Green Gold: Labor, Nature, and Power in the Brazil-China Soy-Meat Complex

• In Event: Commodity Frontiers, Land, and Global Production

Abstract

By 2017, Brazil had surpassed the United States as the world’s largest producer and exporter of soybeans. Today, it dedicates forty-five million hectares to soy cultivation, clearing vast areas of the Amazon and Cerrado biomes. Dubbed “Cerrado gold,” soybeans are celebrated as symbols of modernization and economic growth. The appeal of soybeans lies in their flexibility: production can shift among animal feed, biofuel, and food products in response to price fluctuations, climate shifts, labor unrest, or geopolitical tensions. Although such “flexing” is not new under capitalism, it has intensified since the neoliberal restructuring of the world economy, amid rising food prices. I argue that this intensified flexibility represents a new phase of commodity frontier expansion—one that temporarily resolves capitalism’s internal contradictions and recurring (ecological) crises. Deploying a world-systems and food regimes perspective, I situate the soy boom in Mato Grosso and the MATOPIBA region—the heartlands of soy production in Brazil—within the broader development of the capitalist world-economy. Traditionally dominated by the ABCD grain trading firms (Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus), the South American soy sector has recently seen the rise of the Chinese state-owned enterprise COFCO (China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation). In 2018, COFCO surpassed Archer-Daniels Midland, effectively breaking the ABCD oligopoly in the so-called “United Republic of Soy.” COFCO’s expanding presence in the Southern Cone suggests that China is reproducing a core-(semi-)periphery relation with Brazil, reorganizing labor, landscapes, and nonhuman energies in service of soy production. As a protein-rich input for animal feed, soy is vital to China’s agro-industrial regime, which depends on cheap meat to provision an expanding labor force. Tracing the China-Brazil soy-meat complex reveals an emerging international division of labor, in which geographically distant production processes are structurally linked within a unified process of capitalist development.

Author

• Adam Joseph Benjamin, University of Tennessee-Knoxville