tailored projects, and even more elusive assumptions about Brazilians’ higher socio-cultural capabilities for operating in Third World contexts. Rather than being the outcome of planned policy, this seems to be an effect of the practical conditions under which cooperation operates – conditions that, when looked at from the point of view of established aid organizations, would be regarded as immature or lacking.By zooming in from the previous chapter’s hemispheric scale on relations between Brazil and Africa I am inverting my actual research path. The fieldwork on which this dissertation is based started in Africa, more specifically in Ghana, before it got to Brazil and its broader SouthSouth cooperation enterprise. Only then did I start to pay attention to the account Brazilian cooperation provided of itself, which was largely crafted by its diplomatic arm rather than by the front liners themselves. One of the things that stood out since then was a certain mismatch between the concerns shown by those pioneering Brazilian cooperation on African grounds, and what was said about it in official discourse back in Brazil.