ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the social-ecological challenges and contradictions of the current soy regime from the vantage point of historical legacies and breaks. As regimes are historical and eventually contradictions and limits trigger their end, we analyze the signs of an approaching rupture phase. We focus on three different types of challenges. The first is a crisis of structure in the longue durée, which involves the idea that frontier expansion and ecological simplification are closing in on biophysical limits. The second is a looming crisis in the logic of accumulation of soy business, which is threatening its future profitability. The third, and final type of challenge, is political, in which the contemporary soy regime is contested both from popular countermovements and from China’s competition with the United States for control of the global soy complex. A rupture in the present soy regime is inevitable, but there is a possible choice to be made between a planned and deliberate transformation or a nonlinear, chaotic disintegration of the current regime phase. Understanding the history of the soybean can help to inform this choice.
