Research project The Miracle Bean: Agrofood globalization from the lens of the soybean
This project aims to provide a thorough investigation of the journey of the soybean, from a key food staple in ancient Asia to today’s expansive biotech agriculture in South America producing the fundamental ingredient behind “cheap” meat.
Over its long history, emperors, botanists, nutritionists, industrialists and traders have hyped different qualities of the soybean. It has been called a “miracle bean” for its outstanding flexibility of uses, nutritional qualities and hardiness to poor agricultural conditions. However, it has also been portrayed as a “curse” - as the ultimate symbol for increased corporate control and financialization of agriculture, enabling animal confinement, accelerating biodiversity loss and increasing displacement of farmers. We view the soybean itself is neither a miracle, nor a curse, but exceptional in the sense that it is a highly versatile and adaptive crop that has taken on a broad variety of functions and meanings throughout history depending on how and where it was produced, for what purpose, by whom, etc.
Through a mapping and analysis of the functions, uses, places, production methods, values and meanings of the soybean throughout world history, we will explore the widely shifting roles and meanings it has held. This study will thus include an exploration of the spatial reconfigurations of production, trade and consumption of the soybean, as well as its changed social-ecological relations and modes of production and commercialization practices over history. To examine the evolving dominant structures and processes of the agrofood system and the social-ecological effects of these changes over time we propose a study that complements and integrates theories and methods in political economy with resilience thinking in a world historical and transdisciplinary way. In this way, this project will add nuance to the complex picture of agrofood globalization, while also advance theory and methods related to the evolution and sustainability of agrofood systems. The resulting analysis may accordingly even challenge previous historical narratives and ways of conceptualizing agrofood change.
Project description
We wish to inquire into the historical evolution of the ubiquitous, yet often invisible, “miracle bean” - the soybean (Glycine max). This project aims to provide a thorough investigation of the journey of the soybean, from a key food staple in ancient Asia to today’s expansive biotech agriculture in South America producing the fundamental ingredient behind “cheap” meat. The soybean is a powerful lens to analyze the historical processes of uneven globalization and the development of the modern-day global agrofood system.
Over its long history, emperors, botanists, nutritionists, industrialists and traders have hyped different qualities of the soybean. It has been called a “miracle bean” for its outstanding flexibility of uses, nutritional qualities and hardiness to poor agricultural conditions. However, it has also been portrayed as a “curse” - as the ultimate symbol for increased corporate control and financialization of agriculture, enabling animal confinement, accelerating biodiversity loss and increasing displacement of farmers. We view the soybean itself is neither a miracle, nor a curse, but exceptional in the sense that it is a highly versatile and adaptive crop that has taken on a broad variety of functions and meanings throughout history depending on how and where it was produced, for what purpose, by whom, etc.
Through a mapping and analysis of the functions, uses, places, production methods, values and meanings of the soybean throughout world history, we will explore the widely shifting roles and meanings it has held. This study will thus include an exploration of the spatial reconfigurations of production, trade and consumption of the soybean, as well as its changed social-ecological relations and modes of production and commercialization practices over history. To examine the evolving dominant structures and processes of the agrofood system and the social-ecological effects of these changes over time we propose a study that complements and integrates theories and methods in political economy with resilience thinking in a world historical and transdisciplinary way. In this way, this project will add nuance to the complex picture of agrofood globalization, while also advance theory and methods related to the evolution and sustainability of agrofood systems. The resulting analysis may accordingly even challenge previous historical narratives and ways of conceptualizing agrofood change.
Our main research questions are:
RQ1: How have the long-term patterns of production and consumption of the soybean developed and changed throughout history, and what do they tell us about agrofood globalization?
RQ2: What are the social-ecological consequences of the shifting patterns of production and consumption of the soybean chain throughout history?
RQ3: How can a new transdisciplinary framework for analysis and interpretation of long-term agrofood globalization be developed by combining insights and methods from historically informed political economy, such as the Food Regimes and Global Commodity Chain, with complex adaptive systems theory and ecology, such as Resilience thinking?
THEORY AND METHODS: COMBINING INSIGHTS FROM POLITICAL ECONOMY AND RESILIENCE THINKING
This project builds on a unique combination of insights from within the traditions of a historically informed political economy, complex adaptive systems theory, and ecology. The project will thus be conducted in a world historical and uniquely transdisciplinary way (Jarrick et al 2016, Nicolescu 2014 ). We build on a common definition of globalization within world history, as “a process in which the network of human interaction gradually widens and takes on new and more complex forms” (Jarrick et al 2016:7). To map and analyze the changing articulations of the soybean over history, we will use a combination of tools from food regimes (FR), global commodity chain (GCC) analysis and resilience thinking (RT). All three perspectives share a systemic and non-linear view of change, which reflects a holistic, non-determinist historical interpretation of evolving social and ecological relations.
The FR approach analyzes world capitalist history through an agri-food lens. FR categorizes history chronologically into relatively stable constellations called food regimes with periods of reorganization between (Friedmann and McMichael 1989, McMichael 2013). These regimes are built around more or less stable relations among and between states, enterprises and populations (McMichael 2009:140, 2016). When contradictions and contestation grow, the regime starts to erode and eventually falls apart in a crisis, which eventually leads to reorganization and a new regime. In line with McMichael (2016), we see that the food regime analysis offers a tool to examine the historical political and economic (and ecological) relationships attending the production and circulation of food on a world scale, by providing a particular optic on the periodic transformations in political and social relations in the capitalist world economy. This FR chronology will guide our work and provide a context in which we situate, as well as interpret, the events and processes involved in the soybean chain at different times. However, while the FR chronological periodization begins in the late 19th century, this project will also explore the evolving roles of the soybean in a vast area in Asia during ancient and early-modern periods. This is an important historical backdrop to the globalization of consequent agrofood regimes (Hymowitz 1970, Huang 2002, Du Bois 2008). Thus, we propose the following study periods: 1) Pre-1870; 2) 1870-1914; 3) 1950s-1973; 4) 1980s - present (see detailed information on each period study below).
For each of these four historical periods, we will use the GCC approach to map the full set of interlinked actors, assets and activities and dynamic interactions in different stages of the commodity chain (Wallerstein 1974, Gereffi 1994, Gunderson and Holling 2002). This includes investigation of the complex webs of (non-)hierarchical relations among different actors, expressed through informal or formal contracts, embedded in particular socio- technological, socio-environmental and socio-economic structures and processes. The four GCC dimensions: territorial, input-output structure, governance structure and institutional structure (Bair 2009, Hamilton and Gereffi 2009) help to map out where and how soybeans are produced and consumed, but also the relations between local, national and transnational actors; including farmers, trading companies, seed companies, scientists, feed, soap and margarine manufacturers, financial intermediaries and consumers, with differing interests, capital, practices and power relations among them. Regulation at different scales is also important, and accordingly this mapping also includes identifying the role of economic policies and the wider institutional context in which the chain operates.
Recognizing the gap in global history of a truly social-ecological approach, we explicitly integrate ecological understanding into our analyses, e.g. recent understanding of ecological regime shifts (large sudden, long-lasting changes in ecosystems) and that they often significantly impact humans (Scheffer et al 2001). Using simple systems modelling from RT, operationalized in causal loop diagrams, will be a complementary tool to map the dynamics and identify key feedback processes and features (Meadows 1996, Deutsch et al 2012;2013, Porter et al 2013) of the soybean chains.
By combining FR, GCC and RT into one unified framework, we aim to build on the specific strengths of each perspective, while overcoming some key limitations and contribute to theory development. For example, relating the specific empirically grounded configuration of the soybean chain at different times to the subsequent food regimes will add both nuance and depth to the FR approach and avoid oversimplification. The incorporation of RT into GCC analysis enhances in-depth ecological understanding. While RT is enriched by the perspectives of political economy and its deep historical understanding of the evolution of the market economy and its power relations. In this way, we believe that the results of this investigation will not only provide important new empirical contributions to world history research, but will add nuance to the complex picture of agrofood globalization and even challenge previous historical narratives and ways of conceptualizing agrofood change.
SIGNIFICANCE AND SCIENTIFIC NOVELTY
While deep studies into the global history of sugar and corn have contributed with a richer understanding of the evolution and differentiated articulation of agrofood capitalism, there are, to our knowledge, no studies exploring the shifting roles of the soybean throughout world history. There is a burgeoning research interest in the contemporary roles played by the soybean in the wake of increasing soybean production and trade, and the “gene revolution”. We argue, however, that in order to understand how the soybean could become the most cultivated biotech crop in the world by far, or why the soybean is main ingredient behind American beef without most consumers knowing it (and increasingly so for poultry, swine and salmon farming around the world), then historical depth is necessary. In the same way, many of the problems that the soybean brings to the fore, e.g. unequal concentration of power and wealth, as well as ecological and biocultural degradation (Baraibar 2014; Baraibar 2020), and other current patterns of change, cannot be properly understood without consideration of their historical evolution as well as the broader institutional context. In addition, we believe that the long history of the versatile soybean can shed new light on the wider history of agrofood globalization. By adopting a longer time frame than most studies in this field, and by basing our discussion on solid empirical research regarding the shifting articulations of the soybean chain, this project ultimately adds nuance and depth to the expanding research in the fields of world economic history, agrofood globalization and sustainability science.
Although both social and natural sciences have engaged in research about agriculture and global history, deep dialogue between these realms has been rare. In this way, we can see that while using different terminologies and not referring to each other, similar systemic approaches dealing with change have emerged within political economy (world systems theory such as Food Regimes and GCC) and systems ecology (complex systems theory and resilience). One important contribution of this project is that we will make these different theoretical traditions speak with each other and we aim to develop an integrated transdisciplinary framework, building on their concepts and tools. This means that our research will recognize the social-ecological integrated nature of agrarian change, where humans and nature are explicitly conceptualized as part of the same integrated system and embedded in the biosphere at all scales (Biggs et al 2015). With this unique transdisciplinary approach, this project will use the history of the Miracle Bean to develop a framework for studying shifting roles of humans and nature in resource use. We will do so in novel ways that contribute both new empirical data, new combinations of methods and theory building to better understand agrofood globalization.
PRELIMINARY AND PREVIOUS RESULTS
The research team has worked with different aspects of agrofood globalization for several years, and this project will build on that previous knowledge, experience, skills and research results. More specifically, we will examine complex couplings between the ecological effects of globalization of food production systems and national policy and economic accounts, in line with Deutsch’s previous research (Deutsch et al 2005; 2007; 2010; 2011, Crona et al 2016). Deutsch has particularly focused on the ways in which global trade can change the mix of inputs to food and feed by estimating the ecosystem subsidies needed to support intensive livestock and aquaculture production systems, where soybeans play a central role (Deutsch et al 2005; 2007; 2010). This project extends the scope to consider other roles and uses of soybeans. Moreover, Deutsch’s work has explored the complex spatial and temporal dynamics of ecosystems, for example: (1) water-related ecosystem services associated with the intensification of livestock production globally (Deutsch et al 2010) and in Uruguay (Ran et al 2013) and (2) ecological effects on soil quality and pollinators resulting from land use changes due to use of feed imports in Sweden (Deutsch & Folke 2007). We rely on this knowledge as we quantify the ecological effects of soybean globalization related to e.g. soil erosion, use of GMO crops, pesticides and fertilisers, and biodiversity alteration.
We will build on Baraibar’s doctoral dissertation, where she developed a GCC inspired framework to map assets, actors and activities involved in the soybean chain in Uruguay and situated it in wider global commodity chains (Baraibar 2014). This project will also draw on Baraibar’s monograph “The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Latin America: Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay”, (Baraibar Norberg 2020), where the FR approach is used to historize the contemporary articulation of the soybean and livestock chains in Latin America.
In order to accurately interpret and situate the changing roles of the soybean throughout its very long history ,this project also benefits from the long and extensive experience of agrarian and world history research of Myrdal and Jonsson (Myrdal & Morell 2011; Jonsson & Pettersson 1989). Moreover, the project uses insights from Myrdal’s previous research about methods in World History in general and source criticism in particular (Myrdal 2016).
Besides the ways we aim to use and further explore previous results, we have made some pilot surveys in the vast material offered by the Soyinfo database (Soyinfo Center 2018) about the early history of soybeans. In this material, we have been able to follow the ways the soybean was conceptualized in different agricultural treatises, poetry, pharmaceutical registers and economic records in Ancient China and across Asia to the Korean peninsula and Japan. Quick searches in the material also show that it will be possible to follow how new technologies (e.g. ploughing, seed breeding, intercropping, fermentation, and transportation) emerged and spread, allowing the soybean to shift from quintessential local subsistence food to a wide array of extensively traded soy-derived products. It is also possible to follow in the material how the soybean was “discovered” by European merchants and botanists in the 18th century, as well as the many attempts made to make the soybean thrive in European, American and African soils. In short, our initial readings of the material clearly show that there are many early written records about the soybean, and that a long durée study of the soybean is both relevant and possible to perform.
Project members
Project managers
Lisa Deutsch
Universitetslektor
Members
Matilda Baraibar
Forskare
