The politics of flexing soybeans: China, Brazil and global agroindustrial restructuring

Abstract

The political geography of the global soybean complex is shifting. While the complex has long been controlled by US-based transnational corporations, new agribusiness actors, business logics and power relations rooted in South America and East Asia are emerging, based in part on commodity flexing. We explore how soybean flexing is shaping and being shaped by global restructuring of the soybean processing industry. Using the divergent histories and uses of soy in China and Brazil, we propose that in order to understand the changing soy landscape, we must examine the relationships between soy's multiple-ness and flexible-ness, the political economy of soy processing, and the relationships between crop 'flexors'those powerful firms that control the soy complexwith each other and with governments. We demonstrate that the agribusiness actors who are gaining more control over the soy complex are doing so in part through flexing, and that the ability to flex may ultimately determine the trajectory of global agroindustrial restructuring. Finally, we raise questions and make suggestions for further research on flex crops.

Polycentric governance in telecoupled resource systems

“…Such flex crops "have multiple uses (...) that can be flexibly interchanged while some consequent supply gaps can be filled by other flex crops" (Borras et al 2016:94). Flex crops provide agricultural producers with access to multiple value chains (Oliveira and Schneider 2016). The stages of value chains from production, processing, circulation to consumption are hence multiplying into "value webs" with adaptable flows of commodities (Borras et al 2016).…”

The rise of flex crops and commodities: implications for research

“…The soya oil by-product may have seen increased market demand with the expansion of the vegetable oil market worldwide, including in China. The most recent commercially significant by-product for soya is perhaps biodiesel (Oliveira and Schneider 2014). Sugarcane has multiple food-oriented uses, and is also famous for jumpstarting modern day bioethanol in the 1970s (McKay et al 2014).…”

Sacred groves, sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization, intensification and neo-nature in South America

“…Although transnational seed and export companies dominate the sector, their business logic and operations remain firmly rooted in concrete social and ecological relations, embedded rather than abstracted from their place. There has already been considerable scholarship on how the ABCDs established a global monopsony (Goldsmith et al 2004;HighQuest Partners and Soyatech 2011;Morgan 2000;Murphy, Burch, and Clapp 2012;Oliveira and Schneider 2015), but countering these tendencies was the earlier development of cooperatives in southern Brazil that pooled capital to purchase inputs, build storage and processing facilities, and increase their bargaining power vis-à-vis trading companies (Chase 2003;Fajardo 2005). Some of the largest scale farmers, such as Blairo Maggi in Brazil and Gustavo Grobocopatel in Argentina, have even been able to expand vertically into the construction and operation of their own trading operations (Table 2).…”

“…This reflects a strategic response by North Atlantic-based agrochemical and commodity trading companies to capture the emerging shifts of production to South America from the United States, as well as consumption markets created by increased poultry and pig production in Europe and East Asia, particularly China, triggering a race for control over these new production sites and flows of this key agroindustrial sector (Figures 4 and 5;Oliveira and Schneider 2015).…”

“…Henry Ford, for example, who was an eccentric booster of this crop as a diet supplement and industrial input, already imagined his car's non-metallic structures composed mostly of soy derivatives. But with the advent of soy-based biodiesel and the actual integration of soy as input for hundreds of processed foods and non-food products, soy 'flexing' is now becoming a real and powerful force shaping the sector (Borras et al 2015;Hecht and Mann 2008;Oliveira and Schneider 2015;Grandin 2009). It is recasting continental production systems, agrarian regimes, agronomic infrastructures, finance systems, urban forms and networks, and migration and economic patterns according to what we can classify as a tropical high modernist 'neo-nature' (Scott 1998;Hecht 2005).…”