Crops, Ecology, and Developmentalism: The Historical Role of Soy in the Complex Socio-Environmental Relations in Brazilian Cerrado

• In Event: Locating Extractive Development in Latin America

Abstract

The environmental history of the Brazilian tropical savanna presents intrinsic and complex relationships between economic and agricultural development and among crops, soil ecology, and the destruction or conservation of nature. This paper aims to analyze the historical role of soy as a crop liable to the economic and agricultural development of Brazilian Cerrado. Scientific studies for the “tropicalization” of soybeans and their adaptation to climatic and soil conditions involved institutions and researchers engaged in improving seeds and establishing favorable conditions for the cultivation of this legume. Soy represents a success story for agriculture in the tropics and as an agro-export model for agricultural commodities. Soy farming is associated with rapid agricultural expansion in the Cerrado, being responsible for profound transformations in natural landscapes and complex socio-environmental and land speculations, involving indigenous and extractive communities in the last decades. Furthermore, the soy frontier has impacted not only the Cerrado but also other bordering Brazilian biomes, in particular the Amazon. I argue that the expansion of the soy frontier in Brazil needs to be analyzed in a broader historical context, involving governmental policies for agricultural and demographic settlement, land speculation, and socio-environmental threats.

Author

• Sandro Dutra e Silva, Universidade Estadual de Goiás; Universidade Evangélica de Goiás