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Based on 14 months of ethnographic research, this paper analyzes soil management within the plantation model of farmingin order to understand the extent to which life on large-scale monocultural farms can be controlled and directed toward extractiveproduction. Transnational soy farmers in Western Bahia Brazil 'correct' soils in the region to make them productive and marshal thisagronomic work to claim that they have added value to the land by 'building it up'. Still, the permeability of the plantation keepstransnational farmers from achieving their dreams of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ProSAVANA was a technical cooperation program signed between the governments of Brazil, Japan, and Mozambique. Its aim was to promote agricultural development in the northern region of this African country. In this article, I give an ethnographic account of ProSAVANA's implementation and the different struggles that emerged in opposition to its undertakings. As I describe, the program promoters constantly mobilized three allegories evocative of connections and flow in their fieldwork, speeches, or documents: parallels, chains, and corridors. Although, at the territorial level, these were connected to effects of isolation and fixation of the local population and their agriculture. Based on this controversy, I suggest that ProSAVANA can be understood as those world design projects that perform what Anna Tsing called a "plantation ecology," that is, machines to produce the same, that operate to expand their scale while creating simplified, homogenized, and standardized models on diverse landscapes. Nevertheless, throughout the ProSAVANA implementation, their plantation designs were (re)composed both by technicians who aimed to promote its development model and by peasants and activists critical of the program, showing that these configurations alone cannot comprehensively circumscribe human agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the history of government-sponsored rural settlements in the province/state of São Paulo, Brazil, as a pendular movement, whose points of reversion depended on the interests of a landowning elite to obtain labour for newly expanding plantations from the 1820s to the 1920s. Faltering infrastructure and ill-defined property rights over public lands were persistent constraints to the development of such rural settlements. Part of this failure can be attributed to a lack of State capacity and part to the opposition of plantation owners to the settling of independent smallholdings. The paper complements this historical-institutional analysis with a quantitative description of such settlements in 1898–1920. These late government-sponsored rural settlements showed the potential to grow in demographic and economic terms and had an overall demographic and occupational composition well aligned with the goal of creating a family-based peasantry. However, there were enormous heterogeneities in ethno-linguistic composition, educational attainment, and economic prosperity between and within such rural settlements, which point to idiosyncratic features that should be taken into account in future research assessing the short- and long-run effects of immigration and settlement policies in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]