Towards an Extractivist Bioeconomy? The Risk of Deepening Agrarian Extractivism When Promoting Bioeconomy in Argentina

Abstract

Bioeconomy is a concept that has been developed in the OECD and is prominently discussed in Europe and industrialized countries. Over the years, Argentina has begun appropriating and developing its own interpretation of the concept, which has a clear agro-industrial and bio-technological focus. In Argentina, bioeconomy is framed as further intensification of agro-industrial production—including GMOs and the immense use of pesticides—combined with strengthening industrial upgrading. The same people and institutions that have supported soybean expansion over the last decades also advocate bioeconomy. Nevertheless, Argentina’s agricultural policies have been contested for several years; this particularly applies to the expansion of soybean monocultures and the related use of pesticides. Referring to the debate on agrarian extractivism, this chapter argues that Argentina’s focus within the bioeconomy debate risks deepening the extractivist tendency within the dominant form of agriculture and continuing the exclusion of peasants, indigenous groups and environmental concerns.

The more things change, the more they stay the same: promises of bioeconomy and the economy of promises

“…The latter include exploitative working conditions and other forms of domination and injustices in the Global South (Backhouse et al 2021;Puder 2019;Neimark and Healy 2018), or externalization and low-wage migrant labor in bio-based sectors in the North (Prause 2021;Reid et al 2021;Bogoeski 2022). Recent research has also increasingly addressed the bioeconomy in light of unequal North-South relations, e.g., by analytically and empirically unpacking its role in perpetuating and/or deepening ecologically unequal exchange and the production of extractive knowledge (Backhouse et al 2022;Tittor 2021). Challenges have also been mounted in a range of other scholarly and scientific fields, ranging from analyses of their discursive foundations and knowledge bases through economic accounts of jobs and value creation to investigations of the potentials and limits of biophysical expansion of bio-based economies (for an overview, see Eversberg et al 2022a, in this feature).…”

“…While attempts to increase the domestic value added of agricultural products do lead to the establishment of new industries in these countries, this has hardly had lasting employment effects. Bioeconomy's promise about 'keeping the wealth in the country' in effect legitimizes increasing inequalities and masks the detrimental effects of industrial agriculture and monocropping on local populations, especially in the long term (see also Tittor 2021). Anlauf's (2022) contribution, while rhyming with these findings, focuses on the oft-neglected role of classical minerals extractivism at the global peripheries for agroindustrial bioeconomy value chains worldwide.…”

Global Inequalities in the Bioeconomy: Thinking Continuity and Change in View of the Global Soy Complex

“…Additionally, agribusiness has developed a strategy of presenting their activities as sustainable and as contributing to the fight against the climate crisis. Powerful actors from the agribusiness and biotechnology sectors in Argentina have appropriated the narrative of the bioeconomy and play a key role in the development of public policies on bioeconomy in the country [64,65]. This has contributed to a situation in which actors from these sectors have powerful voices in bioeconomy fora and they are the ones with which European bioeconomy proponents collaborate.…”

New or Traditional Approaches in Argentina’s Bioeconomy? Biomass and Biotechnology Use, Local Embeddedness, and Sustainability Outcomes of Bioeconomic Ventures

“…In general, alternative bioeconomy concepts that deviate from the mainstream discourse and are based on small-scale, agro-ecological models are usually underrepresented in the debate and marginalized [6]. This is also the case in Argentina, where the bioeconomy is mainly linked to genetically modified (GM) monoculture crops, intensive use of inputs, and export orientation, with a biotechnological and agro-industrial focus [9]. Argentine agriculture has been driven by the soybean model since 1996, when GM crops were first introduced, and has since expanded greatly in terms of acreage and production levels.…”