Soy, Globalization, and Environmental Politics in South America

Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at University of California, Berkeley, USA. His dissertation analyses the political ecology of Chinese investments in Brazilian agribusiness and logistics infrastructure. He is a member of the BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies.Susanna B. Hecht is Professor in the Luskin School of Public Affairs and the Institute of the Environment at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA, and Professor of International History at the Graduate School of International Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland. She is the author or editor of more than 16 books and numerous articles on the political ecology of tropical forests. Her book on Amazonian environmental history The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha won the Melville Prize from the American Historical Association, and the Carl Sauer Award in Geography.

• Introduction: Sacred groves, sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization, intensification and neo-nature in South America 1. Strategies and hybrid dynamics of soy transnational companies in the Southern Cone 2. Disappearing nature? Agribusiness, biotechnology and distance in Argentine soybean production 3. Which territorial embeddedness? Territorial relationships of recently internationalized firms of the soybean chain 4. The geopolitics of Brazilian soybeans 5. China’s soybean crisis: the logic of modernization and its discontents 6. Different farming styles behind the homogenous soy production in southern Brazil 7. Soybean agri-food systems dynamics and the diversity of farming styles on the agricultural frontier in Mato Grosso, Brazil 8. Farming is easy, becoming Brazilian is hard: North American soy farmers’ social values of production, work and land in Soylandia 9. Green for gold: social and ecological tradeoffs influencing the sustainability of the Brazilian soy industry 10. On the margins of soy farms: traditional populations and selective environmental policies in the Brazilian Cerrado 11. Genetically modified soybeans, agrochemical exposure, and everyday forms of peasant collaboration in Argentina 12. ‘More soy on fewer farms’ in Paraguay: challenging neoliberal agriculture’s claims to sustainability 13. The moving frontiers of genetically modified soy production: shifts in land control in the Argentinian Chaco 14. Bolivia’s soy complex: the development of ‘productive exclusion’