Ajuda ao desenvolvimento: tem alguma importancia? - o caso do Fundo IBSA (Oliver Stuenkel)

A matéria abaixo tenta ser generosa e positiva em relação ao Fundo IBSA.
A realidade é que a ajuda ao desenvolvimento vem sendo realizada nas últimas cinco décadas, em montantes equivalentes a dezenas de bilhões de dólares anuais, sem resultados muito visíveis.
A África está melhor hoje em função dessa ajuda, ou através de comércio e investimentos?
O fato é que os países que mais crescerão no mundo nas últimas décadas, com destaque para a China e a Índia, o fizeram com base em sua integração nos circuitos produtivos da economia mundial, ou seja, graças à globalização, não por causa de qualquer ajuda ao desenvolvimento.
Seria muito difícil de compreender isso?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

South-South cooperation: Does the IBSA Fund matter?

By Oliver Stuenkel

Post-Western World, 27 de janeiro de 2014

Ten years ago, leaders from India, Brazil and South Africa, which had just launched the trilateral IBSA grouping, decided to join forces as so-called "emerging donors" and established the IBSA Fund, which would come to symbolize their efforts to promote "South-South cooperation". For the past ten years, policy makers involved in the IBSA process frequently and proudly point to the IBSA Fund's great success. Yet what exactly is the IBSA Fund? More importantly, does it matter?

The IBSA Facility Fund for Alleviation of Poverty and Hunger was created in 2004 and became operational in 2006. Countries decided to contribute an annual amount of US $ 1 million. According to the IBSA governments, the Trust Fund operates through a demand-driven approach. Governments of developing countries requesting support by this fund initiate discussions with focal points appointed among IBSA countries’ officers around the world. These focal points then submit proposals to the IBSA board of directors for review. If a proposal receives a favorable review, UNDP’s Special Unit for South-South Cooperation, which acts as the Fund's  manager and board of directors’ secretariat, initiates contact with a potential executing agency to advance a project formulation, and to facilitate the project’s implementation.

IBSA projects are executed through partnerships with the UN’s Development Program, national institutions or local governments. Important concerns of IBSA partners in the design of their projects include capacity building among projects’ beneficiaries, build-in project sustainability and knowledge sharing among Southern experts and institutions.

Despite its small size, the IBSA Fund received the 2010 MDG (Millennium Development Goals) Award for South-South Cooperation by the NGO “Millennium Development Goals Awards Committee”. In 2012 the Fund earned the "South-South and Triangular Cooperation Champions Award", given by the United Nations for its innovative approach.

The IBSA Fund finances or has financed projects in Haiti, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, Burundi, Palestine, Cambodia, Lao PDR and Sierra Leone. Until today, a series of small projects in developing countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia have been implemented. For example, in Burundi, the IBSA Fund supported, until 2012, a project to increase the government’s capacity to combat HIV/ AIDS. In Cape Verde, a public health center was reformed and modernized in 2008. In Guinea Bissau, an agricultural project was implemented until 2007. In a second phase, operationalized by 2011, the project was expanded. In Haiti, a waste collection project was supported in Port-au-Prince, finalized in 2011. A sports complex has been completed and inaugurated in 2011 in Ramallah under the IBSA Fund. In 2012, the refurbishment of a hospital in Gaza began.

At this point, projects in Cape Verde (Desalinization to increase access to drinking water and provide water for agriculture), Cambodia (medical services for children and adolescents with special needs), Guinea Bissau (farming, solar energy), Laos (irrigation), Palestine (support for a hospital, center for people with special needs), Sierra Leone (leadership training), Vietnam (agriculture).

While such cooperation is notable, even IBSA-enthusiasts must admit that the amounts involved remain extremely small compared to existing development institutions. While policy makers officially hail the IBSA Fund as a centerpiece of the grouping, former diplomats concede that a lack of political will is the only way to explain why the fund remains so small – in particular when considering that all IBSA members spend far larger amounts on bilateral development and humanitarian aid.

Rajiv Bhatia, who served as India's High Commissioner to South Africa from 2006-09, commented that “IBSA assistance is too limited, with each member-state contributing just $1 million annually. Surely, they can afford to be more generous. If IBSA truly wants to make a difference, it should step up its assistance, expedite its decision-making and undertake more projects.”

Governments point out in response that the IBSA Fund is meant to develop “new paradigms” and can thus be successful even while maintaining its small size. Yet several development experts who are not involved in the IBSA Fund pointed out that unless the funds’ size increases, it is virtually impossible to judge its scalability – i.e., in how far others can learn from and copy the IBSA Fund’s strategy.

As a consequence, several observes have called on the fund to be expanded if it is to be taken seriously. Lyal White argues that, if countries committed more financial resources, the Fund could become IBSA’s “flagship and its interface with the developing world.” He recommends that a greater part of Brazilian, Indian and South African bilateral aid should be incorporated into an enlarged IBSA development fund.

Notably, civil society organizations have criticized the IBSA Fund for its lack of transparency. Laura Waisbich of Conectas, a Brazilian human rights NGO, argues that

apart from the annual report which retrospectively gives broad details of projects undertaken by the IBSA Fund, there is very little information on IBSA projects. The website dedicated to the Fund shields any information of relevance, with passwords. An interested citizen has no access to information on - the selection process of projects, the projected timeline, details of sub-contractors, impact assessment reports, target beneficiaries, overall project assessment, etc.

Waisbich writes about a conversation with Vrinda Choraria, from the Delhi-based Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, who had argued that

this lack of information on the Fund is frustrating as even a recent exercise of filing formal requests under the respective information laws, by organisations based in the three countries elicited no relevant information. (..) It is perplexing that a Fund that the three countries promote as a symbol of cooperation and assistance should be shrouded in such secrecy.

Finally, she reports that an information request to the UN Office for South-South Cooperation in United Nations Development Programme, which manages the IBSA fund, under its information disclosure policy, did not provide the information that was sought.

The incapacity of civil society to monitor and assess the impact of IBSA Fund projects reduces the buy-in of NGOs and public opinion makers, which directly impacts the grouping’s image in India’s, Brazil’s and South Africa’s civil society. On the IBSA Fund’s website, a project description affirms that a project in Guinea Bissau was “received positively in the local oficial press” - yet inviting independent NGOs to visit and evaluate the projects would certainly enhance trust in the IBSA Fund.

The IBSA Fund - one of the IBSA groupings few elements that produced tangible results - is a great idea that may not only alleviate poverty, but also enhance the debate about innovative ways of poverty reduction and South-South cooperation in more general. Yet in order to make a serious contribution in the global debate, IBSA governments should dramatically enhance financial support, and make the Fund's operation more transparent.

Cooperacao Sul-Sul = autoservidao voluntaria?

Abaixo uma información sobre o seminário "Cooperação Sul-Sul, Cooperação Triangular e Cooperação Descentralizada", organizado pelo Instituto de Estudos Políticos e Sociais da Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro e pelo Observatório de Política Sul-americana (OPSA), que será realizado no Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, no dia 9 de novembro de 2012.

Antes porém uma informação sobre o que eu penso desse tipo de auto-castração voluntária que praticam certos governos em nome de não se sabe bem qual causa, qual excelência, qual aproveitamento máximo das possibilidades de cooperação existentes no mundo.
Suponho que ninguém tenha nada contra a cooperação triangular, a quadrangular, a pentagonal, a sexagonal, a octogonal, a plurilateral e a multilateral, todas são possíveis e bem vindas. Suponho, igualmente, que a descentralizada pode ser útil em alguns casos, em outros se recomendaria algo mais centralizado, e quem sabe até unilateral e unidirecional. Ou seja, tudo é possível em matéria de cooperação, inclusive porque, como diz o velho ditado, a cavalo dado não se olham os dentes. Quem recebe, se não fica preguiçoso com os donativos generosos, pode aprender algo e ficar até agradecido, supondo-se que aquilo não vicie o cidadão.
Agora, francamente, cooperação sul-sul em nome do que, exatamente? O Sul é melhor do que o Norte, tem mais tecnologia, mais recursos, superou o Norte, tem soluções geniais para os nossos problemas? Se esse for o caso, não tenho nada contra, mas tenho uma pequena desconfiança que não seja bem o caso, e que uma cooperação com viseiras geográficas seja, além de canhestra, redutora e simplista, basicamente estúpida, se for considerada como a forma ideal de cooperação.
Dito isto, eis o que escrevi a respeito: 

2425. “A política externa das relações Sul-Sul: um novo determinismo geográfico?”, Brasília, 21 setembro 2012, 15 p. Texto guia para palestra de encerramento na Semana RI de Florianópolis, em 5/10/2012. Disponível no site pessoal (link: http://www.pralmeida.org/05DocsPRA/2425RelacoesSulSul.pdf). Informado no blog Diplomatizzando (link: http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com.br/2012/10/trabalhos-pra-relacoes-sul-sul-e.html).

E agora, o tal do seminário Sul-Sul e outras geringonças. Tem gente que gosta muito desse tipo de coisa. Eu só acho estranho...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Brazil e Africa: novos horizontes - New York Times

Brazil Gains Business and Influence as It Offers Aid and Loans in Africa

Issouf Sanogo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In Luanda, Angola, construction workers for the Brazilian company Odebrecht, which is among Angola’s largest employers.

By SIMON ROMERO

The New York Times, August 7, 2012

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RIO DE JANEIRO — In Mozambique, Brazil’s government is opening a plant making antiretroviral drugs to fight the AIDS epidemic. Brazil islending $150 million to Kenya to build roads and ease congestion in the capital, Nairobi. And in Angola, West Africa’s rising oil power, a new security agreement seeks to expand the training of Angolan military personnel in Brazil.

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Brazil, which has more people of African descent than any other country outside of Africa itself, is assertively raising its profile again on the continent, building on historical ties from the time of the Portuguese empire.

The array of aid projects and loans recently extended to African countries points both to Brazil’s ambitions of projecting greater influence in the developing world and to the expanding business allure of Africa, where some economies are rapidly growingeven as parts of the continent still grapple with wars and famine. The charm offensive is paying off in surging trade flows between Brazil and Africa, growing to $27.6 billion in 2011 from $4.3 billion in 2002.

“There’s the growing sense that Africa is Brazil’s frontier,” said Jerry Dávila, a historian at the University of Illinois who has written extensively about Brazil’s inroads across the South Atlantic Ocean. “Brazil is in the privileged position of finally reaching the institutional capacity to do this.”

Brazil’s forays into Africa are similar to the ambitions of other rising powers, like Turkey, which has established its sway in the Arab world, and India’s promotion of its culture across Asia.

The prominence given to Africa also reflects Brazil’s shift from aid recipient to provider. Big development challenges persist in Brazil, including woeful public schools and a sharp economic slowdown this year. But Brazil is a major agricultural exporter that recently surpassed Britain as the world’s sixth-largest economy, and it now boasts more embassies in Africa than Britain does — a notable change from when Brazil relied on foreign aid in the 1960s, largely from the United States, to alleviate hunger in the country’s impoverished northeast.

Africa now accounts for about 55 percent of the disbursements by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency, which oversees aid projects abroad, according to Marco Farani, the agency’s director. Altogether, including educational exchanges and an expanding loan portfolio, Brazil’s foreign aid exceeds $1 billion, he said. Big portions of Brazilian aid also go to countries in Latin America, and there is a smaller focus on East Timor, the former Portuguese colony in Southeast Asia.

“We still have a smaller foreign aid profile than other some countries, but we’re learning how to do cooperation,” Mr. Farani said.

Brazil still trails other nations, notably China and the United States, which have far more expansive aid programs and trade in Africa. Elsewhere in Latin America, Venezuela and Cuba have offered different ways of enhancing African ties. Venezuela organized a 2009 summit meeting of African and South American leaders, in which President Hugo Chávez tightened an alliance with Libya’s leader at the time, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

During the cold war, Cuban troops supported Communist governments in Africa. In Angola, this mission included the seemingly paradoxical task of protecting a Chevron oil complex at the same time the United States was supporting an insurgency against Angola’s leaders. More recently, Cuba has sent thousands of doctors to Africa.

But while the Cuban and Venezuelan efforts have largely prioritized developing-world solidarity with some African nations, Brazil’s growing foothold in Africa is more complex, involving ambitions to forge Brazil into a diplomatic and economic powerhouse.

After a surge of openings of diplomatic missions over the past decade, Brazil now has 36 embassies across Africa, and hopes to open its 37th in Malawi this year. Brazil is already using this presence to bolster its actions on the world stage, sending jets to fly delegations from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cape Verde to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which was held here in June.

Other projects are intended to lure Africans to study in Brazil. A new university began offering classes last year for students from Portuguese-speaking countries, including Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Principe.

Since Brazil does not need to import large amounts of oil or food, its plans in Africa differ somewhat from other countries seeking greater influence there. Outreach projects tie largely into efforts to increase opportunities for Brazilian companies, which sometimes work with Brazil’s government in offering aid.

Some of Brazil’s biggest inroads, predictably, are in Portuguese-speaking countries like Angola, where the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht ranks among the largest employers, and Mozambique, where the mining giant Vale has begun a $6 billion coal expansion project.

But Brazilian companies are also scouring other parts of Africa for opportunities, putting down stakes in Guinea and Nigeria. A leading Brazilian investment bank, BTG Pactual, started a $1 billion fund in May focused on investing in Africa. New links are also emerging, including Brazilian farming ventures in Sudan; a flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to São Paulo; and a fiber optic cable connecting northeast Brazil to West Africa.

Some of Brazil’s forays in Africa have come with complications, including criticism of warming ties with leaders connected to human rights abuses, like Equatorial Guinea’s president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. A freedom-of-information measure has enabled journalists to delve into African arms deals by Brazilian companies, including the sale of cluster bombs to Zimbabwe.

African students studying in Brazil have filed numerous complaints describing slurs and aggression, complicating the myth of “racial democracy” that once prevailed here, in which scholars contended that Brazil had largely escaped the discrimination common in other societies.

In one episode here in Rio, Eleutério Nhantumbo, a Mozambican police officer with a scholarship to study public security at a Brazilian university, said he was stopped by police officers on one occasion. They ordered him to raise his shirt upon exiting a store on the suspicion that he had stolen something.

When he questioned why they had singled him out, he said the officers responded with a racial slur and warned him of addressing them without respect; hearing his accent in Portuguese, they queried him about his origins. “The police asked, ‘Where’s Mozambique?’ ” said Mr. Nhantumbo, 33. “They didn’t know that there existed a country with this name.”

Brazil, closely linked for centuries to Africa through shipping routes and the slave trade, is thought to have imported 10 times as many slaves as the United States did before slavery was abolished here in 1888. For a stretch in the 19th century, Brazil was the seat of the Portuguese empire, making the capital then, Rio de Janeiro, a nerve center for trade with Africa.

Those ties withered until civilian leaders sought to establish relations with newly independent governments in Africa in the early 1960s. That process cooled after Brazil’s military rulers seized power in a 1964 coup supported by the United States.

Then economic necessity and a quest to build autonomy from the United States laid the foundations in the 1970s for today’s diplomatic buildup in Africa. Seeking to offset spending on oil imports, including cargoes from Nigeria, military rulers set about opening new markets in Africa for Brazilian companies. They found some success, notably in newly independent Angola.

Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, built on those inroads in trips to Africa from 2003 to 2010, referring to the “historic debt” Brazil had to Africa in its formation as nation.

Taylor Barnes contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 8, 2012, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Brazil Gains Business and Influence as It Offers Aid and Loans in Africa.

Cooperacao ao desenvolvimento: Brasil doador (The Guardian)

Western donors could learn from Brazil's new brand of development aid

The Guardian, June 28, 2012

Rather than advising governments on what should work, as the west does, Brazil exports success – its south-south co-operation is based directly on what has already worked.

Technical advice and capacity building have been central to much of western aid over the past few decades but examples of success are hard to come by. On a recent visit to Brazil I was struck by the confidence with which many of those involved in fleshing out what might be described as the Brazil model of south-south co-operation insisted that they would succeed where so many had failed.

I was not entirely convinced – some of the problems of the aid relationship (related to power, ownership, culture and information) are fairly intractable however you go about seeking to resolve them. But there is one aspect of the Brazil model that made me cautiously optimistic that it may be more effective than traditional donor approaches: the limiting of scope to areas of direct and recent experience.

Brazil exports success. Rather than advising governments on what should work, the hallmark of much western advice for decades, Brazilian co-operation is based directly on what manifestly has worked.

Understanding the agriculture sector in the past 10 years or so has been the mainstay of Brazil's economic and social progress. While presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff have kept well away from any deep land reform – much to the despair of their critics on the left – radical investments in small-scale farmers, to complement the continued might of mega-plantations, has led to increased food supply, reduced hunger in rural areas and, crucially, stimulated internal demand, with knock-on effects for the rest of the economy. The technology, research and policy ideas associated with this progress forms the core of Brazil's agriculture co-operation, about a quarter of its aid effort.

In health, Brazil's second largest co-operation sector, the human milk bank is a flagship initiative demonstrating how milk can be donated by mothers, categorised according to its nutritional quality, and supplied to premature babies. The zero hunger strategy linking social safety nets to school attendance is another of Brazil's proudest achievements, and one that it is working actively with the World Food Programme to share with other countries.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) donors claim to have expertise on all aspects of development, from budgeting to education, resolving conflict, ending maternal mortality and everything else, but their actual experience of such issues in a development context is a distant memory at best. In contrast, Brazil, like other southern countries, is still contending with extreme poverty at home, especially in the rural north-east, so it knows the challenges first-hand.

Brazil's experts are not part of an overpriced development industry, but are drawn directly from the sector ministries and give their time as part of their regular salaried jobs. The people responsible for success at home are the very ones sent abroad, providing a direct link and plenty of experience to share with counterparts, with the Brazilian Co-operation Agency playing only a co-ordinating role.

Although many traditional development consultants and advisers are true experts in their fields and make an incredible contribution to foreign countries, it is hard to deny that the cult of the western expert has been counterproductive as often as it has proven useful. When I left university a number of my friends went to work for management consultancies and within a few months were advising companies on how to run their businesses better. This is not unlike some of the western consultants doing the rounds in developing countries. Jeffrey Sachs's famous arrival in Bolivia to visit shock therapy on an unsuspecting population is only the most famous of all the blueprint approaches typical of the neoliberal era of western aid, written behind a Washington or Tokyo desk.

Brazil's new breed of development practitioner has a rather different experience of development from that of most westerners – that of recipient rather than donor. When the US sought to implement its flagship Aids programme, Pepfar, in Brazil, "no one asked what our needs were, and there was little concern for sustainability", says one senior health official. Brazil eventually rejected Pepfar money because of policy disagreements.

So Brazil is committed to tailoring its support to country needs – but isn't that what everyone says? Again, there are two reasons tentatively to hope that the Brazil model may be different.

First, while OECD donors feel the need to engage with all countries, including fragile and conflict ones, both for development and political reasons, Brazil feels no such responsibility, thus relieving itself of the hardest development conundrum – how to achieve change in a country where the conditions are not right. It is demand driven, meaning that only countries already keen on its way of working will come looking, filtering out those with whom tensions might arise.

Second, the promise of hard cash can distort so many otherwise promising relationships, including between countries. According to Mauro Figueiredo, who is responsible for many of Brazil's 120 health projects worldwide, "money can get in the way" of the crucial process of dialogue. Brazilian co-operation deals with far smaller sums of money than western aid; while more money is needed to bolster and expand Brazil's co-operation activities, it is not the central part of the deal.

I am aware of the danger of idealising a new approach simply because the old one has so many flaws. When money and national interests enter the equation more fully, when some of the intractable contradictions of "country ownership" emerge, when the public in Brazil and the host country start to request impact evaluations of projects carried out with taxpayers' money, Brazil may find that it runs up against the same kind of harsh realities that have dogged technical co-operation for decades. But for now, it would be churlish to seek to undermine the confidence with which this new power is seeking to learn from the past and do things differently.

O Brasil e sua cooperacao internacional - artigo analitico

Meu amigo Bruno Ayllon Pino, espanhol que conhece como poucos o Brasil, me envia uma nota que parece ter interesse para todos aqueles que estudam a cooperação prestada pelo Brasil.

Caras e caros

O newsletter D+C (Devolpment + Cooperation) da Alemanha publicou uma materia sobre o Brasil e sua cooperaçao.

http://www.dandc.eu/articles/220452/index.en.shtml

Acho que é interessante conhecer o que se escreve ao respeito na Alemanha.

abraços

Bruno

-- 

Bruno Ayllón Pino

Cooperacao brasileira ao desenvolvimento: Sul-Sul descentralizado

Estados e Municípios brasileiros terão apoio para cooperar com países em desenvolvimento

Agência Brasil, 20/02/2012

http://www4.planalto.gov.br/saf-projetos 

No dia 29 de fevereiro, no Salão Oeste do Palácio do Planalto, em Brasília, o Governo Federal lançará o Programa de Cooperação Técnica Descentralizada Sul-Sul, cujo objetivo é estimular estados e municípios brasileiros a desenvolverem projetos de cooperação técnica em benefício de seus homólogos nos países em desenvolvimento. 

Trata-se de uma iniciativa inédita, fruto da parceria entre a Secretaria de Relações Institucionais (SRI) da Presidência da República, por meio da Subchefia de Assuntos Federativos (SAF) e do Ministério das Relações Exteriores, por meio da Agência Brasileira de Cooperação (ABC).

Após o lançamento do Programa, os governos locais e estaduais, mediante demanda dos países beneficiários da cooperação, poderão apresentar suas propostas até os prazos de 29 de junho e 31 de agosto e, uma vez aprovadas, receberão apoio da ABC para elaborar os projetos, organizar missões e atividades previstas nos projetos.

As propostas serão avaliadas por um Comitê Técnico, composto por representantes do Governo Federal, dos estados e municípios, tendo como referência os critérios técnicos objetivos, explicitados no Programa.

Espera-se que os projetos sejam elaborados com base nas experiências bem sucedidas dos governos subnacionais nas áreas de saúde, educação, segurança cidadã, governança local, desenvolvimento territorial sustentável, agricultura sustentável, segurança alimentar, restauro e conservação do patrimônio, esporte e lazer, inovação tecnológica e desenvolvimento científico, meio ambiente e mudanças climáticas, formação profissional, cultura e fortalecimento de competências para o alcance dos objetivos do Milênio.

O orçamento total previsto para o Programa é de 2 milhões de dólares em dois anos, sendo que cada projeto poderá apresentar um orçamento de até 200 mil dólares para execução no prazo de um ano.

Como forma de orientar tecnicamente estados e municípios de todo o território nacional a apresentarem projetos e dar maior visibilidade à iniciativa, serão realizados cinco seminários regionais nos meses de março e abril com o intuito de envolver os governos, bem como, na condição de parceiros secundários, a iniciativa privada e a sociedade civil local (organizações não governamentais e associações).

Nos últimos anos, o Brasil vem mudando o perfil de sua política de cooperação técnica e vem se consolidando como país prestador, com atenção crescente em países da América Latina, África, Ásia e Oriente Médio. Segundo o estudo Cooperação Brasileira para o Desenvolvimento Internacional: 2005-2009, organizado pelo IPEA e ABC, com apoio da Casa Civil, os recursos do Governo Federal brasileiro investidos para contribuir com o desenvolvimento de outros países alcançaram cerca de 3 bilhões de reais, aplicados em diversas modalidades de cooperação.

De forma análoga, cidades e estados brasileiros vem incrementando suas ações internacionais de cooperação. A ideia de apoiar as iniciativas de cooperação internacional dos entes federados com recursos federais ganhou impulso após o lançamento do edital trilateral Brasil-França-Países da África e Haiti, em 2011, o qual selecionou dois projetos envolvendo as cidades de Fortaleza e Guarulhos (Brasil), St Denis e Lyon (França), Porto Novo (Benim), Maputo e Matola (Moçambique).

Cooperacao tecnica brasileira - The Guardian

Brazil can blaze a new trail in international co-operation

Jonathan Glennie

The Guardian, 28 0ctober 2011

By pursuing an aid strategy based on mutual benefit, Brazil can consolidate its newfound place in the international spotlight

It is a good time to be a Brazilian on the international stage. Brazil has the eighth largest economy in the world, and the "traditional donors" want to know what the country is thinking. In fact, with an aid programme of under $1bn (according to official estimates), it commands far more interest than it probably should. Why? Because Brazil is the future. When leaders in poor countries sit down to plan their way out of poverty, they don't look to emulate Britain. They say: "We want to be an emerging economy, like Brazil."

 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Economic Survey of Brazil, which was published on Wednesday, confirms this advance in terms of economic growth and poverty reduction (although the much-lauded reduction in inequality can be overstated, coming as it does in one of the world's most unequal countries).

 In the space of a decade, Brazil has transformed its international presence. Its international development strategy is part of that. According to This is Africa, trade between Brazil and Africa has grown from $5bn in 2003 to more than $20bn in 2010 (over a third of which is with one country, Nigeria). President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose vision defined this bold declaration of international relevance, established 17 new embassies in Africa and visited 23 countries on the continent.

 Marco Farani, the director of the Brazilian aid agency, is well aware of the political and economic benefits of Brazil's new positioning as a player in the international development field, but insists the body's motives are pure. "I have never been told to work in a country for strategic reasons," he said in a debate in Parliament on Monday, organised by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and the All Party Group on Overseas Development (Apgood).

 Farani is the leader of a growing team – under his tenure, staff numbers have risen from 70 to 160 – but, far from worrying about Brazil's status as new kids on the block, his attitude to strategy is relaxed. "We don't have a strategy", he states proudly. Farani's preference is to respond to requests for support rather than engaging in comprehensive strategic planning. "There will come a time when we will be richer and more rigid and perhaps then less creative, more boring," he says.

 On monitoring and evaluation, he favours intuition over rigorous analysis for now. "Everywhere I go on my country visits, people tell me how much they like what we are doing," he says. With other countries, one might assume such expressions of goodwill stemmed from a desire to maintain good relations; in the case of Brazil, it's just possible they're sincere.

 Eventually, Brazil will need to become more strategic and engage in the more rigorous elements of impact assessment that denote a professional outfit accountable to citizens (downwards) and the international community (upwards). The OECD is helping the country to record its data better, but Brazil is determined to do things its own way.

 The main difference between Brazil (and other emerging powers) and traditional donors is that they still have to fight extreme poverty at home. Brazil has tens of millions of very poor people. The UK's Department for International Development (DfID) has led the way in recent years in insisting all aid must pass the simple test of primarily benefitting the poorest. Perhaps Brazil should embed this poverty focus as well, but with a twist, based on the idea of mutual benefit. Not only should the poorest in the partner country benefit from international co-operation, but also the domestic poor. Solidarity and accountability should exist not only between governments, but between peoples.

 The Brazilian NGO community already understands the potential of this new internationalist vision. Building on years of leadership, symbolised by the groundbreaking World Social Forums that started in Porto Alegre in 2001, some in Brazilian civil society want to become world players, competing with the big northern NGOs in shaping the international debate, not just the domestic one.

 Brazil continues to receive about 0.025% of its annual income in aid, as it has for the past two decades. This is roughly the same amount as its own aid programme. According to traditional, post-colonial aid dynamics, there is little sense in both giving and receiving aid. But this conception is being recast. It makes perfect sense in the new era to give and receive aid – it is part of mutuality. As if to underscore the point, Farani gave as his examples agricultural co-operation support to Japan (the third richest country in the world) and Ghana.

 Again, civil society organisations are keen to ensure that foreign money continues to help fund their activities. Issues of inequality, environmental degradation and land rights remain complex issues in Brazil, and the international community must continue to play a crucial part in supporting just outcomes for the poorest in Brazil.

 I believe Brazil should learn from DfID and the other successful aid agencies, but not emulate them, influencing the debate at international development fora but without getting sidetracked into the technocratic results mantra. In short, Brazil must blaze a new trail in international co-operation. Not that Farani needs much encouragement to do that. We will know in a few years how successful he has been.

Brasil: Cooperacao Tecnica Internacional - Olympio Barbanti Jr.

Governo do PT internacionaliza cooperação técnica

Olympio Barbanti Jr.*
Congresso em Foco, 20/10/2011

“Até que ponto a experiência de cooperação internacional não seria relevante para ‘resolvermos’ os problemas de tantas ‘áfricas’ que existem dentro do Brasil?”

O governo do PT tornou mundialmente relevante a cooperação técnica para o desenvolvimento que o Brasil presta em diversas áreas de políticas públicas, e agora planeja internacionalizar o modelo brasileiro de movimentos agrários. Nos novos projetos oferecidos à África do Sul, Moçambique e Namíbia, o Ministério das Relações Exteriores (MRE) incluiu como parceiros o Movimento Camponês Popular, o Movimento das Mulheres Camponesas e o Instituto Brasileiro de Análises Sociais e Econômicas (Ibase).

Não existe cooperação internacional desinteressada, tanto do ponto de vista econômico como político. A cooperação que o Brasil recebe do Banco Mundial, da Alemanha, dos Estados Unidos e de outros países traz consigo valores e modelos do liberalismo contemporâneo.

O modelo de cooperação para o desenvolvimento que o Brasil já exporta é parcialmente diferente. Diz-se “estruturante”, porque busca dar orientação estratégica e organizar a atuação pública em algumas áreas relevantes para o desenvolvimento econômico e social dos países receptores.

Estão participando nos projetos brasileiros no exterior a Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (Embrapa), que entrou fortemente na assistência à produção de algodão na África; o Senai, que internacionalizou seu conhecimento sobre capacitação profissional; e o Serviço Federal de Processamento de Dados (Serpro), que leva a outros países a experiência dos “telecentros”, que contemplam ações no campo da inclusão digital.

A projeção de poder que o país alcança por meio da cooperação internacional é muito relevante. Na Rio+20, ano que vem, Dilma vai faturar alto com as ações de cooperação nas áreas de meio ambiente e redução da pobreza.

Agora, o Brasil pretende internacionalizar a experiência de ONGs ligadas aos movimentos agrários com a produção e plantio de sementes “crioulas”. Trata-se de uma experiência de fato relevante, pois o mercado interna

cional de sementes está controlado por grandes multinacionais.

Existe um inegável componente ideológico na inclusão dessas ONGs na cooperação internacional. Porém, de outro lado, a capacidade de um país controlar minimamente a sua produção de grãos típicos da agricultura familiar pode ser estratégica para a segurança alimentar e o combate à fome – especialmente nos países pobres.

A cooperação brasileira no exterior já é muito forte em termos de presença internacional: está em 37 países da África, 12 países das Américas, no Timor-Leste, e em alguns países do Oriente Médio, sem contar os cursos de treinamento à distância oferecidos para diversos países. Mais de 120 entidades estão envolvidas na cooperação sul-sul brasileira.

O intrigante nisso tudo é o fato de diversas áreas de políticas públicas ambientais e sociais no Brasil caminharem tão lentamente. Até que ponto a experiência de cooperação internacional não seria relevante para nós mesmos “resolvermos” os problemas de tantas “áfricas” que existem dentro do Brasil? Até que ponto os projetos financiados com dinheiro brasileiro no exterior estão dando resultado positivo?

Essas são algumas dúvidas de uma importante área de política, que o Congresso Brasileiro passa à margem. Seria oportuno que as Comissões de Relações Exteriores das duas Casas Legislativas acompanhassem com mais atenção a cooperação internacional brasileira, carente de legislação que suporte as diversas ações que ela pode comandar.

* Jornalista pela Faculdade Cásper Líbero (SP), fez mestrado em Desenvolvimento Social na Universidade de Wales e obteve PhD em Políticas Sociais pela London School of Economics (LSE). Possui uma especialização em Gestão de Conflitos, pela Universidade de Colorado, Boulder. Exerceu as funções de repórter, editor assistente e coordenador de nacional e política na Folha de S. Paulo. Foi professor e secretário de Relações Internacionais na PUC Minas. Realiza atividades de consultoria em organismos internacionais, empresas privadas, ONGs e no Congresso Nacional.