Brazil’s Re-encounter with Africa: The Externalization of Domestic Contradictions

Abstract

This chapter traces Brazil’s Africa policy as a function of its changing position in the world economy and the trajectory of its internal contradictions. It is argued that the country’s policy towards Africa is an expression of the evolution of its own settler capitalism and its articulation with monopoly capital and finance. Brazil’s postwar transition, marked by conservative agrarian modernization, dependent industrialization and recent deindustrialization, has seen the rapid, systematic and violent expulsion of the black majority from the countryside, with universal suffrage only being established as late as the 1980s. This set the stage for a new set of contradictions that have left their mark in domestic and foreign policy alike. In its recent re-encounter with Africa, Brazil has been externalizing a set of domestic contradictions that are most clearly manifest in its conflicted approach to agricultural cooperation. The chapter outlines the main instruments and policies of cooperation in agriculture, as well as the general trends in economic relations.