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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.

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