The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Latin America

Since the early 2000s, increased global demand for agrofood commodities, particularly soybeans and beef, has driven rapid agrarian change in Latin America. The greatest relative land-use and land-cover change has taken place in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, resulting in new social-ecological concerns. This chapter presents the dramatic agrarian change, which has transformed both social relations and forms of production throughout the region. The chapter also contains a description of the perspectives and methods used in this book. The general framework combines three parts: (1) history that relates the recent agrarian change to previous transformative periods, (2) a commodity chain approach situates soybean and beef in wider international commodity chains, and (3) a close examination of regulations that illuminate the previously neglected role of the state and enable a critical comparison of the national regulatory frameworks and their role in agrarian change in contemporary agrofood globalization.

While soybean and beef production in Latin America form part of global networks responding to shifts in prices, technologies, and international regulations, they are also local, since they are embedded in different social-ecological contexts, including historically formed political-economic arrangements expressed in national regulations. This chapter offers an in-depth exploration of the articulation of agrarian change in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay 2002–2019, with focus on the main regulative responses to shifts in forms of production and in social relations brought by the expansion and intensification of soybean and beef. Besides scrutinizing what is said in legislation and public policies, it also addresses the ways social groups and organizations strive to put their interests and concerns on the agenda by influencing the regulatory framework and sometimes resisting governmental policies. By following the trajectory of specific policies, from emergence to enforcement, a deep understanding of their actual role for agrarian change is duly addressed.

Recent agrarian change in Latin America has brought dramatic social-ecological impacts on multiple spatial and temporal scales. Chapter 6 concludes the book with a comparative and historically informed analysis of the main public regulations that emerged in response to new social-ecological concerns in the wake of the dramatic changes. Through a reflection over the ways Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay have coped differently with the strong distantly driven transformative pressures, the chapter contributes depth and nuance to the discussion of constrained state autonomy and capacity in Latin America within the realm of contemporary agrofood globalization. The chapter concludes that while state autonomy and capacity are constrained in all three countries to varying degrees, stronger and more coordinated regulative efforts could lead to more sustainable pathways for agrarian change in Latin America.