Brazil’s South-South Cooperation in food security

Brazil has increasingly been deploying agricultural and food security assistance initiatives with African countries in a way which is said to be markedly different from the approaches of ‘traditional donors’. Brazil claims to provide a ‘horizontal’ cooperation (i.e. absence of hierarchical relations) and a capacity building methodology that focus on sharing of its own development experiences. This paper demonstrates how Brazil intends to build capacities of partner countries through its own experiences. Specific attention is given to the ‘transferability’ of those experiences to other countries, which do not necessarily operate in the same context. The object of the analysis is the Centre of Excellence against Hunger (CEAH), an office located in Brasília that aims to develop developing countries’ capacities to combat food insecurity. Conclusions are that, on the one hand, the capacity development approach of the CEAH focuses on facilitating the creation of the political and institutional factors that were crucial for the supposed success of Brazil’s domestic policies, without neglecting the different environmental and institutional contexts. On the other hand, the approach does not yet have answers to addressing the absence of other contextual factors, notably relating to availability of domestic resources and a strong civil society, while its effectiveness in Brazil is jeopardized by the lack of impact studies and fragmentation of the national cooperation framework. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht and International Society for Plant Pathology 2015