Soy, Globalization, and Environmental Politics in South America PDF Download

Author: Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351583743
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Soy in South America constitutes one of the most spectacular booms of agro-industrial commodity production in the world. It is the pinnacle of modernist agro-industrial practices, serving as a key nexus in food–feed–fuel production that underpins the agribusiness–conservationist discourse of "land sparing" through intensification. Yet soy production is implicated in multiple problems beyond deforestation, ranging from pesticide drift and contamination to social exclusion and conflicts in frontier zones, to concentration of wealth and income among the largest landowners and corporations. This book explores in depth the complex dynamics of soy production from its diverse social settings to its transnational connections, examining the politics of commodity and knowledge production, the role of the state, and the reach of corporate power in everyday life across soy landscapes in South America. Ultimately, the collection encourages us to search and struggle for agroecological alternatives through which we may overcome the pitfalls of this massive transnational capitalist agro-industry. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Author: Bartow J. Elmore
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324002050
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
An authoritative and eye-opening history that examines how Monsanto came to have outsized influence over our food system. Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical firm that became the world’s largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, merged with German pharma-biotech giant Bayer in 2018—but its Roundup Ready® seeds, introduced twenty-five years ago, are still reshaping the farms that feed us. When researchers found trace amounts of the firm’s blockbuster herbicide in breakfast cereal bowls, Monsanto faced public outcry. Award-winning historian Bartow J. Elmore shows how the Roundup story is just one of the troubling threads of Monsanto’s past, many told here and woven together for the first time. A company employee sitting on potentially explosive information who weighs risking everything to tell his story. A town whose residents are urged to avoid their basements because Monsanto’s radioactive waste laces their homes’ foundations. Factory workers who peel off layers of their skin before accepting cash bonuses to continue dirty jobs. An executive wrestling with the ethics of selling a profitable product he knew was toxic. Incorporating global fieldwork, interviews with company employees, and untapped corporate and government records, Elmore traces Monsanto’s astounding evolution from a scrappy chemical startup to a global agribusiness powerhouse. Monsanto used seed money derived from toxic products—including PCBs and Agent Orange—to build an agricultural empire, promising endless bounty through its genetically engineered technology. Skyrocketing sales of Monsanto’s new Roundup Ready system stunned even those in the seed trade, who marveled at the influx of cash and lavish incentives into their sleepy sector. But as new data emerges about the Roundup system, and as Bayer faces a tide of lawsuits over Monsanto products past and present, Elmore’s urgent history shows how our food future is still very much tethered to the company’s chemical past.

Author: Midori Hiraga
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040252486
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
This is a business history of soy that reveals how Japanese imperial and military institutions and financial-mercantile-industrial interests created a role for soy as a versatile raw material and global commodity beginning in the 19th century, even before the Western world recognized this “oilseed.” Originating in the rich food cultures of Asia, soy is praised as the “magic bean.” About 360 million tons are produced in the world today, and it is traded globally to become food, feed, and fuel. It is the second largest source of vegetable oil in the world, and soy meal is an essential feed without which the modern livestock industries could not exist. Its dominance today is often accounted for in terms of its versatile nature. This book, however, argues that soy was transformed into a versatile industrial raw material and global commodity through the political-economic strategies of state and business actors engaged in the development of the capitalist world-economy. By studying little-known Japanese historical documents and corporate records, and focusing on the less-researched vegetable oil and industrial uses of soy, this book provides a better understanding of how this traditional Asian food was transformed into a global commodity embedded in contradictions. Promoted as a healthy and sustainable food source, soy is also a destructive cash crop whose cultivation and use have played a significant role in the current climate crisis. Based on this case of soy, the book provides a structural understanding of broader food and agriculture systems in the history of capitalism, making it of interest to students at an advanced level, academics, and researchers in the fields of business history, corporate governance, Japanese business, as well as the political economy of food and agriculture.

Author: Ines Prodöhl
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000877345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Globalizing the Soybean asks how the soybean conquered the West and analyzes why and how the crop gained entry into agriculture and industry in regions beyond Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Historian Ines Prodöhl describes the soybean’s journey centered on three hubs: Northeast China, as the crop’s main growing area up to the Second World War; Germany, to where most of the beans in the interwar period were shipped; and the United States, which became the leading cultivator of soy worldwide during the 1940s. This book explores the German and U.S. adoption of the soybean being closely tied to global economic and political changes, such as the two world wars and the Great Depression. The attraction of the soybean to stakeholders on both sides of the Atlantic was linked to a need for cheap alternatives to butter and lard and a desire for greater quantities of meat, which led to the soybean becoming a cheap resource for fat and fodder. Only occasionally was it also used as food. This volume is useful for anyone who is studying or interested in economic history and commodity trading in the twentieth century. It is also connected to the histories of capitalism, globalization, imperialism, and materiality.

Author: Frederico Freitas
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477330399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
A new history of Brazil told through the lens of the often-overlooked interior regions. In colonial Brazil, observers frequently complained that Portuguese settlers appeared content to remain “clinging to the coastline, like crabs.” From their perspective, the vast Brazilian interior seemed like an untapped expanse waiting to be explored and colonized. This divide between a thriving coastal area and a less-developed hinterland has become deeply ingrained in the nation’s collective imagination, perpetuating the notion of the interior as a homogeneous, stagnant periphery awaiting the dynamic influence of coastal Brazil. The Interior challenges these narratives and reexamines the history of Brazil using an “interior history” perspective. This approach aims to reverse the conventional conceptual and geographical boundaries often employed to study Brazilian history, and, by extension, Latin America as a whole. Through the work of twelve leading scholars, the volume highlights how the people and spaces within the interior have played a pivotal role in shaping national identities, politics, the economy, and culture. The Interior goes beyond the traditional boundaries of borderland and frontier history, expands on the current wave of scholarship on regionalism in Brazil, and, by asking new questions about space and nation, provides a fresh perspective on Brazil’s history.

Author: Matilda Baraibar Norberg
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030245861
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
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.

Author: Matilda Baraibar Norberg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000903478
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
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.

Author: Maximilian Mayer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040133029
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
This innovative Routledge Handbook sheds light on the complex and transformative nature of Global China, prompting a re- evaluation of existing theories on global and regional dynamics. It encourages theoretical innovation, methodological reflection and analytical transformation, providing new avenues for critical engagement with China’s global interactions. The chapters propose three key commitments for the study of Global China: Advocating for diverse viewpoints and non- binary frameworks, employing nuanced analysis to understand Beijing’s transnational relations and utilizing alternative methodological approaches to explore different trajectories for China in international affairs. The Handbook also identifies and avoids epistemic traps that hinder the understanding of Global China, such as othering and strategic narcissism. It suggests five analytical frameworks related to relationality, global capitalist processes, language and discourse power, planetary- scale modernization and experimentalism to guide future research. By adopting these frameworks, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of the multifaceted factors shaping Global China within the broader global context of cooperation, competition and crisis.

Author: Matthew Himley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429784082
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
This Handbook provides an essential guide to the study of resources and their role in socio-environmental change. With original contributions from more than 60 authors with expertise in a wide range of resource types and world regions, it offers a toolkit of conceptual and methodological approaches for documenting, analyzing, and reimagining resources and the worlds with which they are entangled. The volume has an introduction and four thematic sections. The introductory chapter outlines key trajectories for thinking critically with and about resources. Chapters in Section I, "(Un)knowing resources," offer distinct epistemological entry points and approaches for studying resources. Chapters in Section II, "(Un)knowing resource systems," examine the components and logics of the capitalist systems through which resources are made, circulated, consumed, and disposed of, while chapters in Section III, "Doing critical resource geography: Methods, advocacy, and teaching," focus on the practices of critical resource scholarship, exploring the opportunities and challenges of carrying out engaged forms of research and pedagogy. Chapters in Section IV, "Resource-making/world-making," use case studies to illustrate how things are made into resources and how these processes of resource-making transform socio-environmental life. This vibrant and diverse critical resource scholarship provides an indispensable reference point for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in understanding how resources matter to the world and to the systems, conflicts, and debates that make and remake it.

Author: Fernando Freitas de Lima
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303062949X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Fruits of the Brazilian Cerrado: Composition and Functional Benefits describes the nutritional, chemical and physical characteristics of the fruits of the Cerrado, as well as their pharmacological effects and use in phytotherapics. Chapters are dedicated to the morphological characteristics, macronutrients, micronutrients and active compounds of various fruits, with separate sections covering their peels, leaves, nuts, pulps, and other components. The text also includes detailed studies on the treatment of diseases with these natural products, as well as their applications in popular use by local communities. Authors explain the importance of bioactive compounds found in the fruits and their possible mechanisms of action in the organism. This text thus provides a valuable reference to researchers studying a range of topics, including functional foods, phytotherapy, and plant science.