The Soybean Through World History

Lessons for Sustainable Agrofood Systems

Matilda Baraibar Norberg, Lisa Deutsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780367406318
• eBook ISBN: 9781000903508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book examines the changing roles and functions of the soybean throughout world history and discusses how this reflects the complex processes of agrofood globalization.

The book uses a historical lens to analyze the processes and features that brought us to the current global configuration of the soybean commodity chain. From its origins as a peasant food in ancient China, today the protein-rich soybean is by far the most cultivated biotech crop on Earth; used to make a huge variety of food and industrial products, including animal feed, tofu, cooking oil, soy sauce, biodiesel and soap. While there is a burgeoning amount of literature on how the contemporary global soy web affects large tracts of our planet's social-ecological systems, little attention has been given to the questions of how we got here and what alternative roles the soybean has played in the past. This book fills this gap and demonstrates that it is impossible to properly comprehend the contemporary global soybean chain, or the wider agrofood system of which it is a part, without looking at both their long and short historical development. However, a history of the soybean and its changing roles within equally changing agrofood systems is inexorably a history about globalization. Not only does this book map out where soybeans are produced, but also who governs, wields power and accumulates capital in the entire commodity chain from inputs in production to consumption, as well as identifying the institutional context the global commodity chain operates within. The book concludes with a discussion of the main challenges and contradictions of the current soy regime that could trigger its rupture and end.

This book is essential reading for students, practitioners and scholars interested in agriculture and food systems, global commodity chains, globalization, environmental history, economic history and social-ecological systems.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Combining insights from political economy and environmental history: what can the soybean tell us about changes in the global agrofood system?
• 2 The first soybean cycle (domestication to 900 CE)
• 3 The second soybean cycle (1000–1860)
• 4 The roots of the third soybean cycle (1860–1949)
• 5 The regime of the third soybean cycle (1950–today)
• 6 Historicizing soy: toward a new rupture?
• Index