Wild Yeast Dreams: Nationalized Nature, Sustainable Biotech, and the Making of Brazilian Green Capitalism

• In Event: Latin American Entanglements of Gender, Sexuality, Race, Ethnicity, Coloniality - II

Abstract

In Brazil, sustainability-driven scientists are leveraging colonial infrastructures into new labor regimes, economic configurations, and ecological entanglements. This paper, based on long-term fieldwork, investigates how biochemists I observed use fermentation techniques reliant on “wild” Brazilian yeasts to convert sugarcane and its byproducts into industrial commodities for an imagined Brazilian “biorefinery.” Such a facility, they contend, would maximize plantation efficiency by enlisting the productive processes of Brazilian “nature” itself in the conversion of waste into products that are ethically superior to harmful industrial-chemical equivalents. As these biotechnologies are applied to the creation of new “green” commodities derived from mechanically harvested sugarcane—a crop at the heart of the colonial project—traditional agricultural field labor is being supplanted by elite, laboratory-based scientific labor.

The paper chronicles the technoscientific practices surrounding what I identified as a uniquely Brazilian form of green capitalism, one that generates added value by branding processes and products as “Brazilian” and hence as synonymous with “natural” or “green.” I argue that centuries of equating Brazilian land, flora, and fauna with “the natural”—first in the colonial and imperial eras, then as fundamental to the “Brazilian nation” and citizenry—are today combining with (1) Brazilian researchers’ historic strengths in the agricultural biosciences and (2) a global rhetoric of capitalist sustainability to create a nationalized form of postcolonial biocapitalist production. In the drive to create socially, environmentally, and economically “sustainable” commodities, Brazilian bioscientists are generating new agricultural labor forces, land uses, and ethical valences of capitalist circulation from the global South.

Author

• Nicole Labruto, Johns Hopkins University