The South-South Question: Transforming Brazil-China Agroindustrial Partnerships

Brazil-China agricultural trade mushroomed since 2000 to become one of the world’s largest flows of agroindustrial commodities and capital, reigniting and transforming agrarian questions in a new, multipolar world order. After the conjunction of food price and financial crises in 2007-2009, this burgeoning trade gave rise to a very palpable boom of Chinese investments in Brazilian agribusiness. My dissertation is the most in-depth and extensive study to date about this phenomenon, and its background in historical relations between Brazil and China. As this growth of Chinese investments abroad took place, a broader rush of investments in farmland and agroindustrial production, processing, trade, and infrastructure unfolded worldwide (often called the global land grab) – and China was identified as a major new investor, while Brazil was recognized as one of the foremost targets for transnational agroindustrial investments. State and corporate actors across both China and Brazil promoted this leveraging of investments as a new form of South-South cooperation, claiming it strengthens domestic agribusinesses and governments in these countries in relation to the hegemonic agribusiness and state interests from the Global North. On the other hand, some critics feared this new wave of investments establishes a neocolonial relation that deindustrializes Brazil, dragging it back to an extractivist and export-oriented agriculture that curtails employment and the standard of living of Brazilians, and locks the country economically into dependent international relations. In this dissertation, I set out to investigate where and how Chinese investments are taking place in Brazilian agribusiness (both direct and indirect, targeting everything from seeds, agrochemicals, and other inputs, farmland and agricultural production, agroindustrial processing, and the related logistics infrastructure such as warehouses and ports). My findings indicate that Chinese investments in Brazilian agribusiness did expand rapidly in recent years, but they are still far dwarfed by capital from the Global North – particularly in farmland and agricultural production. The prominent discourse that “China is a (or the) major land grabber” is debunked, and I argue it has actually been constructed through a complex conjuncture of social interests that range across rural social movements, commercial farmers, landed elites, and industrialists in Brazil, alongside agribusinesses and financiers from the Global North. This indicates also a form of sinophobia, which I argue must be understood in its 200-year history of shifting and sedimented Orientalist discourses about the Chinese in Brazilian (and other “Western”) imaginaries. Tracing a genealogy of this sinophobia, I also reconstruct the emergence of a transnational class of boosters, brokers, bureaucrats, and (agri)businessmen (mostly men), who I call collectively “agribusiness professionals.” I argue these agribusiness professionals have not only been at the forefront of constructing Brazil-China relations for over 200 years, but also it is examining their work of assembling Chinese capital with Brazilian land, labor, and expertise that we can comprehend the nature and denouement of Brazil-China agroindustrial partnerships. Thus, I combine political economic and historical methods with a critical global ethnography of the transnational agribusiness professionals assembling Chinese capital with Brazilian agribusiness – rooted in in-depth interviews, life histories, and some participant observation undertaken from the fall of 2010 through the spring of 2017. This period included fieldwork in China during the summers of 2011 and 2013, and the spring of 2015. In Brazil, fieldwork was undertaken during the summer of 2012, and between January 2014 and August 2015. In total, I spent over 20 non-consecutive months undertaking fieldwork in Brazil and 7 non-consecutive months in China, working in about 14 Brazilian states and 8 Chinese provinces (and provincial-level cities). This research reveals that Chinese agroindustrial capital is not homogeneous, centralized, or directed “from Beijing”, and rather than treating it as a “global force” that has “local impacts” in Brazil, I reveal how Chinese and Brazilian agribusiness professionals co-produce the emerging Brazil-China agroindustrial assemblage in the pursuit of their own affluence and influence. On one end of the spectrum, there are companies and projects that I term “Paper Tigers.” These are companies that invested (or attempted to invest) primarily in farmland and agricultural production, and so were feared to be menacing land grabbers, but nevertheless turned out to be quite ineffective. Through a combination of insufficient financial and political resources, inadequate operational capacity among agribusiness professionals, and social resistance across various scales, these Paper Tigers either failed to operate profitably or even establish themselves in the first place. On the other end of the spectrum are companies I call (adapting a term from the Chinese government’s recent policies) “Dragon Heads.” These are companies that play leading roles in their sectors domestically, and launched foreign investments primarily through global-level mergers and acquisitions (M&As) of existing transnational or local (i.e. Brazilian) companies, focusing primarily on agroindustrial trade. While these indirect investments through M&As actually amount to the largest influx of Chinese agroindustrial capital into Brazil, and show clear signs and potential for converging with the agribusiness corporations from the Global North that had hegemony over much of Brazilian and transnational agroindustrial assemblages, this is still an underexplored phenomenon. A central contribution of my dissertation is discerning Chinese agribusiness investments in Brazil as Dragon Heads or Paper Tigers, showing this to be a much more useful lens for analysis than simple categorization across ownership structure as private companies or state-owned enterprises. My main argument is that, whether Brazil-China agroindustrial partnerships collapse as Paper Tigers or advance as Dragon Heads, these projects ultimately benefit the transnational agribusiness professionals who assemble them above all others. While transnational agribusiness professionals cultivate their own wealth and power through these projects, they also aggravate the exploitation of natural resources and workers, and the marginalization of peasants and agroecological alternatives. Therefore, what I call the “South-South question” – how Brazil-China agroindustrial partnerships constitute new linkages of agroindustrial capitalism within and between these previously-peripheral spaces that emerge now as new hubs of capital, and with what implications for the society and environment, particularly struggles for democracy and social justice – brings into the spotlight this group of agribusiness professionals as the key intellectuals (in the sense that Gramsci used in his examination of the “southern question”) who construct capitalist hegemony through transnational agribusiness development. In turn, the struggle for democracy, land redistribution, agroecology, agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and social justice must contest this intellectual and political terrain of transnational agribusiness professionals. Agroecological alternatives for Brazil-China agroindustrial partnerships exist, and are illustrated in the conclusion of this dissertation, but their pursuit is fundamentally a project of internationalist class struggle – uniting peasants, workers, and their allies in both China and Brazil against an increasingly transnational capitalist class.

Advisor: Watts, Michael J