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