Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira

Sacred groves, sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization, intensification and neo-nature in South America

Soy has become one of the worlds most important agroindustrial commodities – serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products – and 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 worlds 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.

The politics of flexing soybeans: China, Brazil and global agroindustrial restructuring

The political geography of the global soybean complex is shifting. While the complex has long been controlled by US-based transnational corporations, new agribusiness actors, business logics and power relations rooted in South America and East Asia are emerging, based in part on commodity flexing. We explore how soybean flexing is shaping and being shaped by global restructuring of the soybean processing industry. Using the divergent histories and uses of soy in China and Brazil, we propose that in order to understand the changing soy landscape, we must examine the relationships between soys multiple-ness and flexible-ness, the political economy of soy processing, and the relationships between crop ‘flexors’ – those powerful firms that control the soy complex – with each other and with governments. We demonstrate that the agribusiness actors who are gaining more control over the soy complex are doing so in part through flexing, and that the ability to flex may ultimately determine the trajectory of global agroindustrial restructuring. Finally, we raise questions and make suggestions for further research on flex crops.

The geopolitics of Brazilian soybeans

Soybean plays a major role in the development of Brazilian agribusiness, and in turn in Brazilian geopolitical power as well. It is a pillar of Brazils insertion into a ‘new multi-polar world order’ as basis for much Brazilian land ownership in neighboring countries, for the extension of political influence in Africa, and it is especially important for balancing trade with Brazils new primary commercial partner, China. Yet the US dollar and North Atlantic transnational companies still control global soybean markets and production technologies. In a context marked by booming but volatile commodity prices, food crises, riots and revolutions in food-importing countries, a global rush for farmland, and severe droughts and climate change, the soybean agribusiness in Brazil takes on new and crucial geopolitical significance. I trace the geopolitical role it has served in consolidating the ‘green revolution’ in Brazil, and raise questions about the intersection between agroindustrial markets and currencies: could agricultural commodities serve geopolitical functions (and thus contestation) similar to those ‘petro-dollars’ have served since the 1970s? These considerations show how the political ecology of soybean shapes and is shaped by inter-regional and global-scale processes, and reveals new directions for research on the emerging geopolitical landscape of our century.

Chinese land grabs in Brazil? Sinophobia and foreign investments in Brazilian soybean agribusiness

ABSTRACT Chinese companies were singled out among major investors seeking farmland in Brazil, but my own and other emerging research reveals that China still lags far behind investors from the Global North, and there is evidence that the differences between them are far less significant than was presumed. Why then have Chinese agribusinesses been singled out, even as the size and amount of their investments in Brazil – particularly when compared with those form the US, EU, Argentina, and Japan – are in fact relatively small? Who are the actors in Brazil that have contributed to this apparent sinophobia, and who has challenged it? Who benefits? And how have Chinese investments themselves been affected by this disproportionate negative attention? I argue that challenges to national and food sovereignty arise, ultimately, from the transnational soybean production system regardless of the national character of any particular companies or their cross-border relations.

Boosters, brokers, bureaucrats and businessmen: assembling Chinese capital with Brazilian agribusiness

ABSTRACT My purpose in this paper is to deepen the literature on Chinese foreign investments (particularly in Brazilian agribusiness), and the formation of a transnational capitalist class, by utilizing practices of global ethnography and the conceptual apparatus of ‘assemblages’ emerging in human geography. I trace the genealogy of the Chinese-owned Brazilian company BBCA Brazil and its agroindustrial project in Mato Grosso do Sul state, since it is illustrative of the conditions of possibility for Chinese direct investments in agribusiness in Brazil and Brazil–China agroindustrial partnerships more generally. I argue the central characters of this story aptly illustrate the transnational class of boosters, brokers, bureaucrats and businessmen who rise by assembling Chinese capital with Brazilian (agri)business expertise, labour and land. It is the particular work of assemblage and set of skills of these characters, especially those operating at the ‘middle levels’ of state and corporate governance, that both enables the successful implementation of transnational investments, and also explains why such projects propel them while marginalizing others, increasing social inequality, and aggravating environmental degradation.

Environment and citizenship in Latin America: natures, subjects and struggles

as an attractive alternative, but the evidence presented suggests that it was a top-down project of the party secretary that persisted in spite of growing discontent. How do particular aspects of the HRS shape rural residents’ practices and relationships, and how do participants’ experiences of shareholding cooperatives and the Yakou commune differ? It is not clear. As for sustainability, while environmental problems are listed, no clear link is established between tenure institutions and specific forms of environmental degradation, and there is little basis for comparing environmental conditions across ecologically disparate locales. These are intriguing cases, and their contrasts beg for an examination of the conditions that have yielded entrenched difficulty in Guyuan, malfeasance in Nanhai cooperatives, and the persistence and fall of the Yakou commune. Likewise, a discussion of what the three cases tell about each other and the thousands of other rural communities across China would have enriched the comparison. Finally, the absence of definitions of key concepts also makes it hard to evaluate the book’s arguments. For example, what constitutes ‘sustainable rural development’ is never discussed with any precision, so there is no yardstick to judge whether sustainable rural development is realized. Likewise, rural residents are consistently referred to as ‘peasants’, without any definition or engagement with conceptions of the peasant in agrarian literature. The reader has little basis for discerning the motivations and interests of these peasants –which is crucial for assessing whether a given approach to tenure is desirable or viable. This book makes an appealing and intuitive argument. Its emphasis on grassroots self-determination constitutes a radical critique of current land tenure institutions and rural governance in China. Limitations of conceptualization and case studies notwithstanding, it provides thought-provoking observations on the role of land tenure institutions in rural China now and in the future. Specialists in land tenure in China may find this book useful for its summaries of relevant literature and illustrative cases. It may also prove helpful for people less familiar with the Chinese context who are interested in understanding how land tenure problems in China relate to those in other contexts.