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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 article presents a comparative ethnography of the smallholder agroforestry projects of an international environmental organization. Migrant ranchers in Brazil sell cattle from private properties in a heavily-deforested landscape. Indigenous farmers in Indonesia rely on subsistence food production on customary lands in a heavily-forested landscape. Despite these differences, the projects identify both migrant ranchers and indigenous farmers as "smallholders" and prescribe cash crop agroforestry as the solution to both their predicaments. In the face of expanding ranches and plantations, this cash crop solution accepts the destruction of forest ecosystems and livelihoods as inevitable, funneling smallholders into market agroforestry in agro-industrial landscapes. This article strengthens the case for comparative ethnography and challenges discursive conflations and political-economic biases of prevailing sustainable development policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and aims: While the role of deep roots in major ecosystem services has been shown for tropical forests, there have been few direct measurements of fine root dynamics at depths of more than 2 m. The factors influencing root phenology remain poorly understood, creating a gap in the knowledge required for predicting the effects of climate change. We set out to gain an insight into the fine root phenology of fast-growing trees in deep tropical soils. Methods: Fine root growth and mortality of Eucalyptus grandis trees were observed fortnightly using minirhizotrons down to a soil depth of 6 m, from 2 to 4 years after planting. Results: In the topsoil, the highest live root length production was during the rainy summer (20 cm m d) whereas, below 2 m deep, it was at the end of the dry winter (51 cm m d). The maximum root elongation rates increased with soil depth to 3.6 cm d in the 5-6 m soil layer. Conclusions: Our study shows that the effect of the soil depth on the seasonal variations in fine root growth should be taken into account when modelling the carbon, water and nutrient cycles in forests growing on deep tropical soils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big-leaf mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) has been harvested and traded since the 16th century. It is highly valued and is used to craft luxury furniture and items. Its natural populations are found in South and Central America. It has been planted throughout the tropical world and sustainable plantations have existed for many decades in a limited number of areas such as the Caribbean. Wood properties of 24 mahogany plantation trees (< 40 and > 40 years old) from Martinique Island were compared with randomly collected data from CIRAD reference collection: 24 trees from natural forest in Brazil, Mexico and Peru. Density of plantation trees was found to be significantly lower compared with natural forest trees. The tangential shrinkage of young trees (< 40 years old) was significantly higher than that of old trees (> 40 years old). Both values were significantly higher than that of natural forest trees. The radial shrinkages of young and old trees were significantly higher than that of natural forest trees. Although the density of natural forest wood was higher than that of plantation trees, the difference in modulus of elasticity (MOE) was insignificant. The static bending strengths (MOR) of young and old trees were significantly lower than that of natural forest trees. The crushing strength in compression parallel to grain of plantation trees was significantly lower than that of natural forest. Mahogany from Martinique Island seems to be a promising tree species for use in joinery and cabinetwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will explore the origins of commercial cacao production in Brazil, specifically as it is linked inseparably to compelled human labor - first of Native Americans employed in the Amazon rainforest and later of Africans imported for regimented plantation fieldwork in Bahia state. Coerced or enslaved labor, both Native American and African, produced almost all the cacao exported from Brazil until the latter quarter of the 19th century. Although never used on the same scale as that employed on sugar and tobacco plantations, slave labor would play an important role in the creation of Brazil's cacao fortunes until the implementation of the abolitionist "Golden Law" in 1888. Even after chattel slavery's de jure demise, exploited and coercive labor practices remained common on Brazil's cacao plantations. This article will consider such topics as: working conditions of slaves and exploited laborers on cacao plantations in Brazil; the chronology, volume, and impact of the slave trade into Brazil; production synergies of sugar and cacao in Brazil; and the lack of a consumer market for chocolate in Brazil and the Portuguese-speaking world. The link of slavery to cacao production in early modern Brazil is little studied in English-language historiography. The present article, based on extensive archival research and field observation on historic cacao plantations, is an attempt to address this scholarly lacuna and create some points of departure for further investigation into a field of fundamental importance to Atlantic World foodways and folkways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]