Argentinean agribusiness and the porous agricultural company

ABSTRACT

This review brings together four essential contributions to the study of Argentinean agribusiness to reflect on the porosity that characterizes the organization of the country’s large agricultural companies. The review dissects popular representations of agribusiness as a highly mechanized and collaborative production network dispersed across rented plots of land and upheld by service providers. These representations ignore the lived experiences of rural workers, whose increasingly nomadic work throughout spatially scattered agricultural plots pushes them away from their local communities, highlighting the porous and hierarchical nature of current agricultural configurations. While ignoring labor exploitation, these representations shed light on the will of agribusiness actors to expand their influence beyond the classical sites of production (the farm, the factory, the laboratory). By portraying their companies as porous, powerful agribusiness actors justify interventions beyond the productive sphere as this helps them to create specific social environments that are friendly and useful to agribusiness. Agribusiness capital is deployed to promote particular values, behaviors, and knowledges in local populations, which in turn render them amenable to agribusiness. Moreover, the porosity of the agricultural company, as revealed by its local interventions, sparks conflict with actors who compete for local power and influence, such as the State.

RESUMO

Esta revisão bibliográfica reúne quatro contribuições essenciais ao estudo do agronegócio Argentino para refletir sobre a porosidade que caracteriza a muitas das maiores empresas agrícolas do país. O artigo disseca as representações populares do agronegócio como uma rede de produção altamente terceirizada, colaborativa, mecanizada e dispersa em campos arrendados. Essas representações ignoram a experiência dos trabalhadores rurais, cujo trabalho, cada vez mais nômade em campos agrícolas dispersos, os afasta de suas comunidades, experiências que ademais ressaltam a estrutura porosa e hierárquica das atuais configurações agrícolas. Ao ignorar qualquer menção sobre exploração laboral rural, tais representações do agronegócio transmitem o desejo das grandes empresas agrícolas de expandir sua influência mais além dos locais clássicos de produção (a fazenda, a empresa, o laboratório). Descrevendo as empresas como porosas, os empresários agrícolas justificam suas intervenções em outros espaços, o que os ajuda a criar ambientes sociais amigáveis e úteis ao agronegócio. Grandes quantidades de capital agrícolas são investidas para promover valores, comportamentos e conhecimentos particulares nas populações locais para deixá-las maleáveis aos interesses do agronegócio. Além disso, este tipo de intervenções gera conflitos com atores como o Estado contra os quais essas empresas competem por poder e influência local.

RESUMEN

Esta revisión de literatura reúne cuatro contribuciones esenciales al estudio del agronegocio Argentino para reflexionar sobre la porosidad que caracteriza a muchas de las empresas agrícolas más grandes del país. El artículo disecta las representaciones populares del agronegocio como una red de producción altamente terciarizada, colaborativa, mecanizada, y dispersa en campos rentados. Estas representaciones ignoran la experiencia de los trabajadores rurales cuyo trabajo, cada vez más nómada en campos agrícolas dispersos, los aleja de sus comunidades; experiencias que además resaltan la estructura porosa y jerárquica de las actuales configuraciones agrícolas. Al ignorar cualquier mención sobre explotación laboral rural, dichas representaciones del agronegocio transmiten el deseo de las grandes empresas agrícolas de expandir su influencia más allá de los sitios clásicos de producción (la estancia, la empresa, el laboratorio). Describiendo a sus empresas como porosas, los empresarios agrícolas justifican sus intervenciones en otros espacios, lo que los ayuda a crear ambientes sociales amigables y útiles al agronegocio. Grandes cantidades de capital agrícola son invertidos para promover valores, comportamientos y conocimientos particulares en las poblaciones locales para hacerlas maleables a los intereses del agronegocio. Sin embargo, este tipo de intervenciones genera conflictos con actores como el Estado con los que estas empresas compiten por poder e influencia local.

KEYWORDS:

• Argentinean agribusiness
• agricultural rural workers
• agricultural social corporate responsibility
• farmers’ movements
• agricultural values

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• Agronegócio Argentino
• trabalhadores rurais agrícolas
• responsabilidade social empresarial agrícola
• movimentos camponeses
• valor agrícola

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Agronegocio Argentino
• trabajadores rurales agrícolas
• responsabilidad social empresarial agrícola
• movimientos campesinos
• valor agrícola

1. Introduction

Since the 1970s the Argentinean soybean sector has experienced an impressive growth, in part thanks to a series of technological and organizational transformations. A good portion of the national production has transitioned to rented lands and is managed by a new class of agricultural entrepreneurs, who coordinate agricultural activities throughout decentralized networks of service contractors. These transformations have allowed agricultural entrepreneurs to attract investment capital and to respond more quickly to market volatility, decreasing or increasing production, without paying the cost of fixed idle capital (Gras and Hernández 2016).

Based on four books¹ that I consider essential reading on the Argentinean agribusiness, I examine the notion of the “porous” agricultural company. The open and fragmented nature of the agricultural networks that are associated with the Argentinean soy boom has led important agricultural entrepreneurs to recognize what Córdoba (2019, 110) calls the “porosity” of agribusiness companies. In the 2010 meeting of the World Economy Forum in Davos, Gustavo Grobopatel (known in Argentina as the “king” of soy) argued that: “it is difficult to determine the limit of what is part of the company and what is not” (in Córdoba 2019, 110). This type of porosity is evident in my own work tracing the development of a drought-tolerant seed in an Argentinean biotech and seed company. From the introduction of transgenic traits into a plant, to the production and commercialization of seeds, the links upon which the company relies are multiple and difficult to delimit. These include kinship ties, connections with large producers and farmers’ associations, public funds as well as speculative capital. The company also relies on local universities for the production of the scientists that they employ, joint ventures with foreign companies with special types of expertise, and connections with former state agricultural regulators who serve as advisors to the company.

What is interesting about the porous company is not its numerous and highly dispersed interconnections, as production has always been embedded in wide-ranging social processes taking place outside of the farm, factory, or laboratory. Instead, what is interesting about this notion is that it points to an emic description by powerful agribusiness actors about the source of economic value in agribusiness. From this perspective, economic value is not produced through the exploitation of rural workers in the classic sites of production, but rather through the collaboration of multiple forms of paid and unpaid labor throughout collaborative networks.

Clearly, this understanding of the agricultural company hides the fact that agribusiness networks are highly hierarchical and not devoid of labor exploitation. For example, Villulla (2014) argues that the type of production flexibility promoted by the model of decentralized and outsourced agricultural production, has come at a high human cost. Agricultural workers have had to adapt to the new times and spaces of production, which require inputs to move at a higher speed along spatially dispersed productive sites. As the rented plots of land where most of the cultivation takes place are not necessarily contiguous to each other, many rural workers become nomads who move from one region of the country to the other, uprooted from their families and communities and expected to work when and where needed.

Despite the strategic mobilization of agricultural networks as collaborative and non-exploitative, the recognition of the agricultural company as a porous space points to forms of labor that escape the classical sites of production. This recognition also highlights the fact that fragmented farms and rural workers are just one of the many sites that agricultural entrepreneurs seek to control. Indeed, market exchanges would hardly be possible without some sort of manageable social ecology preventing conflict and facilitating the circulation of agricultural inputs and outputs across multiple localities. Córdoba (2019) suggests that the construction of this type of social ecology would not be possible through coercion alone. As stated by Grobopatel in Davos: “It is impossible to control everyone everywhere without enthusiasm, motivation, autonomy and entrepreneurship.” However, instigating such attitudes requires some degree of social investment. The porous company thus promotes solidarity institutions that provide “aid” to local populations through the work of paid experts and unpaid volunteers. These “gifts” create obligations of reciprocity among beneficiaries who are expected to return the aid through particular behaviors that are instrumental to agribusiness.

The strategies deployed to promote cooperation in and out of the farm help to expand agribusiness control over the sites and people that are involved in the production, circulation, and exchange of agribusiness products. However, when agribusiness capital ventures in local communities outside of the production sphere, it runs into actors who compete for local influence and power. It is here that the porous agricultural company clashes with national and local political actors who deploy patronage tactics or who resist the advance of agribusiness through outright mobilization (Lapegna 2019). Thus, what the notion of the “porous” company reveals is not merely the will of agricultural entrepreneurs to expand their control, but a dispute over the economic, symbolic, and affective resources that different actors mobilize to advance their particular nature-cultures.

This review is organized as follows. I first discuss Gras and Hernández's (2016) emic presentation of Argentinean agribusiness as a highly mechanized production network dispersed across rented plots of land and carried out by service providers. Following Villulla (2014), I then present some of the experiences of rural workers in these fragmented farms and the appropriation by powerful agribusiness actors of the surplus value that they help to produce. In the third part and based on Córdoba (2019), I consider the influence of the porous agricultural company beyond the productive sphere as well as the gift/counter-gift mechanisms that are deployed in these spaces for the cultivation of agribusiness territoriality. Finally, I draw upon the work of Lapegna (2019) to describe the political tensions that arise between agribusiness, the State, and local populations when the porous agricultural company extends its local territoriality beyond the classical sites of production.

In the concluding remarks I suggest that the productive networks of agribusiness not only lead to porous understandings of agricultural companies but to new entangled configurations of the seeds themselves. The seed also becomes a porous body engineered for flexibility and adaptation and whose borders are also difficult to determine. The seed, and not the company alone, becomes a flexible body (Martin 1992) adapted to the challenges of capital accumulation.

2. Agribusiness networks

In Radiografía del Nuevo Campo Argentino (An X-ray of the New Rural Argentina), Gras and Hernández study the ways in which the Agribusiness model has become hegemonic in Argentina. They analyze the symbolic and material transformations of the agricultural sector promoted by two of the country’s most important farmers’ associations: The Association of Regional Consortiums of Agricultural Experimentation (Aacrea) and the No-Till Farmers Association (Aapresid). By tracing the origin, vision, and work of these associations as described by their own members, Gras and Hernández lay down an emic interpretation of agribusiness. Based on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, they analyze the political capacity of Aacrea and Aapresid to present their particular interpretation of the world as universal. In carrying out this task, they pay special attention to the values, moral narratives, and ideologies that these associations have mobilized to promote particular farmer subjectivities and to legitimize their vision for Argentina’s agricultural development.

To do this Gras and Hernández trace the origins of Aacrea and Aapresid. Inspired by the French CETA groups (Centre d´Études de Technique Agricole), and rooted in Christian and anti-communist values, Aacrea emerged as an umbrella association for regional consortiums that sought collective solutions to agricultural problems (Consorcios Regionales de Experimentación Agricola – Crea). While productivity problems in Argentinean agriculture had been previously linked to high levels of land concentration, Gras and Hernández show that with the return of democracy in 1958, the productivity issue was largely reinterpreted as a technical problem. This technical interpretation resonated with Aacrea’s modernizing vision of agricultural development. Created in 1957 by large landowners, the association had as it missionary goal to reconcile the individual search for profit with the country’s collective welfare. Claiming political neutrality, this agrarian minority saw it as their Christian responsibility to lead the country’s agricultural development through a process of rationalization that rejected land redistribution.

What came to be known as “Aacrea’s method” included the adoption of “zero cost technologies,” which referred to the integration of agronomy, accounting, and management. The method also promoted technological adoption and knowledge transfer through university courses and regional groups of agricultural experimentation. Initially limited to the agrarian bourgeoisie, these groups later became inclusive of small-scale farmers serving as nodes of evangelization that helped to spread Aacrea’s method and to promote particular farmer subjectivities. The promotion of values such as innovation, generosity, and collaboration, as well as the social responsibility of the rich, and the search for the common good, were offered as an alternative to revolutionary ideals of land redistribution. The family and its patrimony remained central to Aacrea’s method and most of the changes that were promoted by the association were to be carried out tranqueras para adentro (inside the farm’s fence).

Importantly, Aacrea’s method was also based on the rotation of agricultural production with cattle ranching. The objective of rotation was the conservation of soil fertility, which was considered by Aacrea as the main reason behind Argentina’s agricultural comparative advantage. However, the introduction of hybrid plants of short cycle threatened the continuity of this strategy. These plants made it possible and more profitable to cultivate all year long instead of rotating agriculture with cattle ranching. Thus, tensions arose between members who wanted to dedicate themselves exclusively to agriculture and members who defended the importance of cattle ranching as a practice of soil conservation. Two of the values that were promoted by Aacrea began to clash: the importance of innovation and the defense of soil conservation for the common good of the country.

Gras and Hernández show the importance of technical transformations in the weakening of Aacrea and in the emergence of Aapresid. The arrival of herbicide tolerant (HT) genetically modified seeds opened the way for an alternative strategy of soil conservation. Since HT seeds allowed controlling weeds chemically, soils no longer needed to be tilled (which affects their microbial life) but could instead be fumigated with glyphosate. The practice of no-tilling served to protect soil fertility as the remnants of the previous harvest could be left covering the new crop, protecting its humidity and acting as fertilizing compost. Thus, this practice allowed farmers to replace cattle ranching for HT crops, as a strategy of soil conservation, and to cultivate grain all year long. Challenging Aacrea’s method, a group of farmers gathered around this alternative practice of soil conservation and created the No-Till Farmers Association (Aapresid).

HT seeds posed an additional challenge to Aacrea’s method. These seeds were tied to the use foreign agrichemical products, which translated into a growing dependence of soy producers on foreign providers of raw materials. This phenomenon, along with the liberalization of the Argentine economy in the late 1990s, intensified the vulnerability of soy farmers to the volatility of international markets. To respond in a timely manner to the whims of the market, farmers needed to find ways to make their production more flexible. For example, farmers had incentives to detach themselves from fix capital (such as land and agricultural machinery) that prevented them from lowering production at low cost when international conditions were not attractive.

Gras and Hernández show how Aapresid championed the search for such alternatives. For example, the association organized conferences where international experts were invited to discuss new ideas from economics, finance, and management. Developments on new economic institutionalism and Coase’s transaction cost theory gave inspiration to a decentralized type of production distributed along a “network of networks.” In the Aapresid model, production would no longer be limited to the farmers’ family or fix capital. Instead, production could be carried out in rented land and outsourced to service contractors who owned the appropriate machinery and other means production. This type of organization would give farmers higher flexibility to increase or pull out from production. Higher flexibility would in turn push service contractors and landowners to offer the best conditions to farmers and to introduce the latest technologies.

The idea of organizing production along contractual networks would also serve to redefine the limits of agricultural production and growth. No longer limited by the size of a particular farm, the new model would redefine productive forces to include multiple nodes of service provision and management that existed tranqueras para afuera (outside the farm’s fence). As long as the cost of outsourcing did not become too significant, transaction cost theory suggested, a firm’s expansion would only be limited by its investment capital. In practice, the extension of this model and of its agricultural frontiers was accompanied by empowering entrepreneurial narratives that promised success to all of those who remained competitive through innovation, reorganization, and expansion. Science and management acquired an ideological dimension: they were positioned at the core of a technocratic, and allegedly democratic, agricultural model that any driven (and even landless) farmer could join.

However apolitical such a portrayal of the network was, a large number of small-scale farmers were excluded from this model. Indeed, agricultural exploitations have decreased in number and increased in size. This was partly due to farmers’ limitations in accessing the necessary capital to acquire new equipment, and in accessing the knowledge to use it. It was also the result of the higher risks and complexities posed to small-scale farmers by an open and volatile international market. With regard to landowners, many decided to rent their lands and abandon production while taking advantage of higher rent prices. Those who owned agricultural machinery had the option to stop managing their own crops to become service contractors.

A new managerial class was in turn forged among those who decided to continue producing and had the capacity to attract capital to expand their productive frontiers. The increasing significance of investment capital, as well as the complex distribution of labor and risks throughout the productive network, ended up transforming the objectives of agricultural producers. While agricultural production and capital management remained linked to each other, it became more important to minimize risks (posed by volatile international prices and extreme climate events), than to maximize production. Thus, the moral virtues that characterized the ideal farmer under Aacrea’s method (a Christian family man with a modernization drive and a sense of social responsibility and generosity), were replaced by the managerial skills of Aapresid’s ideal agricultural entrepreneur (a flexible businessman with a high risk intelligence, who is always innovating and establishing win-win associations with service contractors).

Gras and Hernández's (2016) emic presentation of the agribusiness network can be misunderstood as their own interpretation of how this agricultural model actually works, something that the title of the book An X-Ray of the New Rural Argentinean unfortunately does not help to clarify. More subtle criticisms question their reproduction of agribusiness narratives that portray the soy boom as a process championed by a new class of agricultural entrepreneurs (Villulla 2014). Not only do these narratives invisibilize the role of rural workers, agribusiness reliance on the notion of “the network” has a depoliticizing effect. Agribusiness promoters present the network as a horizontal space where people located in different nodes of the supply chain relate as equals and where power struggles are mediated by private contracts and by the market. While Gras and Hernández criticize agribusiness’ reliance on the notion of the network, they do not address in this book how agribusiness is lived by workers, contractors, scientists, and local populations.

In opposition to agribusiness narratives on the network, scholars such as Bernhold and Palmisano (2017, 114) argue that what is at play is something less novel: a process of capital centralization and concentration in agricultural companies managed by a new rural bourgeoisie. Vertical integration, outsourcing, and financial control allow these companies to maintain a hierarchical structure of the production process while mediating the relationship between capital and labor through subcontractors. The higher complexity of supply chains hides the asymmetric way in which these actors relate, as power struggles are dispersed through multiple bilateral relations. In many cases, existing class division between the holders of capital and labor is blurred. For example, some owners of agricultural machinery work alongside their employees when providing services to agricultural companies. This type of productive organization obscures the differences between the representatives of capital and labor, and increases the capacity of agricultural companies to appropriate the surplus value that is produced by workers.

3. Agribusiness workers

In Las Cosechas son Ajenas (The Harvest Does Not Belong to Us), Juan Manuel Villulla (2014) explores the role of rural workers in the soy boom. He is concerned in particular with the experiences of agricultural machine operators in the Argentinean Pampa region. Inspired by Marx’s theory of value, where human labor is the basis of economic surplus, Villulla traces rural workers’ share of the profits, the transformations that their lives have experienced as the production process becomes increasingly technical, and the way in which they resist their own commodification.

Villulla’s book begins with the touching story of Ramón, an agricultural machine operator who sues his bosses when he is fired after 15 years of work without any type of compensation. Through this case, Villulla addresses the lack of protection that machine operators have received from the national legislation for agrarian labor and the lack of support that they have enjoyed from labor unions. He also shows the social and psychological hardships faced by machine operators in their daily work in Argentina. Given the decentralized nature of agricultural production in this country, machine operators are highly mobile workers who travel from one farm to the other in small teams of service provision of around five men. As they travel, they have to live in mobile camps close to agricultural fields and often very far from their homes. Many of them remain isolated from their communities and families for large parts of the year, which creates an excruciating feeling of loneliness and obliges them to miss important family and community events.

By including portions of his interviews with workers, Villulla provides local texture to the book and an intimate window into their daily lives. Away from their families, these workers remain impotent to deal with the consequences of their absence. As a result, an abundance of worries, anxieties, and psychological problems emerge in their lives. In addition to this, the nature of their work – which can include sitting for 8, 12, or even 18 hours a day in a truck, without much human contact for days on end – is physically exhausting and unbearably monotonous. Back in the camps, all the members of the team share the same space (which one worker describes as no bigger than 8 by 2.7 meters) with little privacy. When the weather makes working impossible, they stay in the camp with little to do, always available to resume working when the climatic conditions improve. The lack of privacy, coupled with mental and physical distress, inevitably creates tensions within the team.

Villulla’s account of workers’ stories brings to mind Polanyi’s (2001/1944) notion of fictitious commodities: things and beings that are not produced for the market and that need to be disembedded from their socio-ecological relations to be commodified. In the agribusiness model, firms of service provision rely on the availability and spatial mobility of the workers under their control. Workers are recruited in their communities and transported elsewhere to carry out agricultural tasks. They are continuously moved around, left in camps surrounded with people they do not necessarily like, and put to work in isolation for long hours in trucks. Eventually, the human inside the worker rebels and demands contact with loved ones, creating conflict with colleagues, and sometimes escaping the camps. Villulla describes how their bodies and minds rebel too, as their knees give in and depression kicks in. As a fictitious commodity that can never be completely commodified, workers are supposed to find protection in labor rights that recognize their humanity and in collective action that demands the fulfillment of such rights. However, the extent of such protection depends on who controls legislation and on the conditions of possibility for collective organization.

In fact, one of the difficulties faced by Ramón as he fought for compensation when he was fired after 15 years of work, was the lack of support from rural labor unions. Villulla spends the first chapters of his book explaining the historical reasons that led to the weakening of these unions in Argentina. One of these reasons is the progressive introduction of agricultural machinery, which led to a decrease in the demand for rural workers and which weakened the political power of rural labor unions. The mechanization of agricultural production also promoted a separation between “skilled” machine operators and the rest of the rural workers, which translated into two different ways that workers related with their employers: most rural workers were considered to be permanent laborers protected with a minimum wage and other social security benefits. On the contrary, machine operators were considered to be transitory workers hired through bilateral piece-rate payment agreements. Rather than negotiating their payment collectively, they came to depend on their own individual skills and negotiating capacities.

Villulla centers on the node of the supply chain that mediates the relationship between agricultural entrepreneurs and workers: service provision. It is in this node where the contradictions between capital and labor are played out: disputes on income distribution between machine owners and operators, as well as the disciplining of workers and workers’ resistance. As a mediating actor between agricultural entrepreneurs and rural workers, the firm of service provision faces a dual pressure: to offer agricultural entrepreneurs a continual service at a low cost, and to attract and maintain skilled workers willing to work on the move. For Villulla, this dual pressure has been largely resolved in favor of agricultural entrepreneurs who are enjoying a growing level of economic surplus. The competitive nature of service provision has guaranteed that this surplus does not trickle down throughout the value chain.

The book provides detailed data about how machine operators’ nominal wages have not grown at the same pace as productivity. As the productivity of labor increased in relation to the introduction of techniques such as no-tilling, hybrid seeds, agrochemical products as well as new harvesting and storage methods, wages have not augmented accordingly. In other words, real wages have decreased, which is enabled by the “veil” of the piece-rate payment system. While these agreements link wages to output, they usually discount the effects of productivity growth. When innovations that increase labor productivity are introduced, service contractors usually renegotiate payments with workers, capturing the new benefits. Thus, the only way machine operators can increase their income is by working for longer periods of time.

The piece-rate payment system creates the perception that payment is related to hard work when in reality it is linked to precariousness and self-exploitation. These private contracts positioned machine operators outside of the formal labor market, which allows contractors to avoid social security payments and to extend the working day for as long as workers are willing to work. As machine operators travel from one agricultural field to the other, their work is no longer delimited by the boundaries of a particular farm. There is always more work to do. Moreover, since payment is related to output, non-active time away from home is not taken into account in wage calculations. Resistance to these working conditions is often reduced to escaping the camp to spend the weekend with family, or texting colleagues across the fields in attempts to collectivize the resistance. However, since these workers are poorly protected by the labor legislation, and since they are employed seasonally, they must keep their reputation as disciplined workers intact if they plan to be hired in the next season.

Something that Villulla’s book makes visible is that the disciplining of labor is no longer about landlords imposing their will in their farms but it is instead dispersed along multiple nodes of the supply chain. Agricultural entrepreneurs face tensions with a multiplicity of landowners and service contractors. They resolve these tensions through asymmetric bilateral negotiations where their status as the holders of capital gives them the upper hand. For example, the increasing number of service contractors, and their lack of collective organization, has created competitive pressures preventing the agricultural surplus of the soy boom from significantly trickling down to them. Their income is sometimes not even enough to account for the depreciation of their machinery.² In turn, this situation prevents them from offering better economic conditions to machine operators. Contractors have to rely on different ways of maintaining their workers loyalty. They pay their workers’ rent or provide loans for them to buy houses, creating a debt base system of reciprocal obligations. Workers are expected to pay these debts with labor. Finally, workers have to negotiate their absence with their communities, partners, and children. They also negotiate their health with their bodies and minds as they sit in isolation in trucks for most of the day/night, with nothing but soy on the horizon.

Missing in Villulla’s account is the importance of the network, not as a concept to explain Argentinean agribusiness, but as an ideological narrative mobilized to create subjectivities that are friendly to agribusiness in and out of the production sphere. For example, Bernhold and Palmisano (2017) highlight the centrality of win-win narratives such as “working in networks” in the agribusiness supply chains. In their study of one of the largest agricultural companies in Argentina, they show how many of the actors who interact with the company have appropriated this notion positively. Although many of these actors understand that their relations with the company are asymmetric, they feel fortunate to be part of the network when they compare themselves with those who remain outside of it. In this way, the notion of working in networks serves to create positive consensus with regards to the hierarchies of agribusiness. Before a worker can be exploited, a labor market needs to be created where workers accept or are coerced to play by the pre-established rules of the game, and where society at large accepts that particular economic activity as socially valuable. In other words, as the workers can never be completely disembedded from their social world, their social world needs to be included in the commodification process.

From this perspective, the network can be understood less as an explanatory concept for Argentinean agribusiness and more as a hegemonic project. This is one of the reasons why the research agenda of Gras and Hernández (2016) is so important. They analyze the moral values and subjectivities that are endorsed by the most important agricultural associations in Argentina and that are central in the positioning of agribusiness as a hegemonic agricultural model. Moreover, they do not limit their description of agribusiness to the productive sphere but recognize the central role of agribusiness-led civil society organizations in creating a social ecology that is friendly to agribusiness. From this perspective, the production of economic value in agribusiness is not only complicit but also conditional on the construction of this social ecology.

In this context, the production of economic value is not limited to the exploitation of the rural worker, but includes other types of labor that make their exploitation possible in the first place. María Soledad Córdoba's (2019) La solidaridad en tiempos del agronegocio (Solidarity in the Times of Agribusiness) shows that the construction of a social ecology that is friendly to agribusiness requires a great deal of labor. Thus, while Villulla (2014) reminds us of the central role of rural workers in the production of the soy boom, Córdoba sheds light on the role of solidarity workers, volunteers and beneficiaries in the creation of agribusiness legitimacy and territoriality at the local level. While this labor is carried out outside of the production sphere, it creates the conditions for the reproduction and expansion of agribusiness, it can potentially lead to higher levels of productivity and surplus value, and it can facilitate the appropriation of this value by powerful agribusiness actors.

4. Agribusiness territoriality

María Soledad Córdoba (2019) examines the way in which the expansion of the agribusiness model in Argentina as a global process relies on local social corporate responsibility interventions. In order to understand the local acceptance and continuity of this agricultural model, the author shows how social corporate responsibility initiatives serve agricultural companies to reorganize local social structures and to create their own territorialities (understood as the organization of the socio-ecological relations and values of a space in ways that reflect a particular set of interests).

Córdoba focuses on two organizations: the “Fundación Bien Común” (FBC) and the “Red Agrosolidaria” (RAS). While the FBC was created by a group of eight entrepreneurs, four of whom belonged to the agricultural sector, the RAS emerged as a way of channeling contributions from agricultural organizations to impoverished segments of society. Both organizations trace their origins to the 2001 Argentinean crisis. After a decade of neoliberal policies, Argentina was experiencing high levels of unemployment and a decline in its gross domestic product and real wages that ultimately led the government to default on its foreign debt.³ While poverty was on the rise, the export led Argentinean soy sector was booming and benefited from the economic measures that were adopted by the government to face the crisis. The resulting inequalities created a social debt between agribusiness actors and the rest of the Argentinean society that had the potential to question the social legitimacy of the soy boom.

Córdoba argues that it was critical for agribusiness actors to address this social debt and the rising levels of poverty without risking the economic structures behind their own success. To achieve this objective, agribusiness promoters explained the crisis by appealing to culture. On the one hand, the FBC defined the 2001 events as yet another critical moment in a vicious cycle of recurrent crises experienced by Argentinean society throughout the years. For the FBC, this vicious cycle was rooted in a crisis of values. It was not about lack of access to land or neoliberal structural reforms but about the habit of impoverished populations of waiting for the State’s assistance. As self-identified successful entrepreneurs, the founders of the FBC saw themselves as carriers of the ideal values that could help Argentineans break free from these habits. Thus, the FBC gave itself the task of transmitting their knowledge through workshops carried out in public institutions and private companies. In these workshops participants did not remain passive but were instead encouraged to put into practice values such as innovation, adaptation, commitment, and money management. The discussion of values that circulated in these workshops resonated strongly with Aapresid’s principles, as was the idea of working in networks because “working alone nothing is possible” (Córdoba 2019).

On the other hand, the “Red Agrosolidaria” (RAS) emerged as a way of fighting the increasing hunger generated by the 2001 crisis through donations of soy. Because most of this soy was not produced for human consumption, the regional RAS centers devised ways of transforming these donations into consumable products. They also transformed soy into money and credit through barter, commercialization and other type of arrangements with regional and local food merchants. After the 2001 crises, the RAS transferred its focus to nutrition and worked towards professionalizing its solidarity work. It created alliances with institutions with local knowledge in order to carry out youth and nutritional training as well as health and microcredit programs. These initiatives had a similar moral undertone than the workshops organized by the FBC, seeking to generate self-employment and to distance the local population from the State’s welfare programs. Agribusiness solidarity interventions such as those promoted by the FBC and RAS further a vision of the world where success, discipline and hard work (or wage and labor productivity to speak in neoclassical terms) were associated. Copying the language of the FBC and of agribusiness actors, these initiatives had “the network” at their core: they were called acciones en red (network activities).

In the case of RAS, the distribution of food also helped agribusiness actors to somehow fulfill their promise to “feed the world.” Narratives that portray Argentina as the breadbasket of the world have been used to legitimize the Argentinean soy boom, even though most Argentinean soy is not produced for human consumption. Interventions that turn soy donations into food donations allow agribusiness actors to show that their production does not only feed the world but also feeds Argentineans in need. The power of this narrative is confirmed by Villulla,⁴ who argues that this discourse adds sense to the lives of machine operators who sit in trucks far away from their families staring at the horizon.

Moreover, through solidarity interventions such as those of FBC and RAS, agribusiness companies and organizations gain local presence and create ties and reciprocal obligations with local institutions. According to Córdoba, beneficiaries are expected to return these donations by adapting their behavior according to the recommendations of experts. She calls this the “solidarity dispositive”: part of the surplus that is produced in the soy sector leaves the circuit of economic capital and transforms itself into “solidary capital.” This capital favors beneficiaries of solidarity programs but also creates a debt. Donors expect a counter-gift. While Villulla’s (2014) workers are expected to pay their bosses’ favors and loans with labor, the solidarity debt is expected to be cancelled in the moral plain through the adoption of the values promoted by the solidarity programs. This is evidenced by the fact that beneficiaries’ behaviors that run contrary to those promoted by agribusiness actors can be faced with sanctions or with the withdrawal of solidarity aid. Beneficiaries are also expected to keep their doors open for members of solidarity institutions as an additional form of reciprocity. In this way, agribusiness reaches the most private and intimate spaces of local populations and individuals.

How is this intimate access used by agribusiness? While agricultural workers are discouraged from resisting or making income distribution claims in the FBC workshops, beneficiaries of RAS courses and microcredit programs are expected to learn the skills that agribusiness companies and associations need and promote. This type of education is later inserted into the production sphere. For instance, young beneficiaries of informatics programs become the new generation of workers capable of operating the increasingly computerized agricultural machinery. As shown by Villulla (2014), this has implications for veteran machine operators whose mechanical knowledge is increasingly becoming irrelevant. Villulla (2014, 254) voices the opinion of a service contractor: “if he does not know how to use a smart phone I will not hire him.” Thus, the negotiating power of veteran machine operators weakens in light of a new generation of workers trained in digital technologies.

Solidarity programs and network narratives can therefore have powerful effects in the productive sphere beyond the promotion of particular behaviors. As argued by Fernandez (2016, 13), the management of social relations in networks is important, not for the sake of working together, but because it increases profits. Although Fernandez is referring to the sphere of production, this reasoning can be extended to solidarity initiatives such as education programs that train the future labor force. Both types of arrangements can lead to lower production costs for soy exporters and to higher productivity levels. Clearly, as shown by Villulla (2014), the extra profits do not trickle down to contractors or workers but instead are captured by agricultural entrepreneurs.

Importantly, through the solidarity dispositive every intervention reconfigures the power relations among the actors involved in the solidarity exchanges. The interventions of the RAS described by Córdoba, for example, relied on the hierarchical reorganization of the institutional solidarity landscape. RAS sought to work with institutions that could contribute their local expertise for the channeling of agribusiness solidarity funds. However, they wanted to create these networks of partners and allies in ways that they could control from Buenos Aires. For instance, Córdoba describes the difficult relations between RAS and a local microcredit organization known as Mobe in Santa Fé. Seeking to standardize its microcredit interventions across the country, the RAS wanted to create a manual of procedures based on Mobe’s local experience. This initiative created tension with Mobe’s leaders who preferred to keep their knowledge, which was based on their long-term relations with beneficiaries, hidden from RAS. By pressuring Mobe to transform its local knowledge into a manual – a replicable object disembedded from its social ties – RAS sought to capture Mobe’s local power.

Interestingly, in Villula’s book workers’ social relations are a hindrance that make workers’ mobility and commodification all the more difficult. In contrast, in Córdoba’s book, local relations are assets that need to be captured through detachable devices such as manuals that can be then moved from their local settings to be deployed elsewhere. We can therefore see that the functioning of agribusiness requires a double movement: the disembedding of fictitious commodities such as land and labor, and the simultaneous embedding of agribusiness narratives, subjectivities and institutions at the local level. To efficiently extract value from people and soils, agricultural companies need to colonize local territories and minds.

In both of these movements, the extraction of economic value relies on social relations of reciprocity that motivate workers into accepting exploitative conditions or that enroll local populations into the values and behaviors of agribusiness. The obligations of reciprocity that machine operators face vis-à-vis their bosses, as per Villulla’s book, can therefore be connected to the obligations of reciprocity that beneficiaries of solidarity programs feel with agribusiness funders. Both types of obligations exert the power of the giver over the vulnerability of the receiver to discipline target populations into following specific behaviors. The production and appropriation of economic value in agribusiness can therefore not be completely understood without considering how power circulates in the production sphere and beyond.

Crucially, solidarity interventions respond to an understanding of “the company” by agribusiness actors as a porous entity whose limits are difficult to define: a network of multiple service contractors, present and future workers, solidarity institutions, public servants, and so forth. For donors, solidarity interventions are not necessarily taking place outside of the agribusiness company. Such definition gives legitimacy to the drive of soy producers and agricultural associations to expand their influence beyond places that are directly related to agricultural production. Therefore, from the perspective of the porous company, the creation of economic value is not limited to the productive sphere. Decentralized agricultural activities and solidarity interventions that are financed and managed by agricultural entrepreneurs become a way of governing local populations for the production of value, while simultaneously turning local territories into part of their companies.

While the notion of the porous agricultural company derives from agribusiness narratives about the agricultural network, it is important to note some differences. For all its porosity, the agricultural company highlights the hierarchical structure of corporations and extends this organization beyond the productive sphere. Moreover, when agribusiness actors describe their companies as porous entities whose influence extends beyond the productive sphere, they can be held responsible, at least in part, for the negative effects of agribusiness. This is usually not the case when referring to agribusiness as productive networks where responsibilities are dispersed along a long chain of anonymous actors. Finally, the notion of the porous agricultural company allows addressing the depoliticizing effects of network narratives while simultaneously considering the production of value beyond the productive sphere.

5. The outsides of the porous agricultural company

As agricultural companies cultivate local territoriality and community loyalty, they gain not only economic but also political power. It is here where the porous agribusiness company clashes with national and local political actors who deploy patronage tactics or who resist the advance of agribusiness through outright mobilization. In other words, there is an outside to the porous company and to the agricultural network; an outside that can potentially threaten its advance. This outside reveals the fact that the agricultural network is not the reality of all rural Argentina, but the project of an organized economic sector. Since in practice agricultural actors are heterogeneous and do not necessarily follow the moral narratives of agricultural associations, the expansion of agribusiness can be perceived as violent to the economies and lives of local populations who will organize and resist.

In La Argentina Transgénica (Soybeans and Power), Pablo Lapegna introduces two new actors to our discussion, who struggle against agribusiness in radically different ways: farmers’ movements and the State. Indeed, the values promoted by the solidarity dispositive ran against the State’s assistentialism, which reveals a dispute for the control of local populations. The neoliberal state of the 1990s rested on the idea of reducing its size and privatizing its welfare responsibilities. In the same vein, the advocates of philanthropy and social corporate responsibility promised that the private sector could carry out many of the State’s functions more efficiently and that, therefore, they should be granted tax reductions. However, with the 2001 Argentinean economic crises and the rise of Kirschnerism, the Argentinean State reclaimed part of these social functions aided by higher export taxes on agribusiness. While the higher taxes created tension with agribusiness actors, by no means was this dispute about the legitimacy of the agribusiness model, which the State and agricultural companies supported. In fact, one of Lapegna’s main conclusions is that public social assistance dwarfed local resistance against agribusiness.

Lapegna’s book is an analysis of the different responses of local farmers’ movements to the negative effects of soy production’s expansion to the north-eastern province of Formosa. Located on the banks of the Paraguay River, Formosa remained at the margins of the soy boom until the beginning of the 2000s, when soy producers arrived in the region from the provinces of Santa Fé and Salta. Lapegna’s book analyzes the responses of the farmers’ movement of Formosa (Mocafor) to herbicide drifts in 2003 and 2009, which affected local crops as well as human and animal populations. While in 2003, the drifts were faced with strong resistance by the Mocafor, the members of this movement decided not to mobilize in 2009. Inspired by these events, Lapegna’s book is an analysis of the political, cultural, and affective factors influencing farmers’ movements’ mobilization and demobilization in Argentina.

To understand the Mocafor’s different responses to these events, Lapegna takes the reader through a historical explanation of the evolution of farmers’ movements in Formosa. We are introduced to the tensions over land between small farmers and cattle ranchers that the province experienced in the 1970s and that led to farmers’ organization in “ligas” and to de-facto land reclaims. After the repression suffered by the “ligas” during the Argentinean dictatorship, their members slowly came back together under the banners of the Agrarian Movement of Formosa (MAF). However, as the MAF became increasingly influenced by Peronist patronage practices and subordinated to the provincial government, some peasant committees and women’s groups no longer felt identified with the MAF. They decided to create the dissident Peasant Movement of Formosa (Mocafor) which sought to distance itself from Peronism and its networks of patronage. However, Mocafor established an alliance with the national movement “Land and Housing Federation” (FTV), which gave it access to national subsidies. The alliance also allowed Mocafor to manage a big part of an unemployment plan that was benefiting around two million people by 2003. In this way, Mocafor gained regional relevance by providing farmers with economic alternatives when their main crop, cotton, fell under a profound crisis.

This historical explanation guides the reader into the complexities of the political alliances and animosities that permeate the regional agricultural context of Formosa. Patronage networks and alliances between movements are central to Lapegna’s analysis of farmers’ mobilization and demobilization. As a movement that emerged in contradiction with Peronism and the provincial government, Mocafor’s complaints against herbicide drifts in 2003 did not receive the support of the State. Instead, police forces were deployed in favor of soy producers and medical authority was mobilized to deny, depoliticize or dismiss health issues. When attention was provided to the drifts through medical checks, responsibility was placed upon farmers themselves. Skin and stomach affectations, for example, were labeled as problems of hygiene. Lapegna captures the negative feelings of disrespect and non-recognition that these responses created in Mocafor’s farmers. Thus, when they decided to mobilize, they did not do so merely in defense of their households but also to reclaim recognition and respect from State authorities: they confronted soy farmers in their fields, blocked roads, and even held hostage a plane that was used to spray agrochemicals.

In 2009, things had dramatically changed. Under the administrations of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, the Peronists increased State’s support to farmers’ movements. This newfound recognition was related to the government’s need to legitimize one of its most controversial decisions: to increase export taxes for soy producers as a way of tapping into the surplus generated by the soy boom. In this context, the government transformed the Agrarian Social Program (PSA) into the Subsecretariat of Rural Development and Family Agriculture (Ssdraf). This was a powerful message of State recognition to farmers’ movements and was accompanied with promises of renewed financial support. In this context and despite its non-Peronist identity, the Mocafor decided to sit down in the regional meetings that were organized around the government’s financial aid to discuss the distribution of the government’s support.

Besides institutional recognition, equally important for Lapegna’s argument is what he terms “dual pressure.” As Mocafor grew in influence and became responsible for the implementation of social programs, its leaders could not afford to openly oppose the movement’s funders. The expectations of Mocafor’s beneficiaries to receive economic support through social programs created pressure from below, limiting the freedom of Mocafor’s leaders to organize actions of collective resistance. Moreover, Mocafor’s leaders also needed to take care of the relations of reciprocity that they had cultivated with their allies. They felt obliged to listen to the FTV, for example, which had helped Mocafor gain access to public subsidies. As the FTV increasingly aligned with the Peronist national government, it also mediated the tensions between Mocafor and the Peronist provincial government and it openly discouraged Mocafor’s plans to protest and mobilize against agribusiness in various occasions. Thus, Lapegna’s “dual pressure” includes the need of Mocafor’s leaders to fulfill the expectations of its members (pressure from below), as well as their need to reciprocate its allies and funders (pressure from above) for their help.

Throughout the book, State-funded patronage networks and farmers’ agency are pitted against each other as a way of demonstrating that even though farmers’ movements might decide to participate in such networks, they do not do so out of passivity or co-optation. One of Lapegna’s main objectives is to highlight the agency and critical thinking that farmers mobilize to make such decisions, as well as the affective elements mediating farmer movements’ relations with agribusiness agents and the State. Despite the economic and social vulnerability faced by farmers when their crops and livestock are destroyed by chemical drifts, Lapegna shows that the farmers of Formosa are not passive or powerless. They discuss their challenges, organize, adapt, and negotiate but they also protest and confront when they deem it reasonable and necessary.

Despite farmers’ agency in deciding to entertain or not these types of relations, reciprocal obligations created through donations of any type become a technology of power when they are not carried out on a leveled playing field. This is evident in the relations of reciprocity discussed by Villulla and Córdoba. Taken together, these books show that the higher positions of the solidarity/welfare field are disputed between the national government and agribusiness. This is a matter of power, not a matter of which actor, public or private, can provide help more efficiently. As argued by Córdoba, social assistance creates a space of intervention where donors materialize their presence at the local level and were local populations acquire obligations of reciprocity that can go from adopting particular values to carrying out political actions. In this way, public or private donors acquire a type of power that can be transformed into economic or political capital.

Thus, the struggle between the State and the agribusiness sector that is discussed by Lapegna was a struggle over agribusiness money that could be used to cultivate territoriality through a gift/counter-gift dynamic. On the one hand, the Kirschner administration was interested in cultivating support to form local organizations in their dispute against soy producers over export taxes. In the midst of this conflict, the national government promised to spend a large portion of the additional income for social projects. On the other hand, as described by Córdoba, soy exporters responded to the advance of the national government by activating the local power that they had cultivated through solidarity programs. The institutions of the agribusiness solidarity network hurried to mobilize their beneficiaries to protest in the streets against the government’s decision to raise export taxes.⁵

This struggle reveals that the precariousness of local populations is used as an asset that can be mobilized through donations. Moreover, it shows that it is not clear who has the responsibility to provide support to impoverished communities. The solidarity/welfare territory is traversed by the porosity of the agricultural company as well as by the porosity of the neoliberal State whose functions are no longer clear. This is one of the reasons why Gras and Hernández (2016) highlight the importance of the epistemological battlefield. They consider the types of knowledge that are mobilized to advocate for the private or public governance of social spending. For example, they show the relevance of new institutional economics in the porous forms of governance devised by agribusiness associations. New institutional economics avoids the extremes of market or state governance and instead suggests various institutional frameworks were responsibilities are given to corporations or the state according to transaction costs. The porous company emerges as a hybrid entity that is driven by economic efficiency and that is simultaneously for-profit and philanthropic. At the same time, we witness the pressure of neoliberal politics in Argentina to reduce the size of the “inefficient” State while cyclical economic crises appear and local populations are left in the hands of private benefactors.

6. Conclusion

The books analyzed in this article show that the Argentinean agribusiness model is promoting a sociotechnical system based on a combination of old and new relations and techniques for the coordination of production and labor. What matters in a sociotechnical system is not a new device like a digital tractor, or an innovation like GM crops, but rather it is a whole assemblage of more or less stable relations that, in this case, include the participation of machine owners, mobile workers, land renters, farmers’ organizations, and even local communities. While not all of these relations are new, they are mobilized by agribusiness promoters thorough the harmonious narrative of the network, as they evoke images of cooperation and responsibility between varied segments of the population.

The books discussed here take distance from the notion of the agribusiness network in different ways. Gras and Hernández portray it as an emic concept used by agribusiness promoters to describe the new relations of production that they promote. Villulla avoids using it in order not to reproduce the apolitical and collaborative narratives that are instrumental to agribusiness. Lapegna dwells at the margins of what this notion describes, concentrating on farmers’ movements who oppose and negotiate the advance of agribusiness. Finally, Córdoba shows that the interconnections that this notion highlights point to the will and strategies of powerful agribusiness actors to expand their control outside of the production sphere. Her use of “porosity,” when referring to agricultural companies, points to the flows of people, things and narratives in and out of agribusiness. But this notion also shows that building the channels through which these flows circulate requires labor, ideology, and disciplining. In this sense, making this side of the entangled agricultural company visible can serve a political purpose.

The notion of the porous company differs from the model of the factory. Its main concern is not mass production but adaptability. As we saw, the main objective of the agricultural entrepreneur is not the maximization of production but the minimization of risk (Gras and Hernández 2016). This objective is achieved by creating a system that is adaptable in space (rented land, mobile workers) and time (financialization). However, it is not only the social body involved in the production process that is shaped into something flexible and adaptable. Bodies themselves are reconceptualized. In 1992, Emily Martin suggested that a transition was taking place in the body percept and practice “from bodies suited for and conceived in terms of the era of Fordist mass production to bodies, suited for and conceived in the terms of the era of flexible accumulation” (Martin 1992, 121).

Villulla’s (2014) account of the pressures felt by machine operators is one example of how flexible accumulation affects individual bodies/minds. The biotech company that I investigate in Argentina provides an additional example. This company is developing a seed system known as ECOSeed (where ECO stands for environmentally customized organism) as a climate change adaptation strategy. The ECOSeed is a drought-tolerant multispecies arrangement that includes carefully selected soy or wheat germplasm, transgenes from the sunflower, region-specific microbial seed treatments, and digital agriculture technologies. The industrial seed is conceived as a system whose performance depends on manufactured symbiotic relationships with other organisms and technologies. To respond adequately to the varied effects of climate stress in different localities, the seed needs to travel with a network of microbes, genes and technologies that enhance its flexibility and adaptability. Thus, the books analyzed in this review could be complemented by a study showing the effect of agribusiness networks and porosity in the human and non-human bodies of agribusiness.

Whatever their use of the notions of the network and the porous company, these books recognize that agribusiness techniques of control rely on the cultivation of reciprocal obligations for the disciplining of social relations. Whether through loans to buy houses or to pay the rent, through food donations or educative initiatives, or through public funds for farmers’ movements, these gift/counter-gift exchanges require labor and take place in a hierarchical structure. Donors and recipients do not share the same power, wealth, and vulnerabilities when accepting what counts as an adequate gift or counter-gift. Thus, mainly guided by the interest of creating a social ecology that is friendly to agribusiness, donors provide material gifts in exchange for desirable behaviors (disciplined labor, political demobilization or “correct” values) that will in turn translate into economic value. These exchanges require the work of mediators (such as solidarity institutions) and the translations that they entail, from material to behavioral to material, require loading gifts with ideological substance. Notably, the idea that collaborating with agribusiness helps to feed the world.

Missing in these books is the perspective of plant scientists linked to agribusiness in Argentina. What type of labor do they carry out? How is their labor inserted in the production sphere? What type of bilateral arrangements and obligations of reciprocity do they entertain with agribusiness capital? In my ethnographic work in the offices and laboratories of the Argentinean biotech company, I have seen how plant scientists continuously accept to work extra hours with no additional payment. Given the lack of places and resources that are available in the country for them to put their knowledge into practice, many of them express their gratitude for having access to high-tech equipment in agribusiness companies even when this is accompanied by labor exploitation.

Finally, these books have highlighted the importance of the solidarity/welfare space as it is contested by agribusiness companies and the State. Lapegna (2019) shows that this space is a source of economic and political power, and that this is hidden in neoliberal narratives that portray private solidarity initiatives as more efficient than public social spending. However, taking the perspective of plant scientists into account would also enrich this part of the discussion. It would highlight the role of the State in the production of corporate science and the appropriation of public knowledge for the production of private profit. How is corporate science financed by State funds in Argentina and how do Argentinean scientists benefit from the innovations that they help to create? Including plant scientists in the discussion also sheds light on the role of the non-human beings with whom these scientists work on a daily basis. How does life itself become a space of contestation inhabited by safety and property regulations? How are the bodies and labor of non-humans and the surplus that they help to produce controlled and appropriated? While the books discussed in this article address issues of governance in the production sphere and in local populations, much remains to be said about the related governance of non-human beings and technologies.

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my gratitude to the authors of the books discussed in this paper (Carla Gras, Valeria Hernández, María Soledad Córdoba, Juan Villula, and Pablo Lapegna), who generously accepted to discuss their work with me. Any errors in my interpretation and extrapolation of their ideas are my responsibility. I would also like to thank the academic institutions and scholars who hosted me during the different stages of my research on Argentina: Carla Gras and Valeria Hernández at the Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales - Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Javier Lezaun at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society - University of Oxford; and Casey Walsh at the Anthropology Department of the University of California Santa Barbara. Thank you also to the reviewers and editors of the article for their useful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Diego Silva Garzón is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and Visiting Fellow at the Anthropology Department of UC Santa Barbara. He is currently working on the design of climate-ready seeds in Argentina. His work is located at the intersection of science and technology studies, economic and legal anthropology, and agrarian studies, and pays special attention to the socio-technical networks and rural conflicts surrounding the deployment of agricultural innovations.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted with the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) [postdoctoral grant P2GEP1_178189]; Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung.

Notes

1 Carla Grass and Valeria Hernández's (2016) Radiografía del Nuevo Campo Argentina (An X-ray of the New Rural Argentina); Juan Manuel Villulla's (2014) Las Cosechas son Ajenas (The Harvest Does Not Belong To Us); María Soledad Córdoba's (2019) La Solidaridad en Tiempos del Agronegocio (Solidarity in Times of Agribusiness); and Pablo Lapegna’s (2019) La Argentina Transgénica (Soybeans and Power).

2 Private conversation with Juan Manuel Villulla.

3 In December 2001 unemployment levels reached 21.5%, the GDP had declined by 16% and real wages by 24% in comparison to the previous year (Córdoba 2019, 13).

4 Private conversation with Juan Manuel Villulla.

5 Private conversation with María Soledad Córdoba.