Brazil-Africa Agricultural Cooperation Encounters: Drivers, Narratives and Imaginaries of Africa and Development

Submitted version of article in IDS Bulletin.Brazilian development cooperation is increasingly in the spotlight. Africa is a major destination and agriculture tops the list of priority fields on intervention, with Embrapa leading cooperation projects. But patterns of cooperation in Africa are changing as other public, private and civil society actors enter the realm of cooperation and bring along contrasting narratives and experiences of agricultural development. This article maps the evolving nature of Brazilian development cooperation in agriculture and discusses emerging features of the Brazil-Africa encounter, considering knowledge framings, policy narratives, imaginaries and the motivations driving a diversity of technical and political actors.ESRC, DFI

Políticas climáticas e industriais : o caso do Brasil

No Brasil, o debate público sobre políticas domésticas voltadas para a mitigação da mudança climática ganhou destaque em 2009, contribuindo para que o país apresentasse compromisso internacional voluntário de redução de emissões. No entanto, este debate não bastou para abrir espaço para a discussão dos temas relacionados à transição para uma economia de baixo carbono, seus riscos e oportunidades. Até hoje, a articulação, no Brasil, entre as agendas de competitividade industrial e de economia de baixo carbono parece não ter entrado no radar de agentes públicos e privados. Na realidade, parece haver uma desconexão entre as agendas de mitigação da mudança climática - centrada no tema do desmatamento - e de transição para uma economia verde como estratégia de desenvolvimento e de consolidação de novas vantagens comparativas. Há poucos incentivos econômicos e políticos, no plano doméstico, para que esta evolução ocorra. As políticas de desenvolvimento produtivo focam no aumento do investimento e abrem pouco espaço para uma discriminação positiva em benefício de tecnologias “verdes”. Apesar disto, há iniciativas inovadoras –mas pontuais- especialmente no âmbito do BNDES e de suas linhas de financiamento, que conferem tratamento relativamente favorável a investimentos ambientais

Latin American regionalism faces the rise of Brazil

In the last two decades, Brazil has emerged as a global actor. Its rise is embodied in such acronyms as BRICS (Btazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa), and BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China), which include emerging states from several world regions. Brazil's emergence has been an unintended outcome of its foreign policy, not because the government did not seek international recognition but because it planned to reach it through regional blocs rather than transregional alliances. There are two reasons for this unpredicted result: first, Brazil has been widening the gap with its neighbours; second, the organizations it has created as regional means to global ends have not delivered as expected. This chapter analyses Brazil's regional strategies and the region,s reactions along three dimensions: power struggle (politics), interest coordination (policy), and community building (polity). It shows that most South American neighbours have followed Brazil,s lead only in exchange for material compensation, which has been limited and sporadic, and have either dragged their feet (as in the Common Market of the South (MERCosuR)) or created alternative organizations (such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) or the pacific Alliance) rather than bandwagoning (as in the union of south American Nations (UNASUR)) when there was little on offer

Brazil and China in Mozambican Agriculture: Emerging Insights from the Field

Submitted version of Bulletin articleMozambique, a country undergoing rapid transformations driven by the recent discovery of mineral resources, is one of the top destinations of Chinese and Brazilian cooperation and investment in Africa. This article provides an account of the policies, narratives, operational modalities and underlying motivations of Brazilian and Chinese development cooperation in Mozambique. It is particularly interested in understanding how the engagements are perceived and talked about, what drives them and what formal and informal relations are emerging at the level of particular exchanges. The article draws on three cases (i) ProSavana, Brazil‟s current flagship programme in Mozambique, which aims to transform the country's savanna spreading along the Nacala corridor, drawing on Brazil‟s own experience in the Cerrado; (ii) the Chinese Agricultural Technology Demonstration Centre (ATDC) and (iii) a private Chinese rice investment project in the Xai-Xai irrigation scheme, which builds on a technical cooperation initiative. Commonalities and differences between the Brazilian and Chinese approaches are discussed.DFID, ESR