Soy expansion and countermovements in the Global South: a Polanyian perspective

Karin Fischer and Ernst Langthaler

Chapter 15 in Capitalism in Transformation, 2019, pp 212-227 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The chapter takes the marketization of land and agricultural products as a starting point and focuses on movements and countermovements around the expansion of soy production in three countries of South America. The authors use Polanyi’s concept of the double movement in combination with critical state theory adapted for (semi-)peripheral contexts. They investigate both the drivers of marketization in the agro-food sector as well as state agency and rural social movements as protective countermovements. Case studies include Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia during the administration of left-wing governments. From a historical and comparative perspective, the chapter shows the scope and limits for protective countermovements and analyses how rural social movements became disarticulated (Brazil), demobilized (Argentina) and fractured (Bolivia). The results call for a realistic assessment of countermovements, taking into account both their room for manoeuvre and their limits.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Social Policy and Sociology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781788974233/9781788974233.00022.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:18596_15

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().