Brazilian farmers suggest alternative to Lula’s proposal for Africa

Brazil owes much of its culture to Africa and “this debt can be paid with science and technology”, sending researchers to teach Africans how to develop competitive agriculture in the tropics. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s proposal, reiterated in recent statements, is to intensify the role of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) as a hub for technology transfer to African countries such as Angola, Mozambique and Ghana.

Embrapa’s international operations have existed for about 20 years and was recognized by the UN, in 2016, as one of the 15 best cooperation tools between emerging countries aimed at sustainable development. The way it is carried out, however, could be improved based on the Brazilian experience of tropicalization of agriculture, carried out in the 1970s, according to the Association of Soy and Corn Producers in Brazil (Aprosoja).

Report by People’s Gazette showed that Lula’s apparent good intentions may end up favoring China’s geopolitical interest, which seeks to reduce its dependence on the largest global suppliers of soy – Brazil and the United States – and promote a neocolonization of the African continent, through large international loans that end up turning into unpayable debts, subordinating countries to Beijing’s directives.

Instead of intensifying the sending of technicians and researchers as a kind of agricultural missionaries, Aprosoja proposes a closer look at the patterns of the transformation of Brazilian agriculture from the 1970s onwards, from subsistence activity to productive leadership, which also played an important role based on international cooperation.

Agricultural Revolution of the 1970s

In 1974, the then Minister of Agriculture, Alysson Paolinelli, decided to send 1,500 agronomists abroad to do doctorates and learn about the most modern practices in agricultural technology centers in Europe, Asia, the United States and Oceania. Back in the country, those students tropicalized the science learned in the Northern Hemisphere and helped farmers to conquer the Cerrado, until then considered infertile land, but which today is one of the main green belts in the world.

For Aprosoja, replicating this experience would be a more effective measure than Lula’s paternalistic proposal. “The right decision would be to open the doors of Embrapa so that technicians from African countries – and from others who are interested – come to Brazil to learn about the reality of our agriculture and livestock and take to their nations the knowledge learned here, just as we did 50 years ago and that made us self-sufficient in agricultural production”, says the entity.

For the association of producers, the initiative to lend technicians and technologies developed in Brazil to leverage food production in various poor regions of the African continent is worthy of praise, aiming at food security in the world. But simply transferring technology, machinery and professionals to other countries is not enough.

Need for regional arrangements and local diffusion centers

The Aprosoja note observes that, like Brazil, African countries need to adapt cultures and customize technologies to their reality, in order to build sustainable agriculture.

“Just as the mere transfer of genetic material to be planted in Brazil was not the differential that led it to become the third largest food producer in the world, it is the regional arrangements, planning what to produce and where, and the development of centers of local knowledge and diffusion, which will make possible the growth of agriculture in the African continent”, says the association.

“In this way, sharing knowledge, without failing to serve the main customers, which are Brazilian rural producers, Brazil will occupy a prominent place in world geopolitics at the same time that it will serve those who wait for the development of agricultural technology capable of maintaining it. them in the activity”, concludes Aprosoja.

In an interview with People’s Gazette, recalling the pioneering initiative to spread agronomy students around the world in search of the best practices and technologies, former minister Alysson Paolinelli stated that Brazil itself “needs to have a new 1974”. The idea would be to “take a group of good people, recent graduates, doctors, who were brilliant, send them to the great biotechnological centers in the world, to see what they are doing. We are already ahead of them, but it is not letting them get ahead”.

“I was an adventurer who gathered a group of thinking crazy people, who thought crazy things, but it worked, because they had government support and we did it. At the time, we sent 1,530 graduates, most of whom went abroad to do their doctorates. It was the best 100 million dollars spent by Brazil. Today we pay for that with a few kilos of soybeans, but not at the time”, recalled Paolinelli.