This book examines the changing roles and functions of the soybean throughout world history and discusses how this reflects the complex processes of agrofood globalization.

The book uses a historical lens to analyze the processes and features that brought us to the current global configuration of the soybean commodity chain. From its origins as a peasant food in ancient China, today the protein-rich soybean is by far the most cultivated biotech crop on Earth; used to make a huge variety of food and industrial products, including animal feed, tofu, cooking oil, soy sauce, biodiesel and soap. While there is a burgeoning amount of literature on how the contemporary global soy web affects large tracts of our planet’s social-ecological systems, little attention has been given to the questions of how we got here and what alternative roles the soybean has played in the past. This book fills this gap and demonstrates that it is impossible to properly comprehend the contemporary global soybean chain, or the wider agrofood system of which it is a part, without looking at both their long and short historical development. However, a history of the soybean and its changing roles within equally changing agrofood systems is inexorably a history about globalization. Not only does this book map out where soybeans are produced, but also who governs, wields power and accumulates capital in the entire commodity chain from inputs in production to consumption, as well as identifying the institutional context the global commodity chain operates within. The book concludes with a discussion of the main challenges and contradictions of the current soy regime that could trigger its rupture and end.

This book is essential reading for students, practitioners and scholars interested in agriculture and food systems, global commodity chains, globalization, environmental history, economic history and social-ecological systems.

The wicked nature of sustainability challenges facing food systems demands intentional and synergistic actions at multiple scales and sectors. The Southern Cone of Latin America, with its historical legacy of “feeding the world,” presents interesting opportunities for generating insights into potential trajectories and processes for food system transformation. To foster such changes would require the development of collective understanding and agency to effectively realize purposeful and well-informed action toward desirable and sustainable food futures. This in turn demands the transdisciplinary engagement of academia, the private sector, government/policy-makers, community groups, and other institutions, as well as the broader society as food consumers. While the need for contextualized knowledge, priorities and definitions of what sustainable food systems change means is recognized, there is limited literature reporting these differences and critically reflecting on the role of knowledge brokers in knowledge co-production processes. The political nature of these issues requires arenas for dialogue and learning that are cross-sectoral and transcend knowledge generation. This paper presents a case study developed by SARAS Institute, a bridging organization based in Uruguay. This international community of practice co-designed a 3-year multi-stakeholder transdisciplinary process entitled “Knowledges on the Table.” We describe how the process was designed, structured, and facilitated around three phases, two analytical levels and through principles of knowledge co-production. The case study and its insights offer a model that could be useful to inform similar processes led by transdisciplinary communities of practice or bridging institutions in the early stages of transformative work. In itself, it also represents a unique approach to generate a language of collaboration, dialogue, and imagination informed by design skills and methods. While this is part of a longer-term process toward capitalizing on still-unfolding insights and coalitions, we hope that this example helps inspire similar initiatives to imagine, support, and realize contextualized sustainable food system transformations.

South America – specifically Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay – has become an increasingly specialised world provider of soybeans. Indeed, over the last two decades, more than 33 million additional hectares of land (roughly a surface area equivalent to that of Vietnam, or to all the arable surface of Ukraine) have been incorporated into soybean production. This land-use change, here referred to as sojización, has brought multiple consequences, ranging from deforestation, soil degradation and water pollution to agribusiness domination, displacement of family farmers and ‘foreignisation’ of land. While the consequences differ from one place to another, sojización has brought dramatic technological, productive and social transformations throughout the region, leading to increased land concentration and land-use intensification. The consequences of this dramatic change have rightfully received much scholarly attention. Less thoroughly addressed, however, is the preceding history that shaped the preconditions for sojización to occur. This chapter fills this gap through a deep "Polanyian" historical exploration of the multiple shifts and continuities that preceded and, indeed, made sojización possible.

Agricultural intensification in Latin America has led to accelerated soil erosion, water pollution and food with pesticide residues, which are all signs of unsustainable development. In Uruguay, agricultural intensification with continuous cropping has threatened the country’s primary natural resource: its soil. At the same time, incentives for further intensification and specialization are high, since particularly soybeans have offered the highest (short-term) economic margins. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion about governance for sustainable development through an in-depth critical examination of the main flagship public policy response in Uruguay to soil degradation: the Soils Use and Management Plans (SUMP). SUMP indeed has managed to change cultivation practices in a more sustainable direction. The analysis shows that the relative success of SUMP is partly due to its experimental policy design which has allowed for collective knowledge construction and reflexive learning. It also shows that Uruguay’s long history of accumulated domestic soil expertise and state intervention rendered trust in the regulative process among producers and ultimately a high degree of acceptance. Nevertheless, while this policy is found innovative and promising, there is still a need for improvement of governance designs, if genuinely sustainable development is to be achieved.

This book makes an original contribution to the discussion about agro-food exporting countries’ governmental policy. It presents a historicized and internationally contextualized exploration of the political economy of agrarian change in three Latin American countries: Argentina, Praguay, and Uruguay. By comparatively examining how these states have acted in a context of global driven market forces and historically formed institutions, the monograph illuminates the differing capacities of state autonomy under the present era of globalized agriculture.

Climate change, financial shocks, and fluctuations in international trade are some of the reasons why resilience is increasingly invoked in discussions about land-use policy. However, resilience assessments come with the challenge of operationalization, upscaling their conclusions while considering the context-specific nature of land-use dynamics and the common lack of long-term data. We revisit the approach of system archetypes for identifying resilience surrogates and apply it to land-use systems using seven case studies spread across Latin America. The approach relies on expert knowledge and literature-based characterizations of key processes and patterns of land-use change synthesized in a data template. These narrative accounts are then used to guide development of causal networks, from which potential surrogates for resilience are identified. This initial test of the method shows that deforestation, international trade, technological improvements, and conservation initiatives are key drivers of land-use change, and that rural migration, leasing and land pricing, conflicts in property rights, and international spillovers are common causal pathways that underlie land-use transitions. Our study demonstrates how archetypes can help to differentiate what is generic from context dependant. They help identify common causal pathways and leverage points across cases to further elucidate how policies work and where, as well as what policy lessons might transfer across heterogeneous settings.

El objetivo principal de este estudio fue identificar, describir, si-tuar y explorar los principales significados complementarios y contra-puestos atribuidos a la expansión de la soja, incluyendo sus idealesy supuestos subyacentes. Este enfoque constructivista social difieresustancialmente de investigaciones anteriores que, en la tradición po-sitivista, intentan únicamente “revelar” una “verdad objetiva” basadaen “hechos neutrales” sobre los diferentes aspectos de la expansión dela soja. Así, mientras que las áreas de estudio y las conclusiones de lasinvestigaciones previas fueron divergentes, todos afirmaron que suspropias conclusiones son “correctas” y que las conclusiones divergen-tes son “incorrectas”. Al conceptualizar la expansión de la soja en Uru-guay como un campo discursivo, este estudio no se pregunta qué es laexpansión de la soja actual sino que antes bien explora la dinámica desu (re)producción de significado.

In just over a decade, soybean production in Uruguay emerged from almost non-existence to second most important export product. The extraordinary rapid soybean expansion is often referred to as representing changes that go far beyond the mere substitution of one agrarian activity for another, but evolved into a broad societal concern. Accordingly, the soybean expansion has not only been debated in national media, but among NGO’s, firms, scholars, farmers, political parties as well as within broad sectors of the state apparatus. Although the views expressed are allegedly about the soybean expansion, they are found to reflect much deeper values and assumptions about what is good, appropriate and desirable. All this ultimately represents discordant alternative visions and paths of development. This dissertation outlines and analyzes the dynamics of different, complementary and competing views on the soybean expansion in Uruguay between 2002 and 2013. These have in turn been related to wider debates about “development” of longer historical roots within the social sciences.

Rather than exclusively relying on the mediatized accounts expressed in the public debate, often posed in a rather superficial and antagonistic way in accordance to some media logic, this study has made intensive use of in-depth interviews. This has allowed for deeper, more complex and nuanced accounts, as well as made possible to include voices that were only indirectly “represented” in the public debate. The main agreements and disagreements expressed in relation to the soybean expansion have been outlined, described, situated and explored. While constant contingency and unfixity are acknowledged, three main broader competing world-views, or discourses, have also been identified. These are discerned through the analysis of patterns of regularities in the articulations about the soybean expansion. The first is labelled “agro-ecology discourse”, reflecting anti-capitalist notions and centered in values of local autonomy and justice. The other is labelled “pro-market discourse”, reflecting market faith and centered in values of growth, dynamism and meritocracy. The third is labelled “pro-public regulation discourse”, reflecting beliefs in development intervention and centered in values of progress and upgrading.