Environmental Justice and Soy Agribusiness

Robert Hafner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351201698
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Agribusiness
• Index: Business

Environmental justice research and activism predominantly focus on openly conflictive situations; claims making is central. However, situations of injustice can still occur even if there is no overt conflict. Environmental Justice and Soy Agribusiness fills this gap by applying an environmental justice incommensurabilities framework to reveal the mechanisms of why conflicts do not arise in particular situations, even though they fall within classic environmental justice schemes.

Empirically, the case study focus is on the remote soy frontier in Northwest Argentina, particularly the town of Las Lajitas as the nucleus of soy production. This represents an excellent example of the recent expansion of the soy agribusiness industry in Latin America. First, a classic environmental justice analysis is carried out. Second, and drawing on the epistemological works of Ludwik Fleck, an alternative analytical framework is proposed, visualising locals' thought styles on change, effects and potential conflict in relation to soy agribusiness. Here, visceral elements and the application of a jazz methodology are vital for a more holistic form of multisensory cognition. Third, incommensurabilities among the classic and alternative approach are uncovered, arguing for the importance of temporal and spatial contexts in environmental justice research.

1Introduction

Have you ever applied environmental justice in obviously conflicting settings and nothing happened?

Environmental justice conflicts are omnipresent. By October 2017, 2,252 cases worldwide had been reported to the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJOLT 2016), covering topics ranging from nuclear to mineral ores, waste and water management, infrastructure, to biodiversity conservation, biomass and land conflicts. Soy agribusiness-related conflicts are an under-represented part of this list, even though they encompass central issues like new globalisation processes, land grabbing and far-reaching environmental problems, deforestation, GMO and fumigation and the exclusion of indigenous groups, as well as fairness and fair trade.

The potential is there, research is missing. Adding a small part to the manageable corpus of literature, this book will focus on the particular setting of the third-largest soy producer worldwide: Argentina (FAOSTAT 2014). The core area of soy production lies in the Argentine Pampas Region, a traditional agricultural region, where – through the application of heavy machinery, fertilisers and pesticides/herbicides – vast areas of soy monocultures have developed. Based on the increasing international demand for soy and its derivatives over the last three decades, a spatial expansion of the producing area towards the North-west of Argentina (NOA) is observed (cf. Reboratti 2010, p. 65). This traditionally peripheral region with economic and infrastructural deficits and above-average proportion of the population living below the poverty line, is now being transformed to an area of large-scale, externally financed and export-oriented soy fields (Bolsi 1997; Reboratti 2001; Bolsi and Paolasso 2009; Rivas and Natera Rivas 2009). Thus, the integration of the North-west into the processes of globalised soy agribusiness, particularly the accompanying structural and procedural changes, is generating socio-spatial fragmentation and conflicts among local actors, among actors on different scalar levels and among different interest groups. Such topics have already been studied in my research area (e.g. Hufty 2008; Izquierdo and Grau 2009; Silva et al. 2010; Venencia et al. 2012; Goldfarb and Zoomers 2013; Piquer-Rodríguez et al. 2015).

Three observations stand out: first, no explicit reference to the concept of environmental justice has been made so far, neither from an activist nor a scientific perspective. Second, locals living in urban areas (i.e. the villages and small towns) make up the majority of the population in the Chaco Salteño; they are affected by both the environmental change of their surrounding environments (e.g. through deforestation or fumigation) as well as by social effects (e.g. related to health, work, crime) thereof; but their thought styles (i.e. processes, circulations of ideas and social practices from which the style-appropriate conditioning of perception, thinking and acting of actors emerge) have not yet been the focus of social-environmental research. And, finally third, very little (meta-) research has been carried out (an exception is Davoudi and Brooks 2014) on the prequel to environmental justice conflicts, i.e. the focus on the asking (and subsequent questioning) of the ‘right’ questions.

Hence, with this book I aim to tackle those three central themes, go off the beaten path and introduce new forms of thinking (Schopenhauer 1851, p. 93) about environmental justice and soy agribusiness at the frontier in North-west Argentina.

Theoretically, I show that environmental justice activism/research – with few exceptions – has too narrow a perspective, leaving the pre-conflict stage and creation of different realities out of sight. Hence, my book ‘fills a much-needed gap’¹ by focusing on the blank spaces of thought style incommensurabilities that hinder the understanding among actors.

Empirically, I focus on the most remote soy frontier in North-west Argentina, particularly the town of Las Lajitas as the nucleus of soy production. My aim here is to go beyond a classic stakeholder analysis and visualise the thought styles of locals (no extensive work has been done here so far) on change, effects and conflict (potentials) in relation to the soy agribusiness.

Finally, I show that context matters, both from a theoretical (i.e. which theoretical line of thought do I follow?), as well as an empirical perspective (i.e. what sort of questions, methods and findings do I use?).

Structure of the book

Research on environmental justice allows room for experimentation with research designs (Funderburg and Laurian 2015; Hodges and Stocking 2015). This book falls into this category. It is highly influenced by two elements: perspective and jazz. While the former draws heavily on the thinking of Ludwik Fleck (1980) and his thought styles and thought collectives (i.e. a group of people with similar backgrounds who share the same codes and rationalities as well as context) to obtain an understanding of the underlying dimensions that ultimately lead to the construction of differing realities (thus he can be considered a proto-constructivist), the latter resembles the methodological approximations that I have used to design both my fieldwork as well as post-processing, applying the attributes of this musical genre as a strong metaphor (Chapter 3).

This book, while maintaining the spirit of alternative research designs, is divided into three parts. Part I focuses on the meta-contextualisation of the research process and the epistemologies of cognition that become relevant throughout the empirical analysis. Here, Chapter 2 on thought styles and incommensurabilities, two terms highly influenced by Ludwik Fleck, lays the foundation for Chapter 3, dealing with the method(olog)ical consequences of Fleck’s forms of thinking. Viscerality, jazz and the translation of those two concepts into the research process are put to the foreground. Thus, understanding the epistemology of my thinking, as I argue, is the first step towards the understanding of my perspectives, my thought styles and ways of thinking.

Part II deals with the contextualisation of the two main themes of this book. In Chapter 4, the notion of justice is conceptualised and analysed according to its origins and forms of normative interpretation, as well as dimensions. Consequently, those considerations hold true for the debate on environmental justice (EJ), a concept that has undergone major shifts in foci over the last year. Chapter 5 highlights the thematic, temporal and spatial contexts of the soy agribusiness in Argentina. In so doing, strategic reasoning for expanding the soy frontier to the North-west of Argentina is revealed, which will be of particular importance for the in-depth analysis of the case study in Chapter 8.

Part III re-contextualises both the thematic as well as the spatial configurations presented in Part II. Chapter 6 embeds the debate on environmental justice in a Latin American context, highlighting the challenges that come with the concept in this particular setting. Going more into detail in Chapter 7, the Chaco Salteño research area located in the North-west of Argentina is used to combine and adapt classic environmental justice concepts discussed in Chapter 4. Here I take up one aspect that has not yet been studied: EJ incommensurabilities, or why environmental justice activism/research does not work under certain circumstances. Taking up this omission, I develop an environmental justice incommensurabilities framework (EJIF). However, unlike those concepts’ focus on openly conflictive situations, the starting point of my approach is pre-conflict, thus particularly designed for cases where all conditions for EJ activism are given, but still nothing happens, no conflict arises. Chapter 8 relies on the new framework and takes up different realities and readings (CLASSIC, ALTERNATIVE and the COMPLETE, see the next section) of local facts in the town of Las Lajitas located in the nucleus of soy production in the Chaco Salteño.

Finally, Chapter 9 ties all the loose ends together, answering the questions posed in three different readings as well as giving a contextualisation of the whole method applied.

As you like it: a guide to three different perspectives

In line with the two themes of perspective and jazz, I propose three different readings in this book. They are based on three perspectives towards environmental justice (Table 1.1): the CLASSIC, the ALTERNATIVE and the COMPLETE. Each perspective has different – thought-style-dependent – research questions. Here, the concept of ‘methodological drag’, ‘a performance in which qualitative methodologists convincingly masquerade as situated within epistemological, theoretical, and methodological frameworks, even those that they may not situate themselves in personally or professionally’ (Nordstrom and Happel-Parkins 2016, p. 149) becomes important. Counterdiscourses beyond the familiar are deliberately shown to unearth new forms of cognition and allow for the creation of ‘space[s] of curiosity’ (Phillips 2014). So, based on the thought styles, certain contextual information is provided, ultimately leading to the construction of different realities. Each chapter is (or not), marked according to its inclusion/exclusion in the respective perspective.

Table 1.1Three perspectives discussed in the book

THE CLASSIC ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ACTIVISM/SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE The first reading focuses on a narrow perspective of environmental justice, greatly influenced by the early stages of environmental justice (particularly phase 1; cf. Chapter 4) in general and distributional justice in particular. The thought style is framed deductively, i.e. the research area is viewed explicitly theoretically informed, applying environmental justice methodologies to identify conflict potentials.	THE ALTERNATIVE BEYOND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND WHAT ‘REALLY’ MATTERS The ALTERNATIVE approach goes the opposite way to the CLASSIC one. A theoretical embeddedness in environmental justice discussions is – though important – not primarily the key aspect and induction central here. The main objective is to construct thought styles of local actors first, identifying their concerns and claims, highlighting underlying dimensions that can or cannot lead to conflicts in the research area.^1
Thus, the main questions in this field are:	Here, the central questions are:
What forms of social-environmental conflicts are observed in Las Lajitas?	Who are the core actors in the research area?
•Where are those conflicts located? •Who are the actors in the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Seriestitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• PART I: Meta-contextualisation
• PART II: Contextualisation
• PART III: Re-contextualisation
• Glossary
• Index