Ten years ago, a collaborative research project tracked how Chinese and Brazilian agricultural investment, state-business partnerships, informal migration and technology transfer were reshaping farming across Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Revisiting that work now, through a fresh series of reflections from the original researchers, reveals a landscape that has shifted substantially and not evenly.
The clearest throughline is China’s continued ascent. The agricultural technology exchanges, training programmes and informal migration patterns documented in the original research have not just continued but expanded into new territory. Chinese-sponsored agricultural training has grown, according to researchers Henry Tugendhat and Dawit Alemu, while new forms of state-business relationship and commercial partnership have emerged in the years since, as detailed by Jing Gu and Zhang Chuanhong. Even though the research relationships themselves have evolved, China Agriculture University’s Xiuli Xu and Tang Lixia describe a shift in how Chinese academic partnerships with African institutions now operate.
Brazil’s trajectory tells a strikingly different story. The original research captured a moment of genuine optimism following Lula’s second presidential term, when bilateral and trilateral collaboration including the More Food International initiative, seemed to be building real momentum. That momentum didn’t survive the change in political leadership after 2019, the Bolsonaro administration abandoned most of these efforts outright. Attempts to revive the relationship during Lula’s third term have run into funding constraints and perhaps more tellingly, a strategic pivot. Rather than continuing to centre Brazilian equipment exports, new technological partnerships are increasingly forming with China instead, as Lidia Cabral and Arilson Favareto document, suggesting Brazil’s Africa strategy is now being reshaped by Chinese competition even within its own bilateral relationships.
The most cautionary case study remains ProSAVANA, Mozambique’s flagship attempt to import Brazilian agronomic and business expertise on the assumption that similar latitudes meant similar farming conditions. The project is widely regarded as having failed in its original form, but its legacy hasn’t disappeared, Euclides Gonçalves and Alex Shankland trace how small residual projects continue shaping development outcomes along the Nacala corridor, a reminder that failed flagship projects can leave a long institutional afterlife.
Kojo Amanor and Sergio Chichava’s original 2016 analysis described a much-hyped era of South-South cooperation, with hopes of trilateral linkages extending to Western donors like the UK and Japan. That framing looks dated now. China has moved decisively to centre stage in African agricultural relationships, backed by a scale of economic power that has only grown over the decade. Brazil, despite continued aspirations, has taken more of a backseat. Western donors, meanwhile, have retreated further still, with declining aid commitments compounding the shift in who actually shapes agricultural investment on the continent.
What hasn’t changed is arguably more important than what has: the underlying political dynamics and uneven power relations that shaped South-South cooperation a decade ago remain firmly in place. For African governments and agribusiness investors alike, the lesson from a decade of tracking these relationships is consistent “South-South” cooperation, in a new geopolitical era defined even more heavily by Chinese dominance, has never been fully mutual, and remains as contested as ever.
