Negotiating Waste and Value in Soylandia

• In Event: Making “the Public” in Popular Economies: Latin America’s Changing Shared Economic Spheres

Abstract

The rapid expansion of soybean production in South America is intimately tied to processes of land dispossession, land degradation, and violence. Community activists, academics, and national and international NGOs decry the expansion of soy production into vulnerable communities and ecosystems. For their part, proponents of soy production celebrate the soy boom for contributing to economic growth and transforming wasteland to productive land dotted with modern cities. Incorporating ethnographic research on large-scale, North American soybean farmers in the Cerrado of Western Bahia, Brazil, this paper follows Tania Murray Li in taking these claims of improvement and development seriously, though not at face value.

Transnational farmers authorize their work as improvement. They define the Cerrado land as neither productive (in contrast to their perception of Midwestern, USA farmland) nor worth saving (in contrast to their perception of Amazonia). For them, clearing the savannah, applying fertilizers, planting soy, and applying round after round of herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides constitutes a transformation of land from waste to value. They negotiate with North American and Brazilian public spheres to claim their contribution to the common good, but also what counts as the common good. To Brazilian audiences they claim to bring development, rational business practices, and jobs; to North American audiences they claim legacies of settler colonialism and farm expansion as well as reaching towards futures of modern and efficient agribusiness.

Author

• Andrew Ofstehage, Cornell University