|
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva could not hide his disappointment when
he visited Maputo, last October. He had expected to see signs of progress in
the construction of a $23 million plant to produce generic drugs for the treatment
of HIV/AIDS which his administration had donated to Mozambique. As the most
ambitious foreign assistance project ever launched by Brazil, the plant’s
project was announced with some fanfare during the Brazilian president’s
first visit to Maputo, in 2003. It was to have been built in four phases, with
an operational start date in 2010, Lula’s last year in office. Brazil
allocated $4 million for the project’s first phase.
The project was launched on the basis of Brazil’s international stature
as a model country in the combat of the HIV/AIDS, earned as a result of the
work of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, known as Fiocruz, which is attached to
the country’s Ministry of Health. Bringing the project to Africa, the
continent most afflicted by the AIDS pandemic, was a bold political decision
on the part of the current Brazilian administration, calculated to give meaning
and substance to Lula’s government strategy to expand Brazil’s presence
in the southern hemisphere.
Five years later, there was nothing to be measured or seen. During a closed-door
meeting with Mozambican president Armando Ermílio Guebuza, Lula blamed
the slow pace of the project’s implementation on his own Ministry of External
Relations, which coordinates foreign assistance in the federal government through
its Agência Brasileira de Cooperação, or ABC. Speaking
at the inauguration of a Maputo office of Fiocruz, Lula promised that, in the
event of any future obstacles, "we shall clear the path, we shall unblock
matters so that we can come to Mozambique in 2010 and definitively inaugurate
the Fiocruz laboratory and the anti-retroviral factory." The plant, planned
for the southern Mozambican city of Matola, is to supply AIDS drugs across Africa.
To leave no doubt about the president’s frustration with his government’s
poor management of the project, Lula’s office played the tape of his conversation
with Guebuza to the Brazilian journalists covering the trip.
Virtues and challenges
The episode is emblematic of both the virtues and the challenges confronting
Brazil as an emerging provider of international assistance, alongside China,
India, South Africa and a few others. The Matola project involves an area in
which Brazil, a developing country still struggling to reduce poverty and inequality,
has achieved success and has knowledge to share with other developing countries
on issues that really matter to them. In this sense, it reflects the spirit
of genuine solidarity that guides Brazil’s foreign assistance. It also
indicates a social and political—rather than economic—motivation
in Brazilian international cooperation initiatives. Farmanguinhos, a Fiocruz
laboratory, will supply the technology and training for the production of the
anti-retroviral drugs in Matola. The chemicals and other ingredients will come
in part from India, which has worked with Brazil and South Africa to bring a
developing nation’s vision and sensitivity to poverty reduction and other
matters of interest to the nations of the Southern hemisphere.
“What is striking about the current portfolio of commitments made by
ABC is that it doesn’t show commercial and/or business interests. Just
the opposite, the commitments respond to demands made by the government of recipient
countries to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” says Maristela
Baioni, the Program Coordinator for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)
in Brasilia. “A portfolio review shows that no links can be established
between the growing number of Brazilian global companies now bringing investments
and providing services in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia and the technical
cooperation promoted by the government of Brazil.” In this sense, Brazil
international cooperation contrasts with the tied-aid of the traditional model
of North-South cooperation and even with the policies of other BRIC countries,
such as China.
“Another important contrast is that Brazilian south-south cooperation
provides technical assistance with much better understanding of development
contexts than traditional north-south cooperation. Brazilian experience, expertise
and training transferred to Portuguese speaking counties have the comparative
advantage of sharing common language and cultural aspects,” notes Baioni.
“This makes Brazilian foreign assistance initiatives both innovative and
welcome by the beneficiary countries—with greater chances of being effective
when implemented.”
The country’s traditional emphasis on technical cooperation and its
active high-technology sector has contributed to give to Brazilian development
assistance a more significant and focused development dimension, according to
Dane Rowlands, of Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International
Affairs, in Ottawa. Rowlands summarized the qualities and deficiencies of Brazil’s
foreign assistance in a comparative study of emerging donors published last
year by the International Development Research Center. “India and China
have been reluctant to collaborate extensively with foreign partners due to
the fear of losing policy independence,” he wrote in a recent paper. “Brazil
and South Africa have been much more cooperative in their overall development
programs, as well as in research for development.”
In Rowlands’ view, the original motivations and strategic objectives
of Brazil’s assistance efforts also set the country apart. These, however,
are evolving. “In contrast to China and India, Brazil’s development
assistance program seemed to emerge more directly from its affinity with other
less developed countries and less from immediate political or diplomatic ambitions,”
he wrote. While Brasilia does respond to strong pressures to give priority to
its immediate neighbors in order to increase its influence and elevate its profile
in regional affairs, its assistance program was expanded to other regions as
the country’s global stature increased.
The Africa-Brazil Cooperation Program
The Africa-Brazil Cooperation Program on Social Protection (ABCP) is a good
example of both Brazil’s openness to work with other donors, and of its
capacity to be creative in the way it shares its positive development experiences
with other countries. Launched earlier this year, the ABCP is a result of a
partnership of the Ministry of Social Development, the Department for International
Development of the United Kingdom (DFID) and the International Poverty Center—a
joint program of the UNDP and the Brazilian government designed to promote south-south
cooperation on applied poverty research and training. It was inspired by a cooperation
project between Brazil and Ghana, which took place in 2007. The program’s
objective is to share with interested countries Brazil’s technical knowledge
on specific social development strategies, such as the mechanism of conditional
income transfers to mothers who keep their children in school, or Bolsa Família,
a program for the eradication of child labor with protective actions and policies
initiated by the Brazilian Ministry of Social Development and Hunger Combat.
Since 2006, representatives from Ghana, Mozambique, Niger, Guinea Bissau, South
Africa and Zambia have participated in a study tour to Brazil to learn about
the country’s Conditional Cash Transfer Program. In 2007, Brazil provided
technical assistance to the government of Ghana in the design of a pilot social
grants program entitled Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty, while experts
from the Brazilian Ministry of Social Development took part in three missions
to Ghana involving Bolsa Familia, the Single Registry for Social Programmes
and the Program of Eradication of Child Labor.
Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation
Prior to the ABCP, cooperation between Brazil and Ghana had already led to
the establishment—in 2006—of an office of EMBRAPA, the Brazilian
Agricultural Research Corporation, a federal company that developed the country’s
advanced know-how in tropical agriculture in the last 35 years and has pushed
Brazil beyond achieving food security to ensure energy security through efficient,
carbon reducing production of sugarcane ethanol. Brazil has also established
technical cooperation agreements in agriculture with more than a dozen African
countries.
During an April 2008 visit to Accra, to celebrate the opening of EMBRAPA’s
regional office in Africa, President Lula said 13 African nations had improved
crop yields by applying knowledge in tropical agriculture developed by EMBRAPA.
According to Claudio Bragantini, one of the three researchers at EMBRAPA’s
office in Accra, the introduction of Brazilian varieties of plants and seeds
in Africa has taken place regularly, although at a small scale, for 20 years.
“The difference now is that we are bringing African farmers to Brazil
to learn about our methods and how to operate equipments that have helped Brazilian
farmers become more productive,” said Bragantini.
Christopher Quarchie, of Caltec Ventures, in Ghana, has been twice to Brazil
to visit EMBRAPA’s lab that specializes on manioc. Quarchie farms 300
hectares of manioc for production of alcohol used in beverages. With support
from OXFAM, a group of farmers in Benin has learned from EMBRAPA how to process
the whole cashew fruit, which they used to discard after harvesting the cashew
nut. “The same group is now starting now extract the juice from the fruit
and to process and add value to its production the cashew nut in Benin instead
of selling it to be processed in India,” said Bragantini. In one more
evidence of the positive impact of Brazil’s cooperation in agriculture
in Africa, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization launched in
2007 a project in Kenya and Tanzania to forge links between farming communities
and Brazilian firms specialized in production of equipment used in conservation
agriculture. The objective, according to an FAO report, “is to boost agricultural
production in both countries by encouraging a shift to conservation agriculture
techniques, which optimize the use of farm labor and could also help reduce
widespread land degradation.” Under this three-year project, funded by
Germany, up to 4,000 farmers are to be trained through participatory field schools
in conservation agriculture practices, including reduced or no-tillage and the
use of permanent soil cover.
During his visit to Accra, last year, the Brazilian president said that the
Africa Office of EMBRAPA will place more emphasis on technical assistance to
countries, as “this contribution should be seen as our contribution to
Africa to improve on food production and to give Africa a tool to build its
future.” In an indirect reference of the four million Africans who were
brought to Brazil to work in the fields as slaves in the past, Lula said he
sees EMBRAPA’s assistance in Africa as a “Brazil’s duty.”
Brazil’s initiatives
Indeed, Africa—more than Latin America—has become the focus of
Brazil’s initiatives as an emerging donor. Of its 318 technical cooperation
initiatives abroad, 125 involve programs in 19 African countries, namely Angola,
Algeria, Benin, Botswana, Burkina-Faso, Cape Verde, Cameron, Egypt, Gambia,
Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Kenya, San Tome
& Principe, Senegal, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The total investment by the Brazilian
government has amounted to slightly more than half of the $22 million it allotted
to such programs.
In comparison, Brazil lists 119 projects with its nine immediate neighbors
in South America, plus Ecuador. Another 22 cooperation projects are in other
South American countries and 58 activities carried out with Belize, Costa Rica,
El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Dominican Republic,
as well as nine Caribbean countries. Brazil’s international cooperation
initiatives have also been extended to East Timor, a former Portuguese colony,
and to Lebanon, the country of origin of most of the estimated 10 million Brazilians
of Arab ancestry.
According to ABC, the bulk of Brazil’s international cooperation, measured
by cost, involves professional qualification in recipient countries (22 percent)
in the two areas where Brazilian development activities have produced impressive
outcomes at home: health (18 percent) and agriculture and livestock (15 percent).
Other fields include education (10 percent), social development (seven percent)
and legislative assistance (six percent).
The more challenging aspect of Brazil as an emerging donor is the dispersion
of its aid, reflected in the number of initiatives and the variety of fields
covered. The problem is compounded by the multiplicity of agencies involved
in implementation and an insufficient cadre of international cooperation experts
at ABC. The technical knowledge available at the agency is provided mostly through
a cooperative relationship with the Brasilia office of the UNDP. Divided into
seven coordinating units headed by professional diplomats whose assignments
change every three or four years, ABC also suffers from a lack of both administrative
autonomy and political clout. Knowledgeable sources also see the need for better
coordination among the various agencies involved in the planning and execution
of projects.
The rapid expansion of Brazil’s international cooperation activities
under the Lula government has highlighted these shortcomings. They do not diminish,
however, the essentially positive nature of Brazil’s development outreach
and its promising impact in the beneficiary nations.
Paulo Sotero is the Director of the Brazil Institute, Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.
Back to Top
|