To See or Not the See the Soy

For those accustomed to an agricultural sector in which soybeans are part of a patchwork of industrialised commodity production alongside maize or wheat, the impact of the crop on landscapes and livelihoods (referred to as soyisation) in the Southern Cone of South America is starkly evident. In Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, rather than involving the introduction of an alternative cash crop in highly mechanised farming systems, soybean cultivation imposes significant land use and socio-economic changes on either forested lands or small-farming (campesino) landscapes… In this chapter we highlight some of the main socio-economic effects of the soyisation process in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, and use an Argentinean case study of MOCASE-VC (Peasant Movement of Santiago del Estero – Vía Campesina) as an exemplary anti-hegemonic peasant organisation to show the types of local initiatives that have emerged in response to expanding soybean cultivation.

This paper challenges the recent hailing of agricultural biotechnology as a panacea for food insecurity and rural poverty in countries of the global South. Based on an empirical investigation of the neoliberal soy regime in Paraguay, I document how the profound transformation of this country's agricultural mode of production over the past two decades, spurred by the neoliberal restructuring of agriculture and the biorevolution, has jeopardized rural livelihoods. In particular , I demonstrate how the transgenic soyization of Paraguay's agriculture has led to an increased concentration of landholdings, as well as the displacement and disempowerment of peasants and rural labourers who have been rendered surplus to the requirements of agribusiness capital. At the same time, the consolidation of this new agro-industrial model has fostered a growing dependence on agrochemicals that compromise environmental quality and human health. Thus, I argue, a development policy based on industrial monocropping of genetically modified (GM) soy is inappropriate, unsustainable and unethical.

The Journal of Peasant Studies

Soy has become one of the world's most important agroindustrial commoditiesserving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial productsand South America has become its leading production region. The soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows with social relations deeply embedded in contested ecologies. In this introduction to the collection, we first describe the 'neo-nature' of the soy complex and the political economy of the sector in South America, including the new corporate actors and financial mechanisms that produced some of the world's largest agricultural production companies. We then discuss key environmental debates surrounding soy agribusiness in South America, challenging especially the common arguments that agroindustrial intensification 'spares land' for conservation while increasing production to 'feed the world'. We demonstrate that these arguments hinge on limited data from a peculiar portion of the southern Amazon fringe, and obfuscate through neo-Malthusian concerns multiple other political and ecological problems associated with the sector. Thus, discussions of soy production become intertwined with broader debates about agrarian development, industrialization and modernization. Finally, we briefly outline the contributions in this volume, and identify limitations and fruitful directions for further research.

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2016

Soy cropping expansion in Paraguay has displaced a considerable number of smallholders from their communities. Based on discussion groups held at peasant and indigenous communities, this article surveys smallholder attitudes towards soy expansion near a nature reserve in eastern Paraguay. Smallholders identify agrochemical pollution and a development model that seeks to eradicate smallholding through the mechanization of the rural landscape as principal problems. In contrast, several campesino (peasant) and indigenous communities have found ways to profit from the industry: some have legally integrated soy into their agricultural practices while others illegally lease their lands to soy patrons. Through interviews, smallholders revealed the relationships between their livelihoods, big soy, and the marijuana trade, giving the sense that engaging in illegal forms of agriculture may help some smallholders resist displacement caused by shifting economies of scale. While these accounts challenge simplistic big-soy/smallholder binaries, they also underscore the deficiencies of weak governance linked to neoliberal economies in developing regions. The article concludes with recommendations on strategies to ameliorate conflicts and engage in sustainable development based on the strengthening of local institutions.

LDPI Working Paper 23, 2013

Certification initiatives are an increasingly prominent means of quelling public concern about the wider socio‐political, economic and environmental consequences of commodity production (timber, palm oil, soy) on increasingly concentrated land holdings in countries characterized by large, poor, rural populations. This paper examines the ways in which the discourse of sustainable soy production – created and mobilized through the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS) certification initiative – enables the coalescence of diverse justifications for land‐grabbing in South American producer countries with particular attention to Paraguay. Using data and information from fieldwork, academic literature, online media, the 2008 Paraguayan agricultural census, and the UNDP development report, five such justifications are presented here and critically assessed. They are:reduced deforestation; improved agricultural practices; national economic growth; food security; and standards development processes that feature inclusive politics. The paper concludes that such claims leave out important dimensions of the growth of the soy industry and the concomitant concentration of land holdings in Paraguay. Any hope for equity and justice will depend on a radical shift in sustainable development policy; one that highlights the distribution of land and resources.

Cultural Anthropology 28(1), 2013

This article provides an ethnographic response to the statement that soy kills (“la soja mata”), a refrain often repeated by campesino activists living on the edge of Paraguay’s rapidly expanding soybean frontier. In the context of Paraguay’s modernization projects since the 1960s, statements like these were easily disqualified as irrational or nonmodern. In the process, the political importance and analytic potential of the beans were dismissed, and so, too, were the lives and analyses of rural activists. And yet the activists with whom I worked managed, over the course of five years of court battles, to bring killer beans before the courts and to have them recognized as a force in Paraguayan politics. In so doing, they also opened up an analytic position for ethnography, allied with Isabelle Stengers’s cosmopolitics, which emerges from a situation of mutually enacting responses, rather than as a mediator of relationships between beings included or excluded from the political territory by the criteria of modernity.

EDUARDO GUDYNAS ABSTRACT Soybean agriculture has expanded to become one of the leading export products in several countries, providing high economic benefits but with strong social and environmental impacts. Eduardo Gudynas argues that soybean agriculture represents the forefront of a great transformation in rural life as agribusiness oriented to global markets expands and takes over traditional farming. This transformation is marked by management rather than ownership of land, with control over production processes, privatization of resources, outsourcing and commodification replacing traditional farming activities. He warns that small farmers, peasants and indigenous groups are threatened with deepening marginalization and exclusion as the relentless logic of the market pushes them to relinquish control of their land.

Most 'progressive' Latin American governments, which have come to power over the past decade or so, continue to rely on agriculture and resource extraction as the primary generators of wealth. Scholars argue that this 'neoextractivism' is made politically possible by directing some profits toward the funding of progressive social programs. The Brazilian Amazon's vast wealth of extractive resources and its large economically depressed population make it the emblematic site for neoextractivism. Its biodiversity and inhabited landscapes, however, mean that the neoextractive program encounters concerted resistance from the global environmental community as well as from traditional, indigenous, and migrant smallholders. In response, neoextractivism must deploy another form of progressivism-environmentalism. The author uses the case of agroindustrial soy production in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Pará to demonstrate how the emergence of environmental governance there facilitates neoextractivism by 'greening' it. Through an analysis of the mechanisms and effects of two programs, implemented through partnerships between nongovernmental organizations and corporations, to manage soy expansion into the Amazon, it is demonstrated that these programs have questionable environmental benefits at best and at worst work to reenforce the hegemony of international environmental organizations, to green the image of agri-business multinationals, and to destabilize strategies of resistance.

El Búho, 2024

Para este trabajo nos hemos propuesto mostrar, en primer lugar, la fuente compartida de los planteamientos sobre el amor de Hannah Arendt y Mauricio Beuchot, sin que ello implique negar otras influencias ni su originalidad, a saber, san Agustín. Asimismo, apuntamos una comparación entre la filósofa alemana y el filósofo mexicano en diálogo con otros pensadores. Lo anterior nos ha permitido conectar el amor con el sentido y, a la vez, hacer una crítica, sujeta a discusión, a la concepción más actual sobre el amor y tan recurrente en varios medios.