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.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction · Governing the Anthropocene
- Part I | A Cast of Characters
- Chapter One · The Accidental Monocrop
- Chapter Two · Killer Soy
- Chapter Three · The Absent State
- Chapter Four · The Living Barrier
- Chapter Five · The Plant Health Service
- Chapter Six · The Vast Tofu Conspiracy
- Part II | An Experiment in Government
- Chapter Seven · Capturing the Civil Service
- Chapter Eight · Citizen Participation
- Chapter Nine · Regulation by Denunciation
- Chapter Ten · Citation, Sample, and Parallel States
- Chapter Eleven · Measurement as Tactical Sovereignty
- Chapter Twelve · A Massacre Where the Army Used to Be
- Part III | Agribiopolitics
- Chapter Thirteen · Plant Health and Human Health
- Chapter Fourteen · A Philosophy of Life
- Chapter Fifteen · Cotton, Welfare, and Genocide
- Chapter Sixteen · Immunizing Welfare
- Chapter Seventeen · Dummy Huts and the Labor of Killing
- Conclusion · Remains of Experiments Past
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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