Soy and Agro-Food Change, Geheftet

Klappentext

Any assessment of agro-food change faces the challenge of the multiplicity of time, space, and agency. These dimensions are closely interwoven, and each includes multiple scales. Consequently, short-, medium-, and long-term periods, spatial formations from local to global, and multiple human and even non-human agents need to be addressed. As a result, agro-food change is characterized by an overwhelming complexity that is difficult to grasp. Reducing this complexity without over-simplifying requires a clear research focus. In this special issue of the Rural History Yearbook, soy as a commodity provides a lens for assessing agro-food change in the era of globalization since the 1870s from a historical social science and humanities perspective. Soy serves as an excellent marker of agro-food globalization in the "long twentieth century," as it evolved from an East Asian food crop to the world's biggest agricultural commodity during this period. The soy lens therefore allows us to appreciate intersections of multiple scales of time, space, and agency. Importantly, the volume aims to overcome the "methodological nationalism" of country-focused agro-food studies as well as certain globalist tendencies in food regime research by emphasizing (sub)national pathways of agro-food change. International scholars across disciplines address the history of soy in and between Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia, highlighting fundamental continuities and changes, important sites and their connections, and more-than-human key actors of the global soy complex - not least in light of the current "polycrisis."