Worlds Apart: The Soybean’s Journey from China to Brazil

Where it Be(an)gan: Soy’s Origins

Geographic Distribution of Glycine Soja
Picture courtesy of ResearchGate

The soybean, Glycine Max, has roots that stretch back some five thousand years ago. Glycine Soja, its wild ancestor, was a plant that could be found all across East Asia,[1] but was domesticated in China in the third millennium BCE.[2] Roughly one thousand years later comes the first historical evidence of soybean consumption: a series of reports from the Shang Dynasty that document the use of fermented soybeans as a food paste.[3]

From this point we see the first evidence of soy’s entanglements with the political structures and sociological dynamics of the ancient world, moving from its hub of origin in China and across the East—as far west as Russia, and as far east as Japan. However, the soybean’s diaspora wasn’t one of commerce or political conquest, but rather it stemmed from the proselytization of one of the world’s oldest world religions.

Buddhism, long before Christianity, saw itself as a missionizing religion, and, traveling along the major trade routes of the ancient world, was able to diffuse from its Indian origins all the way to China. With a basis in India’s Vedic traditions, Buddhist ethics established a series of dietary regulations, first and foremost of which was vegetarianism. In China, the soybean became intricately tied to Buddhism because of this, and as Buddhism traveled the East, soy came with it.[4] Just as the religion adapted to the new cultures it encountered, so did the use of soy.[5] Despite this growth from a regional crop to a continental food, the soybean remained relatively confined to those nations where Buddhism held a noticeable influence. It wasn’t until the colonialist era, with the advent of the East India Company that the soybean found its place in western farmlands.

Soy Sets Sail: From East to West

In the eighteenth century a sailor of the East India Company by the name of Samuel Bowen returned from China to England, bringing with him a strange new bean. Alleging to have learned about Chinese agriculture while there, he, along with East India officer James Flint, was given permission to move to the colony of Georgia to experiment with Chinese crops. It was in this manner that, in 1765, soybeans were first introduced and grown in the New World.[6] While the mission of Bowen and Flint was to produce soy sauce, ultimately in this newfound context, the bean was thought to be more beneficial as a livestock feed.

Georgia Historical Society plaque commemorating geographic
introduction of soybean to the Americas
Picture courtesy of Read The Plaque

The soybean remained more or less confined to livestock until after the First World War, when scientists from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, T.B. Osborne and L.B. Mendel, found that steam-heating the bean could make it more palatable to human tastes.[7] Shortly after this came the discovery of the soybean’s nitrogen-fixing quantities, which led to its expansion across the Midwest in an effort to reinvigorate the US’s Dust Bowl-ravaged soils. These two breakthroughs in tandem solidified soy as a US staple.

While much can be said and has been said about soy’s dominion in the US, we now will now redirect our attention to South America, where, in 1882, the soybean was introduced for the first time to the Brazil.[8] The crop fared rather poorly in the country due to climactic differences, and so it remained for quite some time a periphery crop. It wasn’t until after the Second World War, after the coalescing of an entanglement of scientific breakthroughs, political shifts, and economic changes that Brazil and soy became synonymous with one another.

…And Beyond: A Postwar History of Soy

In Ellwood’s No-nonsense Guide to Globalization, he discusses a postwar befuddlement called “the petrodollar boom,” an event in the global economy set off by the US’s need to secure funding for the Vietnam War. In an excessive financing of the war, the US printed millions of dollars, driving up both inflation and foreign debt at the same time. The result? An intense economic scare that led President Richard Nixon to devalue the dollar in an effort to make US exports more competitive in the global economy.[9] This in turn bred a high demand for US food aid—so high in fact that US soy reserves became depleted, and in 1973 Richard Nixon placed embargoes on soy exports, prompting global powers to search elsewhere for soy.[10]

A map of the Cerrado region
Picture courtesy of GeoCurrents

Brazil became the next contender due to a mix scientific breakthroughs and anticommunist tactics. In the 1950s, soil scientist Andrew McClung oversaw the mass-fertilization of the Cerrado region of Brazil, acclimating the soil to soybean growth and thereby vastly increasing the arable landscape for this cosmopolitan bean. Some twenty years after this, development projects by the global north in the global south, as part of a larger maneuver to stunt the spread of communism, gave the nation of Brazil the necessary funds to overhaul its agriculture.[11] With a soy vacancy in the world economy, they turned their production toward just that, and became the second-largest producer of soy, just behind the US.

Graph displaying deforestation due to soy production
Picture courtesy of Mongabay

Though Brazil’s soy production in these postwar decades brought it to global nobility, in the ensuing years soy has instead been a source of notoriety for the country. In his essay Globalization and the “Spatial Fix,” Harvey talks about capitalism’s “spatial fix” dilemma, that is its drive to expand geographically to keep at bay the consequences of industry expansion.[12] In Brazil, this dynamic plays out in the battlefield that is the opposing desire for economic development and for preservation of Brazil’s rainforest. With overtaking a large portion of the already-tilled farmlands, their cultivation has slowly begun to creep into the Amazon, aiding in the ecosystem’s rapid deforestation[13] Here, the “fix” for space proves a threat to the native environment of the nation as well as those who inhabit it. Indigenous of the Amazon become equally displaced by new development as are the multitude of wildlife. Them in the crossfire between ecology and economy, we find the farmers. They too find themselves victim to this expansionist fix of neoliberal capitalism, losing their farms to larger soybean production corporation companies, which then reemploy them as peasants. They are often in poverty, landless, and overlooked. And yet, they are the ones that begin this crop’s journey from history to commodity.