Tag: agriculture

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.

The top layer served two purposes, one, it allowed the net infiltration rate to be calibrated to match measured average field infiltration rates of 0.17 cm/hr and two, it represented the expected increase in sediment uniformity expected in ploughed or tilled layers in agricultural settings. While, the impact of the top layer resulted in water being delivered more slowly to the heterogenous sediments below, varying rates of percolation occurred after reaching below the more homogenous layer allowing us to examine the effects of heterogeneity on nitrate transport and fate in the vadose zone. For each stratigraphy, we further varied the frequency and duration of water per application to investigate the impact of different AgMAR implementations that are similar to recent field trials conducted throughout the state . In addition, we tested the effect of antecedent moisture conditions on N biogeochemistry within the more complex stratigraphy by setting the model with a wetter initial moisture profile. Overall, a set of 18 simulation experiments were used to isolate and understand the contribution of different AgMAR strategies to enhance or decrease denitrification rates in deep vadose zone environments with homogeneous and banded configurations. A detailed model setup and numerical implementation is provided in Section 2.3. Although our reactive transport analysis was guided by a particular field site that is classified as a “Medium to Good” site for MAR , our aim was not to replicate site conditions in its entirety, but rather to enhance our understanding of how hereogeneity might impact nitrogen transport and fate under MAR.The study site is an almond orchard located in California’s Central Valley, southwest of Modesto, and north of the Tuolumne River . The surface soil is classified as a Dinuba fine sandy loam . The site is characterized by a Mediterranean climate,bucket flower with wet winters and hot, dry summers. Average annual temperature and total annual precipitation are 17.5° C and 335 mm, respectively.

As suggested above, the vadose zone typifies the valley with contrasting layered sequences of granitic alluvial sedimentary deposits consisting of predominantly silt loams and sandy loams. We therefore use these textures to design our modeled stratigraphic configurations with and without banded layers. The groundwater table in the study area typically occurs around 15 m below ground surface. Soil properties including percent sand, silt, clay, total N, total C, and pH are shown in Table 1. To specifically characterize the textural layers and subsurface heterogeneity at our site, we used electrical resistivity tomography . ERT profiles were generated along a 150 m transect to 20 m depth prior to flooding to quantify subsurface heterogeneity while the subsurface was relatively dry . Further, to validate the texture profiles generated by the ERT data, a set of six cores were taken along the transect of the ERT line down to nine meters with a Geoprobe push-drill system . The first meter of the core was sampled every 25 cm. Thereafter, cores were sampled based on stratigraphy as determined by changes in color or texture. The ERT profiles were used to develop the stratigraphic modeling scenarios and the coring guided the specification of the hydraulic parameters. Redoximorphic features were noted throughout the cores. Several scenarios were developed based on the soil textures identified in cores and the ERT profiles to provide insights into the effect of stratigraphic heterogeneity and AgMAR management strategies on NO3 – cycling in the deep subsurface, as described in section 2 above. The five stratigraphies modeled in this study are shown in Figure 1. The limiting layer in the ERT scenario spans 187 to 234 cm-bgs based on field core observations. For each lithologic profile, three AgMAR management strategies were imposed at the top boundary between 20 m and 150 m of each modeled profile . For each AgMAR management strategy, the same overall amount of water was applied, but the frequency, duration between flooding events, and amount of water applied in each flooding event varied : a total of 68 cm of water was applied either all at once , in increments of 17 cm once a week for four weeks , in increments of 17 cm twice a week for two weeks , and all three scenarios with an initially wetter moisture profile.

Note, that for all scenarios, the same reactions were considered, the water table was maintained at 15 m, and temperature was fixed across depths at 18°C, the mean air temperature for January to February in Modesto. For all scenarios, the modeling domain consists of a two-dimensional 20-meter deep vertical cross-section extending laterally 2,190 m and including a 190 m wide zone of interest located at its center, thus distant from lateral boundaries on each side by 1,000 m to avoid boundary effects. The zone of interest was discretized using a total of 532 grid blocks with a uniform grid spacing of 1 m along the horizontal axis, and a vertical grid spacing of 0.02 m in the unsaturated zone increasing with depth to 1 m in the saturated zone. A maximum time step of 1 day was specified for all simulated scenarios, although the actual time step was limited by specifying a Courant Number of 0.5, typically resulting in much smaller time steps during early stages of flooding. Before each flooding simulation, the model was run first to hydrologic steady state conditions including the effect of average rainfall . The water table was set at a depth of 15 m by specifying a constant pressure at the bottom model boundary , and the model side boundaries were set to no-flow conditions. Under these hydrologic conditions, the model was then run for a 100-yr time period including biogeochemical reactions and fixed atmospheric conditions of O2 and CO2 partial pressures at the top boundary, a period after which essentially steady biogeochemical conditions were achieved, including the development of progressively reducing conditions with depth representative of field conditions. For these simulations, the concentrations of dissolved species in background precipitation and in groundwater at the bottom model boundary were fixed, with compositions described in Table 2 to yield similar vertically distributed NO3 – concentrations as were measured in the soil cores. Flooding scenarios were then started from the initially steady flow and biogeochemical conditions developed as described above and run for 60 days. For these simulations, a free surface boundary was implemented for scenario S1 where 68 cm of water was applied all at once. In contrast, a specified flux boundary condition was imposed for the scenarios S2-S3, where floodwater applications were broken up over a week. The flood water composition is discussed in Section 2.3.5.

The groundwater composition was taken from analyses reported by Landon and Belitz for a groundwater well located near our study site. For simplicity,cut flower bucket the background recharge from rainfall was assumed to have the same composition as groundwater except that it was re-equilibrated under atmospheric O2 and CO2 conditions prior to infiltration. In addition, the concentrations of N species in the background recharge were set to values determined from our own analyses of N at the top of soil cores. The composition of the flood water was set to that of the background precipitation diluted by a factor of 100 for most constituents except for Cl-1 . Ratios of NO3 – to Cl-1 were used to trace the difference between dilution and denitrification effects on NO3 – . Denitrification and N2O production were simulated as aqueous kinetic reactions coupled to the fate of pH, CO2, Fe, S, NO3 – , and NH4 + based on the Spearman correlation analyses discussed above . Apart from pH and nitrate species, Fe and S have been linked to denitrification through chemolithoautotrophic pathways in addition to heterotrophic denitrification , and are therefore included in our reaction network. Heterotrophic denitrification of NO3 – to N2 was represented via a two-step reduction process of NO3 – to nitrite and NO2 – to dinitrogen . Additionally, chemolithoautotrophic reduction of NO3 – to N2 with Fe and bisulfide as electron donors were implemented. Further, dissolved organic carbon was observed throughout the nine-meter profile at our field site, and CO2 and N2O profiles showed strong correlation . Therefore, DOC degradation was simulated using Monod kinetics, although individual DOC components were not simulated consistent with other modeling studies . In particular, we considered a single solid phase of cellulose in equilibrium with acetate as the source of DOC. Parameters for cellulose dissolution were calibrated using the total organic carbon concentrations obtained for each cluster. Biodegradation of acetate was coupled to multiple terminal electron acceptors, including NO3 – , Fe and SO4 2- which follow the hierarchical sequence of reduction potential of each constituent implemented by using inhibition terms that impede lower energy-yielding reactions when the higher energy yielding electron acceptors are present. These microbially mediated reactions and their kinetic rate parameters are shown in Table 5. Rates for denitrification were calibrated using the results from the acetylene inhibition assays as described above. Enzymes involved in denitrification include nitrate reductase, nitrite reductase and nitrous oxide reductase. To remain conservative in our estimates, we chose values typical for oxygen inhibition of nitrous oxide reductase L -1, the most sensitive to oxygen of the enzymes . Spearman rank correlation indicated that pH, DOC, S, NO3 – , and Fe exhibit significant correlation with N2O and therefore, these geochemical species were included in the reaction network. Cluster analysis was used to further detect natural groupings in the soil data based on physio-chemical characteristics, textural classes and the total dataset. Cluster analysis revealed three clusters representing distinct depth associated textural classes with varying levels of substrates and biogeochemical activity. Table 5 shows the median and range for N2O, CO2, NO3 – -N, Fe, S and total organic C for each of the clusters. The first cluster is dominated by sandy loams within the top meter with highest median values of total N2O, total CO2, NO3 – -N, Fe, and total organic C concentrations, indicative of greatest microbial activity and denitrification potential. The second cluster is dominated by silt loams below one meter and had average values of total N2O, total CO2, NO3 – -N, Fe, and total organic C concentrations when compared to the other groups. The third group is dominated by sands and sandy loams below 1 meter and had the lowest median values of total N2O, total CO2, NO3 – -N, Fe, and total organic C concentrations amongst all groups. While most concentrations followed a decreasing concentration trend from cluster 1 to 3, the highest median values of S were associated with cluster 2. Liquid saturation profiles and concentration of key aqueous species predicted at different times for the homogeneous sandy loam column are shown in Figure A1. The sandy loam vadose zone is computed to be 32% saturated with near atmospheric concentrations of O2. As a result of oxic conditions, model results demonstrate significant residual NO3 – concentration within the vadose zone . Evolving from these conditions, Figure A1d shows that with flooding scenario S1, water reaches depths of 490 cm-bgs and saturation levels reach 40% in the sandy loam column. Deeper in the column, lower saturation and only small decreases in O2 concentration are predicted . Calculated concentration profiles show that O2 introduced with the infiltrating water is persistent at shallow depths down to 100 cm-bgs, below which O2 declines slightly as floodwater moves below this zone. Model results further indicate higher NO3 – reduction in the shallow vadose zone including the root zone with 35% of NO3 – being denitrified . Overall, this scenario results in NO3 – concentration persisting at depth. While other redox reactions, such as iron reduction and HS reduction of NO3 – to N2, may be important, conditions needed to induce these reactions were not realized in the sandy loam vadose zone due to the high pore gas velocities of the homogenous sandy loam allowing for large amounts of O2 to penetrate the profile from the incoming oxygenated water. In comparison to the homogenous sandy loam column, the predicted water content is higher and O2 concentration is 53% lower in the vadose zone of the homogenous silt loam column at steady state . This result is expected because of the difference in porosity, with silt loams having higher water holding capacity and lower pore gas velocities compared to sandy loams.

The last chapter will conclude by foregrounding certain trends in the project’s emerging technology adaptation and transfer strategy, as I came to see it: relatively hands-off, fluid, and open to inputs by actors on the recipient side. This has meant greater potential for horizontality, but also vulnerability to all sorts of noises in the translation chain . It could even be argued that this mode of engagement marks many of the relational interfaces in the Brazil-Africa cooperation assemblage: between nation-states, between research institutes, and between researchers, technicians, and farmers. Whether this is better than what happens in Northern aid, depends on the perspective; but it is certainly more open-ended. It comes however at a risk: that of the denying of, or disinterest in, the relation by the African partners – in which case it will inevitably die out. To address this last issue, instead of the technical jargon of ownership or an emphasis on the self-referential character of development cooperation , I will deploy the more relational and open-ended idiom of robustness. In their account of the rise of Mode 2 science in the contemporary “age of uncertainty” , Helga Nowotny and colleagues argued that robust scientific knowledge is that which, rather than shielding itself from society in a position of expert authority , actively seeks to be strongly contextualized in it . When discussing an ethnographic example of such a configuration amidst the “rise of management audit”, Strathern complicated the abstract, preemptive notion of society that is being conjured up in some of these schemes. But by acknowledging the inherent open-endedness of social transactions, she points to the possibility of the same schemes activating new relations, producing “in real time, on [their] own scale, unlooked-for effects” . Similarly to Mode-2 science, technology transfer has always been about not just avoiding isolation from society,procona london container but finding ways to actively produce strong contextualization in it; if the travelling technology’s relations with its new environment are not robust enough, it will neither thrive nor disseminate.

In the case of Brazil-Africa cooperation, robustness seems to be an open question, both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, one may say that, precisely because the hold of policy and bureaucracy over front line practice is, as Chapter 1 will argue, less firm than in development aid organizations, the possibility should be acknowledged of its effects being different than the ones described in the ethnographic literature. And since, as Chapter 1 will also argue, one of the effects of this loose grip of policy is heterogeneity in the implementation of projects, it is likely that if robustness is achieved, it will be more so in some cases than in others. But robustness was a question that imposed itself less through my readings of the literature than through my relations with some of the cooperantes. Having had little experience with international development before the recent surge in Brazil’s South-South cooperation, many of these people – who are research scientists, rather than development workers – seemed to have a sense of possibility that I did not envisage in the ethnographies of aid. I suspect that experienced and professionalized development workers in a way already know, and probably expect, that particular development initiatives will be short-lived, even if the overall system will certainly keep on going. By and large, however, this was not the case of Brazilian front liners. I would not equate this with naiveté, though; this sense of possibility seemed indeed real, precisely because of the emerging character of Brazil-Africa cooperation. In other words, at this point, future directions are open-ended, and, given the gloomy picture provided by the anthropological literature on development aid, that is a good thing. Finally, this leads to another reason why I have chosen the analytics outlined here over all-encompassing notions common in the anthropology of development such as governmentality.

In a discussion with fellow anthropologists in Brazil , I pondered whether, at least if deployed in a totalizing manner, these kinds of approaches would not run the risk of congealing virtualities that are today in full effervescence in this moment of emergence of Brazilian South-South cooperation – a moment marked by vitalities and internal tensions that seem to be no longer present in the cold landscape of Northern development aid. I therefore preferred, I affirmed, to instigate these vitalities and their multiple potentialities – to evoke a Deleuzian-Guatarrian idiom, the lines of flight flowing from their smooth spaces – than to incarcerate them in one single analytics that, albeit perhaps acceptable to, or even expected by, my relations at the desk, would not be productive, or even fair, in terms of my relations in the field. If, as may as well happen, Brazilian cooperation eventually goes on to be engulfed by development’s self-referential machine and these lines of flight fade away, this dissertation will nonetheless remain as the register of a moment – of a window that may be already closing – when things could have been different. This leads to the last cluster of general questions to be tackled in this Introduction, that of knowledge production and reflexivity in anthropology.How and when to pull the breaks on this “fractal unfolding of complexity” – or, in Akrich’s terms, the “propagation of causal chains in all directions” – inevitably brought about by ethnography? Akrich was a student of technology transfer, a phenomenon that is particularly conducive to the evocation of scales of context beyond micro-practice. She once responded to this question much along the lines of how her supervisor Latour probably would have: “On what grounds would the analyst stop [to extend the network] – apart from the arbitrary one of lassitude? Quite apart from the indefinite amount of time such a study would take, there is also the question as to whether it would be interesting” . I find Akrich’s response highly unsatisfying, and the reasons why point precisely to a broader problem with Latour’s version of actor-network theory and its “myopic” method : the “flatness” of the network, which in my view stems from Latour’s poor investment in reflexivity, as opposed for instance to the work of Strathern or Haraway. His perspective assumes that the analyst is as an observer whose task is to witness and register immanent relations in a flat network until some “arbitrary point of lassitude”. She supposedly operates at the same scale of the actors in the network, but is not situated in it, in the Harawayan sense ; what she must do is to describe what she sees and hears.

From this point of view, indeed, to reach for scales beyond the immediate scope of micro-practice would seem not just “uninteresting”, but illegitimate. Scaling and context-making are a major part of what they do,cut flower transport bucket and they do it asymmetrically; as many have noted before me , actor-networks are never flat. Far from being arbitrary, these moves have a direction – at times, a very clear one – driven by the actors’ interests and the politics in which they are enmeshed. To access these moves and later on provide an account of them necessarily entail, therefore, that the analyst situates herself in her field relations. Ethnographers are never free of the risk of being called upon, by her field interlocutors, to make this explicit, especially as the products of research go back to circulate in the field – among the examples that come to mind are Latour’s involvement in the nineties’ “science wars”, and the controversy that prompted David Mosse’s reflections on relations between “field” and “desk” . Any ethnography is therefore a compromise between at least two relational networks: one in the field, and one in academia . At the “desk”, when to pull the breaks on the unfolding of complexity unleashed by fieldwork is hardly arbitrary either. Often, however, the ways by which this happens are eclipsed by recourse to the supposedly disembedded domain of theory. Take, for instance, the debates about technification-depoliticization in the literature on development. To argue that development discourse and practice are about rendering technical or depoliticizing problems that find their roots elsewhere assumes that the analyst knows what is the actual cause of poverty, underdevelopment, and so forth: namely, politics, usually conceived in terms of historical and political economic processes. This assumption that it is historical and political economic processes that matter – that are the real ones – may have been embraced by the analyst even before she went to the field, during seminars or in preparation for qualifying exams. In the writing stage, theory is brought back in to select and weave field data together – Gramsci, Foucault, or some other European philosopher of choice. This kind of operation follows knowledge practices that are prevalent in academia, rather than in the field. I do not have qualms with the depoliticization-technification claim as such; in fact, it is an assumption that I do share with the literature. What I try to do differently is to make explicit how my account is anchored both on debates in academia and on my field relations. This kind of movement can be found, for instance, in De Laet and Mol’s explicitation of their “love” for the Zimbabwe bush pump and its creator as “what moves [their] writing” . As a Brazilian citizen who has been personally interested in the politics of agriculture since long before this PhD, I have my own, non-academic stakes on the topic this dissertation is addressing; these have shaped my relationship with informants as well as the way I looked at their claims about South-South cooperation.

This oriented, for instance, my choice of what elements eclipsed by the actors to bring to the fore here – not an abstract “political economy” or “history”, but concrete political processes that have been central to Brazil-Africa relations, or to Brazilian domestic politics. Moreover, the fact that the empirical processes that I describe here are unfolding, as Maurer put it, “coincidently” with writing, led me to provide feedback to my field interlocutors not separately, but in this dissertation. Parts of my account, especially in Chapters 3 and 4, are responding to demands and debates coming less from academia than from the field. In a similar vein, assumptions of flatness and transparency that underlie actor-network theory’s formulations are rendered problematic when one acknowledges that the ethnographer’s view on the network is itself also directed by the actors’ interests. In other words, rarely is she given access to any and all actors and interactions in the field, and when and where she does, this happens through an often implicit “contract” with interlocutors that further constraints what can or cannot be made explicit in writing. Indeed, questions of access have been common in the anthropology of development, especially for those wishing to study up: that is, the developers rather than the poor communities or peasant farmers to be developed – normally more accessible to, because more vulnerable than, the ethnographer . Quite often, ethnographers of developers have had to “pa[y] their way [into the policy world] with knowledge products” by working for these institutions as consultants or volunteers, and that is how they get direct access to their internal operations: what Rottenburg described as “the main rule of access – ‘No admittance except on business!’”Alternatively, access can be granted through connections of a non-academic type, and this has been the case of some of the Brazilian literature on which I drew here. Many students of institutions such as Itamaraty, Embrapa or the WTO have either personal ties to their officials,or worked at them.Indeed, in occasions when I recounted my fieldwork experience to Brazilians from academia or from Embrapa who were not directly within my research scope, their first assumption normally would be that I worked at Embrapa, or was providing consultancy for the Brazilian Cooperation Agency. This was not the case, however. I had neither personal nor professional networks whatsoever in any of these institutions before I started this project. This often made things slow and sometimes oscillating for me during fieldwork, and, coupled with the rapidly changing character of Brazilian cooperation in its early moments, resulted in a fragmented fieldwork experience in institutional, geographic, and temporal terms. Thus, my field ended up including multiple institutions ; multiple countries ; multiple cities within countries ; three fieldwork languages ; and multiple fieldwork periods – not to mention long-distance interactions through email, skype, or facebook. This fieldwork experience has shaped writing in at least two ways. On the one hand, this dissertation does not reproduce the development version of Malinowskian fieldwork: it is not an in-depth experience of one particular cooperation initiative as it was observed locally.

Eared Dove, Southern Lapwing, Chimango Caracara, Rufous-collared Sparrow are species commonly found in agroecosystems and urban areas . Interestingly, abundance of Eared Dove and Chimango caracara were negatively related to the proportion of fragments but positively associated to the presence of fragments, indicating that even small fragments could be favor these species. Plot and landscape scale were important for conservation within this agroecosystem . This result indicated that both core areas of native vegetation as well as fragments of native vegetation within vineyards are necessary to enhance birds in agroecosystem. My results agree in part with others findings that the plot scale are more relevant for predicting distribution of birds in agroecosystem . Landscape scale was important for some communities as for granivores, indicating that multiple scales should be considered for this study area. My findings also coincide others highlighting the significance of small structural features such as single trees or hedgerows for increase birds within agroecosystems . This could be related to agriculture is a recent driver of land use change in comparison with other regions such as Europe where agriculture has a long history of habitat modification . These results should be interpreted in light of study limitations. Firstly, I did not measure micro-scale variables, as inter row cover crops or bare soil, that could shape bird communities in vineyards . However, previous research showed that these variables could be more significant during winter and not for the reproductive season in central Chile . Secondly, I did not assess the influence of the agricultural management as a covariate with bird abundance. Our study design cannot disentangle the interactions between agricultural management and landscape complexity.

Indeed,30 litre plant pots some of the vineyards that present high landscape complexity were managed conventionally while other vineyards that were managed organically presented low landscape complexity or were surrounded by other crops . Recent literature reveals that in highly mobile species such as birds, the proportion of natural vegetation within the landscape appears to be more relevant than conventional/organic management . Conservation of Forest-Matorral will play a fundamental role for the dynamics of whole bird communities. Given the potential for habitat fragments in and around the vineyard to enhance bird composition across the vineyard landscape and the fact that these fragments can be easily maintained or restored within vineyards, at low economic cost for vineyard production, I propose that maintaining and restoring fragments of native habitat should be widely adopted by grape growers . Restoration approaches should vary depending on the conservation goal. For example, in order to increase the potential ecosystem services provided by insectivore birds, fragments and large areas or Forest-Matorral are essential for a landscape planning in this area. In contrast, in order to conserve endemic rhynocriptids, preserving and restoring large areas of native vegetation is crucial. Most Scleorphyllous forest and Chilean Matorral is located in private sector, and the majority of the vineyards participating in this research own adjacent hills with native vegetation. A lack of policies and incentives that promote conservation of these ecosystems is still a challenge. Recently, laws approved by the Chilean parliament favor private parks, but incentives for conservation are still poor, with a lack of practical legal recognition and depend on individual species preferences by landowners . Simultaneously, land use change by vineyards is a continuous threat for wild areas due to continuous growth trends in the last 30 years .

Vineyard industry sales are valued at US $2,200 million for the year 2011 and projected to reach US $4,500 million in 2020 . The main driver of this industry is international market demand . Lack of land planning and restrictions to agricultural expansion are not currently part of the Chilean economic growth model . However, consumers demand could play a significant role in driving wine industry innovation toward a more sustainable arena . Strategies that preserve and restore fragments of native vegetation and core areas within vineyards can provide a successful approach for bird conservation in Chilean agroecosystems. Agricultural water districts are perhaps the most important players in efforts to reform water-resource management in California. According to several observers, a key impediment to the evolution of California water markets is the requirement in state law that water districts must approve any transfer of water rights outside of their borders . Agricultural irrigation districts have been particularly reluctant to participate in sales that would apparently transfer water from low-valued agricultural uses to higher-valued urban and industrial consumption. How these districts might distribute the costs and benefits associated with these trades has been the focal point of removing this particular barrier to developing viable water markets . In addition, the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act focused on water districts as the agents for implementing water conservation and efficiency measures . On the other hand, recent attempts to establish water market protocols in California that bypass district control have met stiff resistance to date from agricultural interests. 1 Proposals by economists to reform water-resource management and to develop water markets generally have not considered the institutional context in which the targeted agricultural districts operate. Most analyses of water rights markets assume that the participants are attempting to gain the maximum net profits or monetary benefits.

However, this presumption may be off target, particularly if public-enterprise agencies dominate the water management structure as is the case in California. Given that most future water transfers in California are likely to occur among public agencies, looking beyond typical neo-classical assumptions about the “theory of the firm” may be important to understanding how water markets might develop . Previous political economy studies of irrigation districts have looked at some of aspects of how district decision-making processes work , but none has examined California districts across political structures in an economic framework. The emergence of two recent issues adds to the importance of better understanding the incentives embodied in various water-district forms. The first is that use of any electoral system other than universally-enfranchised, popular-vote was challenged successfully in part in federal court . The Association of California Water Agencies intervened with an amicus curiae brief to defend the voting system now in use in California water districts . The second is the recent passage of Proposition 218 in November 1996. This new law requires in many instances that certain types of special-purpose taxes must be approved by a majority vote of the assessed-benefit, and fees and charges by a majority of “property owners” within the relevant jurisdiction . Many of the dynamics that now affect water districts using”assessed-value voting will come to bear in a larger context among many local governments.The one example of a political-science study examined how the various electoral rules affected voter participation . The authors, in a report done for the California Department of Water Resources, attempted to explain why property-based rules led to less “democratic” processes than the popular-based methods. Unfortunately,25 liter pot plastic the predictive theory was unclear in the analysis, and the statistical analysis did not strongly support the thesis. Two comparative studies used sociological methods. Coontz examined the historical development of the Kings River Water Association and maintains that districts single-rnindedly pursued physical acquisition and control of water rights either through construction of diversion facilities or by appealing to outside government agencies for assistance in funding of upriver storage structures . Eventually, a strong contractual arrangement was structured, and the previously strife-torn parties successfully stood in concert against the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation during contract negotiations. In the Grasslands Area, Coontz found that the legacy of Miller-Lux had left control of the region’s water rights and leadership role to the Central California Irrigation District . As part of the Miller-Lux operations, neighboring farmers were allocated water portions greater than they might have achieved in fighting MillerLux and losing. This cooperative arrangement among districts and farmers continues today. Both of these situations represent bargaining solutions driven by the perceived disagreement outcomes by each party. In the first case, the upstream districts could physically control the flow of the Kings River, while the downstream Tulare Lake farmers could appeal to outside political power in the USBR and the city of Los Angeles.

The result was a hard-driven bargain that required strictly defined behavior. In the second case, Miller-Lux, and later CCID, controlled the lion’s share of local water rights. As a result, its neighbors were quite willing to accept a cooperative rather than confrontational solution since they could face substantial losses if they defected. The classical paradigm in which the district maximizes the total net benefits of all members is the most frequently seen in the economic literature. In each case, the water district is entirely transparent to the motives of the farmers themselves. In other words, these models simply assume that district managers use maximizing aggregate net income as their objective function. The district managers have no individual motives themselves nor do they consider any other objectives than resource-use efficiency. The three more recent political-economy models approach differently the question of how districts’ policies are chosen . The first two models treat the institutional management-selection rules as the focal point of policy decisions, while the latter one examines the importance of informal political influence. The first and third models put the districts’ managers at the center of the decision making process, while the second one implies that decisions directly reflect the wishes of the districts’ members. The latter two models rely on information about individual members within each district, either about farming activities or relative political influence. None of the models assume that a district manager maximizes the total net benefits to member, but rather coalitions are built by targeting benefits to certain groups within a district. In the first model, district managers attempt to maximize district profits while maintaining a sufficient level of voting support in a median-voter or “isoprofit/isovote” model . This model focuses on managers as the decision-making unit. Unfortunately, McDowell, did not adequately specify the empirical model to give meaningful empirical results. In the second model, management policies are chosen based on which policy draws the greatest political support among the district’s members, which is done by comparing the relative economic benefits that each would receive . This approach views the members’ operations as the units of analysis and aggregates to the district level. The model sees the managers as simply transparent to the decision-making process. In the third model, the district managers attempt to maximize the benefits of the members subject to a distribution based on the relative political strengths of each member . This model examines the motives of both the managers and members and creates a two-stage optimization model, McDowell, examine whether government-enterprise managers respond to the sometimes divergent interests of “voter-consumers” in a manner different from those of private enterprises . Public managers must balance maintaining political support that ensures their tenure with maximizing net benefits to consumers of the districts’ services. The analytic framework uses the median-voter paradigm . M&U hypothesize that if political support is not proportional to revenue responsibility, i.e., the districthas many voters of whom few pay related fees or taxes, then interests diverge between the disparate groups within the district, They further ask whether cross-subsidies through pricing are more likely in the case of government enterprises. M&U build on Peltzman’s model in which the district manager attempts to maximize voter support subject to the constraint that total district benefits exceed a certain level . The dual of this problem is to minimize the economic benefits forgone to achieve a majority vote. The result is finding the tangency of the isovote and isoprofit curves in the multiple-group/price space. The isovote curve represents the combination of prices to the relevant groups within the district that maintain the same level of political support. The isoprofit curve represents the combination of prices to the relevant groups within the district that maintain the same level of total net benefits to the district. If the political process transmits voter support in proportion to the revenues generated by the consumers in each group, then the tangency should lie along the 45 degree line from the origin, Le., the relative prices for each group should be the same.

The land sharing and “wildlife friendly farming” approaches stress the importance of incorporating biologically diversity into farming practices as a way to reduce the reliance on agrochemicals, and to increase the value of the agricultural matrix for wildlife habitat within the agroecosystems . The main critique of the land sharing approach assumes lower yields from non-intensive agriculture coupled with the need for more agricultural land conversion . More recently a combined approach of land sharing/sparing was proposed to disentangle the debate and co-op favorable practices from both strategies . The importance of the surrounding natural ecosystem is equally important in both land sparing and land sharing strategies for biodiversity conservation purposes. Natural ecosystems provide irreplaceable habitat for wildlife, in particular for highly specialized forest-dependent specialist, migratory species, and local endemics . Core, well-preserved, extensive areas as well as fragments play a role in the landscape connectivity and meta-population dynamics . One proposed strategy to augment the quality of the agricultural matrix is to increase landscape complexity through conservation of native vegetation fragments within simplified agroecosystems . These remnants of vegetation and restored some of the benefit of these vineyards as wildlife habitat that allow increased levels of biodiversity compared to agricultural fields without structural diversification . Forest patches and fragments can contribute to higher species richness within the agricultural matrix and increase ecosystem services provide by biodiversity . Non-cropped areas increase the landscape heterogeneity in time and space, increasing sources of food, shelter, roosting, and nest sites which are important to support wildlife in agroecosystems .

Most current literature on conservation in agroecosystems comes from tropical systems, 30 plant pot whose climatic regimes and seasonality differ greatly from temperate ecosystems. These results provide new evidence of strategies for harmonizing food production with biodiversity conservation. extending these data to advance knowledge of the impact of agroecosystems on wildlife in mediterranean type ecosystems with not only provides regional insights but adds to the global land sparing- land sharing debate. In mediterranean type ecosystems, vineyards are a dominant land cover type and important for the economy of these regions . The remaining natural areas in these regions correspond to some of the most unique and threatened ecosystems worldwide in terms of number of local endemic species that are at risk from continued land use change . The immediate and future impacts of vineyards on wildlife are poorly understood and research in these agroecosystems can help long-term protection of these biodiversity hotspots. Birds are one of the most visible vertebrates in agroecosystems and can be used as indicators of habitat quality or levels of disturbance . Birds provide significant ecosystem services such as pest control within agroecosystems , although some species could be considered agricultural pests when they decrease yields . In these studies, I aimed to determine the influence of vineyards on bird communities in Mediterranean type ecosystems located in Chile and California, respectively. I utilized a natural experimental framework comprising a gradient of increasing vineyard land cover in both study areas. In Chapter one, I review the current literature to evaluate and summarize the impact of agroecological practices on bird conservation. Several practices, including increasing the structural complexity of habitat, organic management, and the supply of artificial habitats such as the addition of bird nest boxes, have been demonstrated to promote bird conservation.

In Chapter two, I examine the how vineyard and several site variables explain bird species detection rates and explore species co-occurrence patterns corrected by vineyard and shrub influence. Results showed that vineyards promote a subset of species, referred to as agricultural adapter birds that interact with non-agricultural adapter birds and thereby can change community composition. In Chapter three, I evaluate the influence of within-vineyard fragments of native vegetation and surrounding native vegetation on bird communities of central Chile. Results showed a positive influence on not only surrounding native ecosystems, but also remnant fragments within vineyards, on bird functional groups, including local endemics birds. In Chapter four, the influence of vineyard at the landscape scale in compared across both study regions by evaluating the influence of vineyards on species and co-occurrence patterns when corrected by vineyards. Results were similar in both study regions, with increasing vineyard proportion favoring agricultural adapters and increasing negative interactions between agricultural adapters and the rest of the bird community. Indirect effects in ecology are difficult to assess but potential consequences for ecosystems could affect resilience and inter specific interactions leading to trophic cascades . Similar findings in both California and Chile suggest indirect impacts from agriculturally adapted species on surrounding natural ecosystems may be important globally. Summarizing detailed information on birds and agriculture highlight the practical strategies that can be implemented across the vineyard landscape for the benefit of biodiversity conservation. The importance of not only the surrounding natural landscape but also fragments within vineyards highlights farm-scale management that can be implemented by growers seeking to conserve birds will have an impact on bird conservation. This result can inform practical environmental policy and management and promoted to growers or non-governmental organizations to facilitate restoration strategies within vineyards.

The landscape and farm-scale nature of these results are applicable not only for conservationists but also for growers implementing sustainable environmental programs, and may be part of a win-win strategy for conservation and sustainable wine production. Approximately ten thousands bird species are distributed across terrestrial and marine ecosystems . A significant number of these species cannot adequately survive in anthropogenic ecosystems . Today, about 13% of bird species worldwide are threatened , including more than 25% of omnivorous and frugivorous birds, and approximately 30% of herbivorous, scavenger, and piscivorous birds . Expected changes in climate could affect the distribution of birds species and their ecosystem functionality and ability to adapt to anthropogenic environments . Conservation beyond protected areas is needed to prevent mass extinctions , and improvement of suitability of agroecosystems for birds, will play an important role in conservation. Birds are one of the most visible vertebrates in agroecosystems. Many bird species have adapted to new anthropogenic environments through thousands of years of co-existence with humans, and although some can become pests of crops, multiple species provide multiple ecosystem services through their roles as scavengers and pollinators and through contributions to pest control, seed dispersal, nutrient cycling, etc. . However, land use change to agriculture and agricultural intensification have been reported as major threats to biodiversity conservation globally, as these activities have increased the extent of which natural habitat have become homogenized and simplified . Agricultural intensification have been documented to drive significant change in bird phylogenetic diversity . Loss of bird species is occurring at fast rates and therefore severely impacting ecosystem service provisioning in agricultural landscapes . These trends can be somewhat reversed by adopting agroecological practices and designs that create favorable habitats for birds in agricultural systems while maintaining acceptable crop yields . I review how agriculture drives land use change and its impacts on birds,grow raspberries in a pot and identify key threats to birds in agricultural systems. From an agroecological perspective I review field studies and meta-analyses to detail the role of the birds in agroecosystems, the associations of birds with specific crops, and the impacts of agricultural management on birds, including both generalizable trends and case studies from temperate and tropical agro-environments. I also explore opportunities to conserve birds through more biodiversity friendly farming systems and practices and how certain agroecological management strategies can enhance the beneficial roles birds play in agroecosystems. Literature was identified using search engines , first with general topics then with refined phrases . Different possible combinations of these key words were used in order to perform an extensive search on each specific topic. I compiled 205 documents used to conduct the review, consisting of 198 journal articles, four online resources, and three books. Studied used where selected and characterized based on a) experimental/influence design, meta-analysis; b) region , temperate areas , tropical areas , and tropical and temperate areas, and publication date .The studies used are publicly available and represent a non-random representation of this area of research. The data may be geographically biased by three main factors: firstly, temperate European countries and the USA have a longer history of research in agroecosystem biodiversity, likely resulting in more studies in this field; secondly, tropical countries have more research conducted in agroforestry systems , especially from long term studies in Central America; thirdly, developing countries from the Global South were not well represented in this study due to gaps in information.

However, this review compiles the most recent advances in this field, highlighting their significance for agroecological approaches for conservation. Biological control of insects by birds in agroecosystems is considered to be one of the main ecosystem services provided. It is estimated that reduction of 20-70% of the arthropod biomass in crop fields can result from consumption by birds, although this depends on season and arthropod population size . This ecosystem service provided by birds was recognized by the US Department of Agriculture in 1885, when the division of economic ornithology was created, but phased out in the second half of the 20th century when the use of chemical pesticides became prevalent . Recent research has revitalized interest in biological control provided by birds in agroecosystems. In Mexico, an exclusion experiment in shaded coffee reported that birds and bats significantly reduced insect pest populations, particularly during the wet season, suggesting that both birds and bats play a role in the provision of ecosystem services . In Jamaica, an exclusion experiment in coffee demonstrated that bird predation on the coffee berry borer reduced production costs by US $310/ha, equivalent to ~12% of the crop value. In the case of California alfalfa fields, an exclusion experiment reported that bird biological control of pests reduced insect abundance by 33% . The introduction of the threatened New Zealand Falcon in vineyards reduced grapes eaten by introduced song birds by 95% and by native birds by 55%, providing an ecosystem service that could reduce pest management costs by US $234-$326 per hectare . Western burrowing owls consumed more prey in irrigated fields in comparison with the semi natural shrub–steppe of sagebrush and perennial bush grasses in Idaho with no differences of prey abundance between the sites . Woodpeckers can act as biological control agents of insect larvae in apple orchards. For example a study in Nova Scotia between 52-90% of the insect predation was attributed to woodpeckers over seven years across 47 orchards . In Chinese flooded rice fields Huang et al. reported that field leaf hopper abundance was reduced by 63-77% and weed biomass by 50-94% in rice-duck systems, increasing the yield by 295 kg/ha while reducing the cost in agrochemicals. Further, the rice-duck system reported better quality rice of grains . In a cereal crop, biological control by birds was higher in an organic field within a diverse landscape than in conventional simplified monocultures . Interestingly, Maas et al. reported that birds and bats provide similar effects on biological control in the tropics as compared with temperate and boreal ecosystems. These noteworthy results provide novel quantitative insight into the role of birds in agroecosystems and their economic benefits. Birds form part of this interactions include intra-guild predation , functional redundancy , and facilitation or niche partitioning . In agroecosystems where few organisms are top down predators, like birds, the presence of these predator organisms could drive shifts in communities . Consequently, the effect of birds as biological control in agroecosystems could be considered essential for sustainable agriculture, and be based on direct predation decreasing abundance of arthropods or/and other vertebrates, or indirect by affecting the behavior of the prey . Additionally, one of the most profitable activities related to birds, with potential to be implemented in agroecosystems, is bird watching. Bird watching is a popular activity in some countries with great potential to help meet conservation goals . Biggs et al. found that empowering local communities in South Africa as guides for bird tourism permitted significantly increases in their monthly earnings by ~$US 250. Further such activities also increased the guides sense self-worth and self-determination, and instilled a sense of pride in their local environment, with in turn led to direct conservation benefits. Another economic argument tied to birds in agriculture is that many consumers are willing to pay more for produce derived from wildlife friendly farming systems.

In recent years, donors and governments have increasingly targeted development aid to conflict-affected areas, often in the hope that aid will reduce conflict by “winning the hearts and minds” of the population. The idea is that by implementing development projects, for example by building roads, schools and hospitals, or by extending technology, cash transfers or insurance to poor people, we can increase popular support for the government and reduce support for insurgent movements. Facing a more hostile population, insurgents will find it harder to recruit fighters, acquire supplies and carry out attacks, leading to an overall reduction in violence. This idea—that development aid can be used to win hearts and minds—is widespread and forms the basis of much of the U.S. Armed Forces’ counterinsurgency strategy. Yet, there is no conclusive empirical evidence that development projects reduce violence. In fact, there is anecdotal evidence for the opposite.A recent report on civil counterinsurgency strategies by the RAND Corporation warns that “insurgents strategically target government efforts to win over the population. Indeed, the frequency with which insurgents attack schools, government offices, courthouses, pipelines, electric grids, and the like is evidence that civil [counterinsurgency] threatens them.”In a recent working paper, my coauthor Patrick Johnston and I offer a simple but frequently overlooked explanation for why the strategy of winning hearts and minds often backfires: if insurgents know that successful development projects will weaken their position,container raspberries they will try to derail them, which may exacerbate conflict. To help us think more clearly about this mechanism, we developed a simple theoretical model of bargaining and conflict around development projects.

The model’s premise is that the government tries to implement a development project while the insurgents threaten to use force to derail it—perhaps by attacking government staff or infrastructure, or by intimidating the population into not participating in the project. The model assumes that the government and insurgents engage in negotiations, during which the government can pay off the insurgents in return for allowing the project’s peaceful implementation. However, the insurgents know that a successful project will win the hearts and minds of the population and will make it harder for insurgents to achieve their political aims in the future. Thus, if the government wants to convince the insurgents to leave the project in peace, it has to compensate them for the shift in power that a successful project will bring about.Previous theoretical work on the causes of conflict has shown that a large shift in power between two parties can cause bargaining to break down. Our model shows that if a project causes a shift in power that is large enough, the government may not be willing or able to compensate the insurgents and conflict will occur. While this theoretical modeling exercise may seem somewhat abstract, it allows us to predict the conditions under which development projects are most likely to cause conflict. First, conflict is more likely if a successful project causes a large shift in the balance of power between insurgents and the government. Second, conflict is more likely if insurgents have a strong military capacity that they can use to effectively derail the project . I will come back to these insights at the end of this article and discuss what they can tell us about the best way to implement development projects in areas affected by conflict.To test the predictions of our theoretical model, we estimate the causal effect of a large development program—the Philippines’ KALAHI-CIDSS program— on casualties in armed civil conflict. From 2003 until 2008, KALAHICIDSS was the Philippines’ flagship anti-poverty program with a budget of $180 million, financed through a loan from the World Bank.

The program distributed grants for small infrastructure projects to the poorest 25% of municipalities in the 40 poorest provinces of the Philippines. In doing so, it followed a community-driven development framework that allowed the population to propose projects and decide which projects to fund through a participatory democratic process. We estimate the effect of this program on the ongoing conflict between the government of the Philippines and the country’s two largest organizations: the communist New People’s Army and the Muslim-separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front . The New People’s Army is the armed wing of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines, a class-based movement that seeks to replace the Philippine government with a communist system. Since taking up arms in 1969, the NPA has relied on guerilla tactics rather than conventional battlefield confrontations against government armed forces. Its current strength is estimated at 8,000 armed insurgents who operate in rural areas all over the Philippines. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front is a separatist movement fighting for an independent Muslim state in the Bangsamoro region of the southern Philippines. It was formed in 1981, when the group’s founders defected from the Moro National Liberation Front, another long-standing southern Philippines insurgent movement. The MILF’s core grievances stem from disputes over lands considered by the southern Muslim population to be part of their ancestral homeland. With an estimated 10,500 fighters under arms, the MILF is larger than the NPA. However, the MILF has a more narrow geographic focus and only operates in parts of the southern island of Mindanao. Overall, conflict with these two groups has been ongoing for over four decades, caused more than 120,000 deaths, and cost the country an estimated $2–3 billion. We had access to information on all conflict incidents that involved units of the Armed Forces of the Philippines between 2001 and 2008.

These data were originally collected for the AFP’s own intelligence purposes, but a declassified version has recently been made available to researchers.Estimating the causal effect of development projects is difficult under any circumstances, and particularly so in conflict-affected areas. To cleanly identify the causal effect of development aid on conflict, one would optimally like to compare two places that are exactly identical in all characteristics, except that one of them received aid while the other did not.Since this is not possible in the real world, researchers usually use regression analysis to “control” for differences in observed variables. By controlling for a variable in a regression, we can “hold its effect constant,” which allows us to compare places that differ in the variable as if they did not. If we were able to measure all the differences between places that receive aid and places that do not, we could control for them in a regression and filter out the pure effect of development aid on conflict. Unfortunately, this is virtually impossible in the real world since many important variables are hard or impossible to measure. We may, for example,draining pots be able to measure and control for differences in demographics, poverty and access to infrastructure, but crucial variables like the strength and militancy of local insurgents and their level of support in the population are nearly impossible to measure. If these unmeasured variables differ systematically between places that receive aid and places that do not, we run the risk of misinterpreting these differences as the causal effect of aid, which would lead us to the wrong conclusions. For example, suppose an aid agency is worried about the safety of its staff and therefore targets aid to places with little or no insurgent presence. In this case, we would most likely find that the places that receive aid from this agency experience less conflict than the places that do not receive aid. However, this does not mean that aid caused a reduction in conflict, but merely that the agency targeted aid towards places that had a low propensity for conflict to begin with. The key to estimating causal effects is therefore to ensure that one is comparing like with like—i.e., that the places one is comparing do not differ in unobserved variables. To overcome this challenge and cleanly identify the causal effect of the KALAHI-CIDSS program on violent conflict, we employ a statistical method called Regression Discontinuity Design . This approach ensures that one is comparing like with like by exploiting arbitrary thresholds in the targeting of interventions. In our case, eligibility for the KALAHI-CIDSS program was restricted to the poorest 25% of municipalities. Thus, municipalities just below the 25th percentile of poverty were eligible and municipalities just above the 25th percentile were not. The basic idea of the RDD approach is that—since the location of the threshold is basically arbitrary—municipalities just above and just below the threshold should not differ systematically in any unobserved variables that determine conflict. We can therefore estimate the program’s causal effect by comparing the intensity of conflict in municipalities just below and just above the eligibility threshold.

The main results of our econometric analysis are summed up in the graph in Figures 1 and 2. The graphs compare the intensity of conflict—measured respectively by the number of casualties and the probability of having at least one casualty in a given month—in municipalities that were barely eligible for the KALAHI-CIDSS program and municipalities that were barely ineligible. Monthly averages of conflict in barely eligible and barely ineligible municipalities are denoted by solid and hollow circles, respectively. Smoothed time trends are plotted as solid lines for eligible municipalities and dashed lines for ineligible ones. The dashed vertical lines mark important dates in the project’s timeline. The first line at t = 0 marks the beginning of preparations for the project in eligible municipalities; the second line marks the start of the project’s implementation six months later. The third vertical line marks the project’s scheduled end after three years. The graphs show that both eligible and ineligible municipalities experienced similar levels of conflict in the period before the project. However, at the start of the project preparations, conflict increased sharply in eligible municipalities but remained virtually unchanged in ineligible municipalities. The difference in the intensity of conflict then became smaller over time and virtually disappeared as the project ended. Overall, the graphs suggest that the KALAHI-CIDSS program caused a large increase in the intensity of conflict over the three years of its duration. The regression results that correspond to these graphs, which are presented in detail in our paper , suggest that the KALAHI-CIDSS program caused a 70– 90% increase in the number of conflict casualties in eligible municipalities. In aggregate, we estimate that the program caused approximately 500 excess casualties over the three years of its duration. Our regression analysis also shows that eligible and ineligible municipalities did not significantly differ in pre-program or post-program levels of conflict, which supports our claim that the observed differences are really due to a causal effect of the program and not due to systematic differences in unobserved variables. Additional results show that the majority of casualties were suffered by insurgents and government troops, while civilians appear to have suffered less. We further find that the program caused similar increases in insurgent-initiated and government-initiated violence, suggesting that the effect is not the result of a one-sided offensive by either party.Our research makes two contributions to the study of civil conflict in developing countries. First, it provides empirical evidence that development projects can cause violent conflict. This evidence is particularly strong because our method of analysis is able to overcome the central problem of causal inference: that places that do and places that do not receive aid differ systematically in important unobserved variables such as the strength of local insurgents. By exploiting a discontinuity in the targeting of aid—the fact that only the poorest 25% of municipalities were eligible—we were able to compare municipalities that were barely eligible for aid with municipalities that were barely ineligible. Since the threshold at the 25th percentile was chosen arbitrarily, barely eligible and barely ineligible municipalities should not differ in unobserved variables, so that the difference in conflict between them reflects the causal effect of the development project. Of course, even though our results show that development aid can cause conflict, they do not suggest that we should stop giving aid to conflict affected areas. Many of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable households live in areas affected by conflict and cutting them off from aid would be throwing out the baby with the bath water. However, we believe that our theoretical model allows us to draw some conclusions about how to implement development projects while avoiding conflict.