The government of beans : regulating life in the age of monocrops
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The government of beans : regulating life in the age of monocrops
Duke University Press, 2020
- : paperback
Available at / 1 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [257]-275) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The Government of Beans is about the rough edges of environmental regulation, where tenuous state power and blunt governmental instruments encounter ecological destruction and social injustice. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Paraguay was undergoing dramatic economic, political, and environmental change due to a boom in the global demand for soybeans. Although the country's massive new soy monocrop brought wealth, it also brought deforestation, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and violence. Kregg Hetherington traces well-meaning attempts by bureaucrats and activists to regulate the destructive force of monocrops that resulted in the discovery that the tools of modern government are at best inadequate to deal with the complex harms of modern agriculture and at worst exacerbate them. The book simultaneously tells a local story of people, plants, and government; a regional story of the rise and fall of Latin America's new left; and a story of the Anthropocene writ large, about the long-term, paradoxical consequences of destroying ecosystems in the name of human welfare.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Governing the Anthropocene 1
Part I. A Cast of Characters 19
1. The Accidental Monocrop 23
2. Killer Soy 32
3. The Absent State 43
4. The Living Barrier 53
5. The Plant Health Service 62
6. The Vast Tofu Conspiracy 70
Part II. An Experiment in Government 81
7. Capturing the Civil Service 85
8. Citizen Participation 96
9. Regulation by Denunciation 106
10. Citation, Sample, and Parallel States 120
11. Measurement as Tactical Sovereignty 130
12. A Massacre Where the Army Used to Be 144
Part III. Agribiopolitics 157
13. Plant Health and Human Health 163
14. A Philosophy of Life 174
15. Cotton, Welfare, and Genocide 184
16. Immunizing Welfare 194
17. Dummy Huts and the Labor of Killing 203
Conclusion. Remains of Experiments Past 216
Notes 223
Bibliography 257
Index 277
by "Nielsen BookData"