Introduction

Mozambique is one of Brazil's closest partners in Africa. The two countries have had diplomatic relations since 1975, right after the African country's independence from Portugal, with a Brazilian embassy opening in 1976. In 1998, Mozambique opened its embassy in Brasilia, and regular political and diplomatic exchange between the two countries started to take place. ‘Under Lula's leadership, Brazil conferred considerable weight to prioritising Brazil's Africa relations’ (CFR 2011: 60), with Lusophone countries, and particularly Mozambique, at the centre of Brazilian diplomatic attention. As a general diplomatic strategy, ‘Brazil's leadership is proactively seeking wider and all-inclusive relations’ (Costa 2010: 2). According to Rossi (2015: 26), ‘Mozambique is the best canvas to display Brazil's arrival in Africa’ because it is the biggest partner of Brazilian cooperation, where between 2003 and 2013, over 30 Brazilian institutions were active (2015: 178). Brazil's total investment in Mozambique was 10 billion USD, which made Mozambique Brazil's most important investment partner worldwide (Frey 2016).

This chapter begins, according to the Neoclassical Realist approach, with an overview of the structural environment that determines the framework in which Brazil's foreign policy with Mozambique takes place. As a second step, I analyse the actors and institutions involved in the policy implementation before shedding light on two micro-cases that represent necessary points of analysis. These cases are the 2007 Brazil and Mozambique biofuels memorandum of understanding (MoU) and the ProSavana project, a trinational development project between Brazil, Mozambique and Japan. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Brazil's ethanol diplomacy through a Neoclassical Realist lens.

What is particularly challenging in the realm of Brazilian–Mozambican relations is ‘the way in which many programme officials use the current point of inquiry to talk about the past […], especially since the ‘re-writing of history’ is already apparent among many official ProSavana actors’ (Funada-Classen 2013b: 5). Throughout this chapter, I rely primarily on my interviews with representatives of the Brazilian FPC but am able to triangulate their statements with published literature on the topic.

Background

Mozambique and Brazil have a very close relationship; the Brazilian embassy in Maputo opened immediately after the establishment of diplomatic relations, which was not the case in many other countries as opening embassies is associated with high costs, and that is something Brazil tried to save money on throughout 20th century.