Soy Expansions: China, USA and Brazil in the Twentieth Century
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
Rural History 2017
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
The soybean belongs to the most globalized foodstuffs of the current agro-food system. After having been grown for centuries exclusively in East Asia, the so-called ?miracle bean? started ist world career at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Since then, three global soy chains emerged: the chain between East Asia and Western Europe from the 1910s to the 1930s, the chain between North America and Western Europe since the 1940s and the chain between South America and East Asia since the 1980s. These global commodity chains were nurtured by the expanding production of soybeans in different world regions, comprising Northeast China (?Manchuria?), the US Corn Belt and the Brazilian savannah (cerrados). The paper investigates how each site of soy expansion was associated with particular labor relations and natural arrangements which reflected the incorporation of the respective regions into global commodity networks.