Pork and Beans: Soy’s Long Return to China

The Seed

Just as soy’s longer history began with a very special seed, so too does its history as a global commodity, though under much different circumstances than it found itself 5,000 years ago. The Glycine Max that was cultivated in China bears little resemblance to that which is cultivated today, oceans apart, in Brazil. For starters, the former was a product of slow domestication across long histories. The latter? It was developed in a lab, is a patented product, and most importantly is Round-Up Ready.

From the court case between farmer Percy Schmeiser and the Monsanto Seed Company, there is one thing that becomes readily apparent: seed distributors such as Monsanto (now Bayer), with their patenting of GM seeds, hold nearly sole control over the global flows of plant bodies across the world economy.[1] This control comes in the form of a patent on glyphosate-resistant crops and transgenic seeds. Herbicide-resistant plants are almost necessary for the scaled-up farms of industrial agriculture, saving farmers the time and money of perpetual weeding. But they also put ownership of the seed into someone else’s hands—alienating the farmer from their product before it’s even had time to germinate.

"Roundup Ready" Soybean ad
Picture courtesy of Monsanto

In Brazil, soybeans today commonly come from Bayer in the form of its “Round-Up Ready” crop.[2] This being the only way of growing soybeans that’s economically viable, most Brazilian farms find themselves at the mercy of Bayer, while those who are unable to pay the higher prices for GM crops and their associated herbicides are often swallowed up by larger corporations in a process known as “land grabbing.”[3] The end result? Less farms, larger farms, and the continuation of agriculture’s scaling-up.

While the stereotypical image of farming in popular culture may be that of a family or community growing and negotiating by their own terms, the reality is that most these farms are owned by corporations such as Cargill and ADM[4], with the small farms of rustic ideation becoming consumed by the larger agro-industrial complex. Left with no land to call their own, these farming families come to take on the role of peasants, where they work on corporate soybean plantations for low or no wages.[5] The landowners become the landless, and the farm-heads become farm-hands.

The Plight of Economic Boom

In her commodity chain analysis of the sneaker, Cynthia Enloe discusses the discourses of “opportunity” that many shoe production companies use as rhetoric in the nations where their factories are based. In these discourses, factory production, often geared toward hiring women, is seen as an opportunity to make a better income, a way that the companies help these nations achieve “progress.”[6] While it is true that the movement of such industries into a country will stimulate its economy, it is the wealthy that reap the greatest benefit—and often at the expense of a nation’s poorer citizens.

Just as it is with sneakers, so too is it with soybeans.

A soybean harvest in Brazil. Note the scale of farming
Picture courtesy of Climateer Investing

While overall the soybean boom in Brazil has greatly strengthened the economy, with annual harvest weighing at over 200 metric tons and bringing in billions of dollars[7], it has also created poor conditions for Brazil’s landless peoples. Unable to compete with the budget of multinational corporations, Brazil’s small farms are often sold off to companies from other countries, which use the new land to scale-up soybean cultivation. On these larger farms, there is less attention paid to individual farm-hand, and so workers are often faced with working conditions that call into question serious human rights concerns. Rather than alleviate the poverty, these large corporate farms perpetuate poverty, so Brazil’s peasants are forced to work for them no matter how abhorrent labor conditions and wages may be.[8] At its worst, and occurring more frequently on farms situated near the Amazon, there is the occurrence of outright slavery.[9]

Loaded into trucks, the soybeans are driven out of the farms and into the hands of the next set of companies in this supply change. These companies are corporations such as Tyson, Smithfield, and, again, Cargill. They make the bean edible…though not for people.

Farm-to-Slaughterhouse: Animal Feed

Worker in a Smithfield slaughterhouse
Picture courtesy of Steve Gong

Smithfield is a pork-producer, owned primarily by the Chinese Shuanghui Group. They operate slaughterhouses as well as plants for processing feed for their animals.[10] It is to these plants that soybeans flow once they leave the farm, fated to be made into a meal for the livestock that’s made into meals for us. Nations which utilize soy for this purpose are those with a higher level of meat consumption. Traditionally, this has been western powers such as the US and Europe, but with the US producing much of its soy within its borders, Brazil’s sights are on newer, more demanding markets. Chief amongst these new global markets is the very place where the soybean has its origins.[11]

Bringing It All Back Home

As China industrializes, its levels of meat consumption rise. This rise leads inevitably to higher demands for animal feed in the nation, and countries such as Brazil are ready to meet that demand.[12] In China, imported soy is processed into feed for pigs, which are then slaughtered and sold for consumption by corporations such as Smithfield.[13] So long as there is a want for meat amongst Chinese citizens, then nearly half of Brazil’s soy export market is secured—and in light of the recent US-China trade war, its share seems as if it can only increase.[14]

This creates an interesting interplay in which, since the dawn of the neoliberal era, economic development in South America has been directly tied to Chinese demand for their exports, with such demand only existing because of China’s development into a country with higher rates of meat consumption. Looking again at Enloe, we can see discourses of progress at play here as well, with the economic growth of one country being dependent on the economic growth of the other. In this transit of the soybean from China to Brazil then from Brazil, curiously, back to China, we can clearly see how, in a globalized economy, interdependence reigns supreme. Such interdependence calls into question the stability of such a system—what would it mean for Brazil, for example, if a sudden economic shift in China were to occur and reduce its meat-eating population? What would it mean for China if Brazil were to become a less-than-viable source of soybean import.

Map of global flows of the soybean
Picture courtesy of AgWeb

Though such questions are ideal for developing one’s critical thinking skills around this interdependence, as it currently stands China’s meat consumption does not seem as if it will decrease anytime soon. Soy continues to be an important commodity for consumption, whether it be eaten unknowingly when one bites into a porkchop, or knowingly when another spears a piece of tofu.