Nadia Vanessa Parreira

VANESSA PARREIRA PERIN, then a graduate student at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was awarded funding in April 2017 to aid research on “Amid Technique & Politics: Ethnography of an International Cooperation Program for Agricultural Development of Mozambique,” supervised by Dr. Macedo Barroso. The research proposes to conduct an ethnographic study of the ProSavana, an international cooperation program signed by the governments of Mozambique, Brazil and Japan, which aims to execute technology transfer projects for agricultural development in the northern region of Mozambique. The study seeks to understand how such an intervention is connected to issues as the right to land tenure in the region; the social and environmental impacts produced by changes in the Mozambican agricultural model; the criticism of local and transnational organizations about the lack of transparency by program managers. Therefore, the study’s main question is how overshadowing those issues, technology transfer for development – carried forward and justified from a technical reason – also becomes an instance of production of political questionings and resistances. Through fieldwork it has been possible to grasp three techno-political themes that pervade the operationalization of this enterprise, but which are often obliterated by technical discourse: the subjects’ relationship with the land, the transfer of “technical packages” and the transnationalization of social movements. Their analysis has helped to understand and connect in a more nuanced way the debates about the operation of a “development apparatus” in the midst of the advances of “global neoliberalism”.