Latin American societies and economies have historically been organized around resource extraction. Under current-day capitalist relations of exploitation, Latin American landscapes are marked by the export of primary goods abroad. Beginning with colonialism and through various iterations of land-grabbing, accumulation by dispossession, and agricultural intensification, land ownership and agricultural means of production have been concentrated in the hands of the few, while widely impacting local communities, urban-rural circuits and landscapes.
Through these processes, which some authors have begun to talk about as agrarian extractivism, different species become monocrops and form the basis of supply chain capitalism. In turn, rural and urban communities find ways to continue living and organizing in contested landscapes, further altering production, reproduction, and relationships to land. In this seminar, we invite participants to think about the everyday, contested logics of supply chain capitalism in food and crop production and with the livelihoods and projects of change that they allow for.
This workshop focuses on the political, economic, and ecological impacts of industrial agriculture on Latin American communities and landscapes, by zooming in on the dynamics of supply and production chains that compose the larger industry. With readings on Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Chile, Paraguay, Colombia and Argentina as well as comparative material from Indonesia, we will examine how local soy, cattle-ranching, and plantations (among others) change landscapes and articulate with regional and world political economy in the everyday, messy relationships of regulation, production, infrastructure, transport and making of meaning.
We ask: What are the on-the-ground dynamics of agrarian extractivism? By focusing on the social, economic, and political networks of supply chains, we aim to discuss the social lives of commodities and how they reconfigure landscapes as well as the life projects of people and plants in rural communities.
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