Soy and Agro-Food Change

Abstract

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 perspectives, spatial formations from local to global as well as various human and even non-human agents need to be considered. Agro-food change is thus characterized by an overwhelming complexity that is difficult to grasp. To reduce this complexity without risking oversimplification, we need 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. Soy serves best as a marker of agro-food globalization in the ‘long twentieth century’ because it evolved from being almost exclusively an East Asian food crop until the late nineteenth century to representing the world’s biggest agricultural commodity since the early twenty-first century. The lens of soy therefore allows us to comprehend intersections of different scales of time, space, and agency.