Agricultural frontiers of the soy complex in Brazil: techno-financial landscapes of a global commodity chain

• Grant number: 21/06354-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: December 01, 2021
• End date: November 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Jorge Luiz Mattar Villela
• Grantee: Vanessa Parreira Perin
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 22/14155-5 - The emergence of agribusiness green bonds and its articulatios with the soybean complex: transformations in global techno-financial landscapes, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

The research has as its main objective to describe the productive chain that involves the soy complex, as well as to analyze how it makes scalable world designs emerge when engaging certain situated, contingent and heterogeneous landscapes in the Brazilian Cerrado. Starting from the advent of the creation of a tropical soy variety in the mid 70s of the last century, I propose to explore how the connections between the development of new agribusiness technologies and financial investments allow us to understand the formation of a commodities global market, which currently has as an outstanding presence of large transnational corporations and agents of the financial sector among its operators. In this sense, the trajectory of tropical soy will be followed not as a fixed entity, but in its state of becoming a commodity, part of a complex of more than human relationships that will be explored ethnographically.The field research, therefore, will permeate different places, organizations, events and documents, always paying attention to the techno-financial dimensions involved in the composition of the soy complex. More specifically, the investigation aims to analyze how the emergence of the soy complex supply chain in the last three decades has created mechanisms for the continuous expansion of the agricultural frontier through agribusiness. (AU)