Transgenic soy as a political crop and a resistance crop in Argentina – The struggle around control and rent appropriation between the state, seed corporations and soy farmers

Abstract

Argentina is now the world’s third largest producer of transgenic crops. They grow on more than half the cultivated area of the country. Transgenic soy is not only the key crop for the Argentine economy but also for politics and society. The Argentine state and also multinational seed corporations seek to control the soy sector and appropriate rents from it, while the export-oriented soy farmers resist these attempts. To expand studies on environmental conflicts from the social to the ecological dimensions, I analyse the role of the materiality of transgenic soy in the struggles around export taxes and royalties on transgenic seeds, based on the concepts of political crops and resistance or escape crops derived from the anthropology of the state. Furthermore, I incorporate transgenic materiality into the analysis of the economic and physical materiality of political crops and resistance crops. In the case study of Argentina, I demonstrate that the materiality of transgenic soy not only enables control by the state – and in parallel by seed corporations – but that it also enables farmer resistance. Thus, transgenic soy is not only key to state building but inherently comes with the risk to the state of a powerful farmer resistance. Building on the empirical analysis, I connect the concepts of political crops and resistance crops, which have been developed for different types of plants. In the case of Argentina, there were three reasons why the state failed to control transgenic soy: 1) difficulties within the institutional setting of the state to grasp the materiality of soy; 2) the parallel governance structure of the seed corporations as developers of transgenic soy; and 3) the everyday and organised resistance of the soy farmers. For the analysis, I use qualitative and quantitative data collected during my research on transgenic agriculture in Argentina since 2009. The data are mainly analysed by applying qualitative content analysis. My own calculations based on descriptive statistics support parts of the qualitative analysis.