Dr. Oliveira publishes a special issue of Globalizations: “Beyond land grabs”

November 20, 2020 by

Beyond land grabs: New insights on land struggles and global agrarian change

Dr. Oliveira’s article “Beyond land grabs: New insights on land struggles and global agrarian change” has just been published as the guest editor’s introduction to a special issue the journal Globalizations.

The article is co-authored with Ben McKay and Juan Liu, who also co-edited the special issue.

ABSTRACT: The conjunction of climate, food, and financial crises in the late 2000s triggered renewed interest in farmland and agribusiness investments around the world. This phenomenon became known as the ‘global land grab’ and sparked debates among social movements, NGOs, academics, government and international development agencies worldwide. In this introduction, we critically analyse the ‘state of the literature’ so far, and outline four areas that are moving the debate ‘beyond land grabs’. These include: (1) the role of contract farming and differentiation among farm workers in the consolidation of farmland; (2) the broader forms of dispossession and mechanisms of control and value grabbing beyond ‘classic’ land grabs for agricultural production; (3) discourses about, and responses to, Chinese agribusiness investments abroad; and (4) the relationship between financialization and land grabbing. Ultimately, we propose new directions to deepen and even transform the research agenda on land struggles and agroindustrial restructuring around the world.

KEYWORDS: Global land grab, contract farming, agricultural labour, control grabbing, dispossession, financialization

 

Globalizations seeks to publish the best work that contributes to constructing new meanings of globalization, brings fresh ideas to the concept, broadens its scope, and has an impact upon shaping the debates and practices of the future. The journal is dedicated to opening the widest possible space for discussion of alternatives to narrow understandings of global processes and conditions. The move from the singular to the plural is deliberate and implies scepticism of the idea that there can ever be a single theory or interpretation of globalization. Rather, the journal seeks to encourage the exploration and discussion of multiple interpretations and multiple processes that may constitute many possible globalizations, many possible alternatives.  The journal is open to all fields of knowledge, including the natural, environmental, medical and public health sciences, as well as the social sciences and the humanities.  Globalizations encourages multidisciplinary research and looks to publish contributions from all regions of the world. The articles and special issues focus on acute issues of the moment and on deep long-term structural shifts.

For the full-length article, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1843842

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Dr. Oliveira published in Applied Geography

August 5, 2020 by

Global-local interactions in agrochemical industry: Relating trade regulations in Brazil to environmental and spatial restructuring in China

Dr. Oliveira’s article “Global-local interactions in agrochemical industry: Relating trade regulations in Brazil to environmental and spatial restructuring in China“, co-authored with He Canfei and Ma Jiahui, has just been published in Applied Geography.

Abstract

China and Brazil are the world’s leading exporter and importer of agrochemicals respectively. We combine quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze global-local interactions in the spatial restructuring of China’s agrochemical industry in relation to a 2006 agrochemical import-acceleration policy in Brazil. We synthesize global political ecology and evolutionary economic geography (EEG) research on environmental regulations, technological upgrading, and the spatial transformations of China’s pollution-intensive industries, discussing arguments that the Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH) and Porter Hypothesis (PH) co-exist due to firm heterogeneity. While existing studies conceptualize heterogeneity in terms of firm size, regional hub (cluster) effect, and local government intervention, this study adds global-local interactions as dimension of firm heterogeneity – distinguishing firms with weak and strong international linkages. We show the import-acceleration policy in Brazil contributed to the de-concentration of agrochemical production towards western China (confirming the PHH). Yet increasingly strict environmental regulations in China curtailed de-concentration after 2010, when well-established firms and new entrants with strong international linkages consolidated exports to Brazil, while new firms with weaker international linkages exited this market (confirming the PH). This co-existence of PHH and PH due to firm-level heterogeneity of global-local interactions illustrates a theoretical synthesis we call an evolutionary political economic geography (EPEG).

Keywords: Evolutionary economic geography; Global political ecology; Global-local interactions; Pollution haven hypothesis; Porter hypothesis; Chemical industry

Applied Geography is a journal devoted to the publication of research which utilizes geographic approaches (human, physical, nature-society and GIScience) to resolve human problems that have a spatial dimension. These problems may be related to the assessment, management and allocation of the world’s physical and/or human resources. The underlying rationale of the journal is that only through a clear understanding of the relevant societal, physical, and coupled natural-humans systems can we resolve such problems. The journal was founded in 1980, and consistently ranks among the top journals of geography, planning, development studies, and environmental science.

For the full length article, see: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2020.102244

 

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Dr. Oliveira presents his research at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

July 31, 2020 by

Video of lecture at UFRRJ, July 31, 2020

Video of lecture at UFRRJ, July 31, 2020

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Dr. Oliveira published in the Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography

April 20, 2020 by

Soy, Domestication, and Colonialism

Dr. Oliveira’s chapter “Soy, Domestication, and Colonialism” has just been accepted for publication in the Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography, edited by Matthew Himley, Elizabeth Havice, and Gabriela Valdivia. The edited volume is forthcoming from Routledge.

Abstract

Soy is one of the world’s most important crops by area, volume, and value. It is especially distinctive for serving as key nexus between food, livestock feed, fuel, and myriad industrial products. Its rapidly multiplying uses provide a powerful touchstone for analysis of how resources are not only created, but also constantly recreated and redesigned. In turn, these transformations reflect the shifting political ecological foundations that undergird resource creation – above all the territorial expansion of an extractive mode of production intimately associated with colonialism – and illustrate how resource-making processes generate new socio-ecological relations in their own image. This chapter begins with the historical interdependence of agriculture and colonialism, framing the domestication of plants as the archetype of resource-making. It then traces the cultivation of soybeans from its domestication and dispersal throughout present-day China through Han colonial expansion; through its early industrialization at the hands of Japanese colonizers of Korea and “Manchuria,” followed by US industrialists; to its key role in the contemporary colonization of South American hinterlands and its projected neo-colonial expansion across Africa and Asia. Finally, I critique the neo-natures created by transnational soy agribusiness through biotechnology, and the neo-colonial expansion of “Western” diets worldwide.

Keywords: soybeans, resource-making, world-making, environmental history, global political ecology

More information on the Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography will be made available shortly.

Author’s original manuscript of the chapter available here.

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Dr. Oliveira presents at the symposium on Politics in Contemporary Brazil, UC Irvine

February 3, 2020 by

“The diseases of Brazil-China agroindustrialization.”

Dr. Gustavo de L. T. Oliveira, Department of Global and International Studies, UC Irvine

Invited presentation to the symposium Politics in Contemporary Brazil, organized by the Jack W. Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy and Latin American Studies Center, University of California Irvine.

Social and Behavioral Science Gateway 1511, 9:00 am – 4:15 pm, February 3, 2020.

This one-day workshop brings together Brazilian scholars focused on some of the pressing issues in the country through the lenses of political science. It offers diverse accounts about democracy, public policy, reforms and contemporary issues in a country that has experienced major political changes over the past decade. Since 2013, Brazil has witnessed massive street protests, profound political polarization, a presidential impeachment, corruption scandals, deep economic crisis and the rise of far-right populism. The workshop looks at this changing context in order to shed light on a myriad of topics of Brazilian Politics.

Dr. Oliveira’s presentation sketches a new direction for research in global political ecology and public health, examining the myriad ways in which the process of agro-industrialization that has deepened through Brazil-China economic integration is associated with increasing prevalence of plant, animal, and human diseases.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/politics-in-contemporary-brazil-workshop-tickets-90329366567#

For further information contact Ricardo Fabrino Mendonça: ricardofabrino@hotmail.com

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Dr. Oliveira interviewed on the Belt and Road Podcast

October 21, 2019 by

Soy and Sinophobia: China’s Place in Brazilian Agribusiness

Dr. Gustavo Oliveira talks about Chinese agribusiness investments in Brazil, the rising importance of the soy trade between the two countries, and the ways domestic and international business interests have fanned the flames of Sinophobia for strategic gains. Dr. Oliveira is a Brazilian scholar and activist and an Assistant Professor of Global & International Studies at University of California, Irvine.

The Belt and Road Podcast covers the latest news, research and analysis of China’s growing presence in the developing world. It is produced by Erik Myxter-Iino (Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions) and Juliet Lu (University of California, Berkeley).

For the full 71 minute interview, see:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/196316/1904978

Belt and Road Podcast, Episode 19

October 21, 2019

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