Agribusiness and the Neoliberal Food System in Brazil is a critical study of Amazon encroachment and the expansion of capitalist agriculture. The book’s release is timely, given the firm commitments of the new Brazilian president to expand agriculture into the vast tracts of the untouched rainforest. The book is divided into seven stand-alone chapters, which, taken together, explore the ontological, historical, and discursive linkages between global markets, the state, and the farm.
In the first chapter, Ioris characterizes John H. Davis and Ray A. Goldberg’s famous term agribusiness as transformational, describing it as the process of rapid modernization of agricultural production so as to change the center point of agriculture from food production to capital accumulation (21). For Ioris, this represents a shift from agriculture-cum-food to agriculture-cum-business. Taking on a political ecology perspective, the study attempts to explain the inequalities produced by agribusiness through situating the states’ intervention in society’s relation with nature—or what he labels socionature (42–43).
Ioris’s political ecology accentuates the relational view of power from a food sovereignty perspective while foregrounding the consciously cooperative scientific production methods in the agroecological perspective. This political ecology perspective is novel because it ontologically rejects the subject-object dichotomy between human and nature while calling for a socioecological understanding of the state apparatus (40–41). Juxtaposed with agroecology and food sovereignty approaches, Ioris’s framework is well presented; however, it proves a more interesting endeavor to see Ioris’s political ecology situated against the broader postextractivist, neoextractivist literature (Acosta Reference Acosta2013; Gudynas Reference Gudynas2013a, Reference Gudynasb; Svampa Reference Svampa2015).
The book then engages with the development of agribusiness globally and in Brazil, focusing on shifts to agribusiness as transitions from developmentalist to neoliberal political economic governance structures. Ioris argues that the neoliberalization of agriculture is made possible through three dimensions: reformed public-private partnerships, advanced technique and technology, and the containment of dissent (52–56). First, the transition from a developmentalist state to a neoliberal state entails a shift from government interventionism to joint governance between the state and agribusiness. Then new technologies and production techniques make the intensive cultivation of crops like soy possible on an industrial scale in Mato Grosso (95). Finally, the hegemonic power of agribusiness in Mato Grosso is able to crowd out alternatives and even unsupportive political elements. For Ioris, these three features fundamentally mean a transformation of the way farming expanded, which ultimately mirrored other industries in a period of wider liberalization of trade and finance. Reformed public-private partnerships, advanced techniques and technology, and the containment of dissent form a trinity that animates the book.
The analysis of the advancement and adaptation of the agricultural frontier in Mato Grosso that Ioris provides is stunning. This timeline begins in the 1930s with Vargas’s “March toward the West” to occupy what was billed as empty space. After the initial deforestation stage, Ioris illustrates how state-led national development colonization plans would cause a massive concentration of land and wealth through land grabs. Finally, agribusiness merges into the neoliberal status quo by propping up its own NGOs, as well as associations; putting up its own politicians; producing massive exports; and forming partnerships with TNCs to modernize.
While acknowledging the idealistic picture of development painted by big farmers, Ioris takes a step back to recognize the production and reproduction of poverty and insecurity, whose precarity the farmers cannot escape. Of particular interest to Ioris are land grabs that resulted in the concentration of land ownership, whereby 3 percent of the population controls 62 percent of the land (97). Convincingly, Ioris argues that agribusiness has attempted to capture the state both in Mato Grosso and in Brasília (96). While he is not the first to make this claim, given the movement of the farmers in the last election into the Jair Bolsonaro camp during this past election, he will certainly not be the last (Bohn Reference Bohn, North and Clark2018). His analysis adds rich insights from the perspective of capitalist agricultural development in one of the world’s highest-producing and rapidly expanding agricultural frontiers.
Moving from the development of agroneoliberalism, the second half of the book advances a novel theory of rent, the dialectical movement of agribusiness, and a geography of poverty—all invaluable insights from this Marxist geographer. Applying Marx’s theory of ground rent to agribusiness development, Ioris begins by sketching out the main features of rent in capitalist agriculture. His novel contribution is the “rent of agribusiness,” in which, in addition to ground rent, there is a qualitative conversion in rent extraction between the state, small numbers of agribusinesses, and TNCs (133). For Ioris, this is important because it highlights the interconnectivities of agroneoliberalism, as well as the movement of rent from agriculture into other sectors of the economy. To label the very fluid structural features of a particular market as rent is an overly simplistic way to unscientifically explain complex market and political interaction.
The next major theoretical advance is Ioris’s engagement with the place framing of the agricultural frontier area of the Teles Pires River Basin through a dialectical process of displacement, replacement, and misplacement. First, virgin forests are cleared, displacing the locals and disrupting the ecosystem (148–49). After the forest has been transformed into its opposite, cleared land, the local society and forest ecosystems are replaced by big farmers, farmworkers, and “soyscapes” (152). Ioris argues that the situation of high farmer debt to TNCs has resolved in a sense of misplacement for everyone in Teles Pires from the top down (157). However, this particular dialectic ends not in a synthesis producing a new situation but in the reproduction of a fragile status quo encapsulated in a prolonged antithesis or replacement phase.
Poverty is referenced throughout the book as a geographical outcome of the process of development. However, a narrower discussion of poverty is masterfully crafted in chapter 6 around small farmers and extractive artisans in an extractive reserve (RESEX) (180). Ioris provides a stunning depiction of an island of productive and ecological harmony that is this community, birthed by political struggle against the encroachments of timber and mining firms (186). This chapter provides an explanation of neoliberalism’s inducing poverty while illustrating a very harrowing narrative of a subaltern community holding out against hegemonic forces.
Ioris’s poststructuralist categorization is limiting because it devalues the ways oppressed people struggle. For example, he mentions the iconic Chico Mendes, characterizing him as the leader of a rubber tapper movement fighting for subaltern groups (191). Digging deeper, we find that Mendes was a trade union leader who mobilized with central trade union leaders to fight to decommodify land from large landowners backed by the military regime. Rather than flush out longer-term sociological processes, Ioris opts for situating RESEX in isolation while highlighting features of geography and hierarchy. Instead of taking the struggle of the oppressed as they are, we are presented with mode of development that is hegemonic over socionature, where the present feels as though it is here only to slip away.
Overall, the text is a valuable contribution to understanding the colonization of the Amazon through capitalist farming techniques. The election of Bolsonaro quickens the pace of neocolonial extraction, which will make Ioris’s forthcoming works exceedingly valuable to a wider audience of readers.
