Nadia Vanessa Parreira

Preliminary abstract: This research project proposes to conduct an ethnography of the implementation of an international cooperation program, signed between the governments of Mozambique, Brazil and Japan — the ProSavana — whose structure includes the execution of technical cooperation projects for agricultural development in the northern region of Mozambique, known as the Nacala Corridor. The study seeks to understand how such an intervention is connected to issues as the right to land tenure in the region (linked to a global land grabbing movement); social and environmental impacts produced by changes in the Mozambican agricultural model; and the denunciations by local and transnational organizations about the lack of transparency and the concealment of information by program managers. These connections will be analyzed through a more singular problem: technology transfer as a way to promote ‘development’. The main question of the proposed research, therefore, is how overshadowing those issues, technology transfer — carried forward and justified through a technical reason — also becomes an instance of production of political questionings and of resistances, not only of depoliticization, as have been underlined in many analyses of the anthropology of development. My hypothesis is that in the case under analysis the mobilization of certain techniques instead of others doesn´t separate itself from the production of political resistances, as suggested by the positions of Mozambican peasants and civil society organizations involved in de campaign No to ProSavana and the recent setbacks in the implementation of the project.