Saving the Amazon? Sustainable Soy and the New Extractivism

Abstract

Most ‘progressive’ Latin American governments, which have come to power over the past decade or so, continue to rely on agriculture and resource extraction as the primary generators of wealth. Scholars argue that this ‘neoextractivism’ is made politically possible by directing some profits toward the funding of progressive social programs. The Brazilian Amazon's vast wealth of extractive resources and its large economically depressed population make it the emblematic site for neoextractivism. Its biodiversity and inhabited landscapes, however, mean that the neoextractive program encounters concerted resistance from the global environmental community as well as from traditional, indigenous, and migrant smallholders. In response, neoextractivism must deploy another form of progressivism—environmentalism. The author uses the case of agroindustrial soy production in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Pará to demonstrate how the emergence of environmental governance there facilitates neoextractivism by ‘greening’ it. Through an analysis of the mechanisms and effects of two programs, implemented through partnerships between nongovernmental organizations and corporations, to manage soy expansion into the Amazon, it is demonstrated that these programs have questionable environmental benefits at best and at worst work to reenforce the hegemony of international environmental organizations, to green the image of agri-business multinationals, and to destabilize strategies of resistance.