Lee Mackey, a doctoral candidate in Urban Planning, has been awarded a research grant from the BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies (BICAS) for his research on the rise of Brazilian agro-industrial firms in Latin America. BICAS is a new global research initiative composed of researchers hailing from the ‘BRICS’ countries of Brazil, China and South Africa that works across the fields of political economy, political ecology and political sociology to understand the ‘BRICS‘ and their implications for global agrarian transformations at a variety of emerging scales. Over the last decade, booming agricultural production and the spotlight of global media has fueled claims that Brazil’s tropical agroindustry will reshape production, technology and hunger across Latin America and Africa. Mackey’s research seeks to ground these claims of ‘BRICS boom’ or, alternatively, ‘BRICs bust’ by exploring the sectoral and locations patterns of Brazilian agroindustry in Latin America. This research holds significance for our understanding of the emerging ‘South-South’ geographies of production in the global economy but it also signals that these processes will be interpreted through the new spaces of intellectual production emerging across the ‘global South.’