Locating Extractive Development in Latin America

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

This panel foregrounds diverse sites of extractive development of Latin American land, resources, and knowledge in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The papers, which travel from farm field to experiment station to watershed to gene bank, examine the complex politics and ecologies that have shaped each site as a space of extractive activity and consider the local, regional, and global consequences emanating as a result. Starting with farm fields and focusing on the “tropicalization” of soy in Brazil, Sandro Dutra e Silva highlights the role of crop and soil science in fostering the region’s ecologically and socially destructive industrial soy frontier. Timothy Lorek moves from farm field to experiment station, exploring the machinations through which Colombian state agricultural installations became training sites for the international development workers who would ultimately reorient the nation’s agricultural economy towards industrial outputs. Although export-oriented agriculture is often the focus of histories of development in Latin America, other extractive industries have similarly mobilized land and resources for state interests and especially private gain. This has sometimes brought different extractive visions into conflict with consequences that ramify across communities and regions, as Gabriela Soto Laveaga shows by situating Sonoran wheat farming within a larger ecosystem in which mineral extraction and crop production directly compete for scarce water. The mobilization of resources from Latin America has also had global effects, as Helen Anne Curry reveals by moving from crop fields to gene banks to examine how Andean potato samples, subjected to disease screening and genetic analysis in Britain, became inputs into European potato monocultures. Together, the contributed papers speak especially to the many kinds of knowledge and diverse political interests that conditioned agricultural and industrial development of Latin American crops, lands, and waters.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Crops, Ecology, and Developmentalism: The Historical Role of Soy in the Complex Socio-Environmental Relations in Brazilian Cerrado - Sandro Dutra e Silva, Universidade Estadual de Goiás; Universidade Evangélica de Goiás

• From Point Four to the Peace Corps: Cultural Encounters at Colombian Agricultural Field Sites - Timothy Lorek, College of St. Scholastica

• Crop Lands and Lithium: Water Demands in an Extraction Zone - Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Harvard University

• The Empire Potato Collection: Imperial Bioprospecting, Plant Quarantine, and the Remaking of a British Staple - Helen Anne Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology

Chair

• Mark Hersey, Mississippi State University