Soybean Expansion and Popular Resistances in the Agrarian Frontier: Land and Environmental Protests in the Argentine Chaco Region.

• In Event: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Political Economy of Agricultural Commodities: The Consequences Soybean Expansion in Argentina.

Abstract

Due to high international prices and technological change—including no-till farming and genetically modified seeds—soybean production has experienced a widespread geographical expansion in Argentina, pushing the agrarian frontier northward into new countryside areas. Such process of territorial growth heightened environmental and land-related grievances among the populations of these regions, as increasing soybean production toppled natural forests, polluted water bodies, and deprived peasant and indigenous communities from access to farmland. As a result, diverse cycles of popular resistance to soybean emerged. We analyze and compare diverse patterns of protest associated with these grievances in Argentina’s Chaco Region, where soybean plantations have considerably spread since the early 2000s. We make use of econometric techniques to examine this relationship. First, we evaluate whether positive economic shocks, instrumented by a hike in soybean global prices, lead local inhabitants to protest over land and the environment. Next, we evaluate whether this effect exhibits significant heterogeneity by landholding inequality, land tenure contracts, and environmental hazards such as deforestation rates and the use of pesticides. Finally, we investigate the heterogeneous effects of political factors and ethno-linguistic identities; especially, we focus on party competition, grassroots organizations—local NGOs, agrarian movements, or peasant cooperatives—and the presence of different indigenous peoples.

Authors

• Maria Victoria Murillo, Columbia University

• Jorge G Mangonnet, Columbia University