This article assesses the ongoing South American soy expansion from a world-historical perspective, comparing the case of Brazil with the cases of China and the USA. For this purpose, it applies the ...concept of commodity frontier, involving both external and internal modes of capitalist incorporation. The Chinese soy expansion (1900s–1930s) shows a predominant shift of the external frontier, associated with the peasant mode of farming. The US soy expansion (1930s–1970s) represents a predominant shift of the internal frontier, connected to the entrepreneurial mode of farming. The Brazilian soy expansion (1970s–2010s) reveals a flexible combination of extensive and intensive frontier shifts, corresponding with the capitalist mode of farming. These commodity booms were driven not only by nation states, capitalist enterprises and social movements, but also by the potentials and limitations of the soybean plant itself. Shifts of commodity frontiers often disrupted society and nature and, hence, were contested among diverse actors, both human and non-human.
The concept of food regimes has become a prominent theory in political economy. We here provide socio-ecological underpinning of the food regimes theory and thereby connect it closer to an ecological ...economics perspective. We quantify physical trade with main agricultural commodities between world regions from the mid-19th century to 2016 and ask how trade patterns relate to issues of resource use, in particular, to land use, soil fertility and the energetic basis of agriculture. Agricultural exports rose from a few million t/yr around 1870 to 1.4 billion t/yr in 2016. Growth in trade and production did not follow a continuous trend, periods of accelerated growth alternating with phases of relative stability can be distinguished. Rather than directed modernization we observe shifts in unequal relations of power, physical exchange and environmental pressure between changing centers and peripheries. The periods of growth in trade match with the periodization of food regimes. We find that regime shifts are closely related to changes in societies energy metabolism, in the resource base of agricultural production and also to agro-ecological crisis. Our analysis emphasizes that food regimes not only reflect changes in power relations in the world system, but also changes in societies natural relations.
•During the last 150 years agricultural trade has grown from 0.002 to 1.4 Gt/yr.•Periods of growth in global export flows match with food regime periodization.•Food regime (FR) shifts correspond to major changes in societies metabolism.•FR shifts are related to ecological crisis and changes in the resource base of agriculture.•The third, neoliberal FR is characterized by conflicting socio-ecological trends.
Taking the province of Niederdonau as an example, this pioneer study highlights everyday fields-of-force between National Socialism and agrarian society in which rural actors competed for resources ...among themselves and with official functionaries. The megaproject of ‘volkish productivism’ – the creation of an efficient peasantry in ‘racial’ and economic terms – got stuck with regard to technical development. However, with regard to institutional development, there emerged a pathway towards an alternative modernity beyond Liberalism and Communism.
From LTER to LTSER Haberl, Helmut; Winiwarter, Verena; Andersson, Krister ...
Ecology and society,
12/2006, Letnik:
11, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Concerns about global environmental change challenge long term ecological research (LTER) to go beyond traditional disciplinary scientific research to produce knowledge that can guide society toward ...more sustainable development. Reporting the outcomes of a 2 d interdisciplinary workshop, this article proposes novel concepts to substantially expand LTER by including the human dimension. We feel that such an integration warrants the insertion of a new letter in the acronym, changing it from LTER to LTSER, “Long-Term Socioecological Research,” with a focus on coupled socioecological systems. We discuss scientific challenges such as the necessity to link biophysical processes to governance and communication, the need to consider patterns and processes across several spatial and temporal scales, and the difficulties of combining data from in-situ measurements with statistical data, cadastral surveys, and soft knowledge from the humanities. We stress the importance of including prefossil fuel system baseline data as well as maintaining the often delicate balance between monitoring and predictive or explanatory modeling. Moreover, it is challenging to organize a continuous process of cross-fertilization between rich descriptive and causal-analytic local case studies and theory/modeling-oriented generalizations. Conceptual insights are used to derive conclusions for the design of infrastructures needed for long-term socioecological research.
The Hungarian Agricultural Miracle? Sovietization and Americanization in a Communist Country. By Zsuzsanna Varga. Translated by Frank T. Zsigó. The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series. Lanham, ...Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books, 2021, 323 pp
This article assesses the ongoing South American soy expansion from a world-historical perspective, comparing the case of Brazil with the cases of China and the USA. For this purpose, it applies the ...concept of commodity frontier, involving both external and internal modes of capitalist incorporation. The Chinese soy expansion (1900s–1930s) shows a predominant shift of the external frontier, associated with the peasant mode of farming. The US soy expansion (1930s–1970s) represents a predominant shift of the internal frontier, connected to the entrepreneurial mode of farming. The Brazilian soy expansion (1970s–2010s) reveals a flexible combination of extensive and intensive frontier shifts, corresponding with the capitalist mode of farming. These commodity booms were driven not only by nation states, capitalist enterprises and social movements, but also by the potentials and limitations of the soybean plant itself. Shifts of commodity frontiers often disrupted society and nature and, hence, were contested among diverse actors, both human and non-human.
Ausweitung und Vertiefung Ernst Langthaler
Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften : ÖZG,
12/2019, Letnik:
30, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Taking as point of departure soy’s omnipresence in everyday life, this article investigates agro-food globalization in the twentieth century through the lens of soy as a commodity. From an exogenous ...view, soy’s commodification was driven by state and corporate projects, widening and deepening the regional frontiers of global food regimes. From an endogenous view, soy as a versatile crop rich in fat and protein drove these projects as industrial raw material, animal feed, and human food. The cases of Northeast China and the US and Brazilian Midwest highlight various modes, systemic forces, and actors as well as socio-natural impacts of soy expansions as regional sites of globalization. Soy was not only passively transformed into a global commodity but also played an active albeit paradoxical role as both protagonist and antagonist of the prevailing food regime.
The article addresses the Western nutrition transition from the mid-twentieth century onwards through the lens of soy. The soybean and its products have mostly been neglected in accounts of the ...nutrition transition. If anything, the soybean appears as an antagonist of the nutrition
transition. The article argues that soy simultaneously played an opposite - though less obvious - role as a protagonist of the nutrition transition. As both antagonist and protagonist, soy's role was quite paradoxical. Based on time-series and cross-section analyses of country-level data,
the article sketches a more nuanced picture of dietary change in the past as a challenge of global society and its environment in the future.
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