Publications

Matilda Baraibar Norberg, Lisa Deutsch. 2023. Ch 1: Combining insights from political economy and environmental history. The Soybean Through World History. Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866-1

This chapter introduces the book’s main aims, premise, structure, theoretical framework and fundamental arguments. First, it briefly overviews soy’s centrality in the contemporary agrofood system and spells out the originality and importance of a world historical approach. Second, the chapter situates the book’s distinct theoretical position in an area of engagement between political economy and environmental history and formu...

Matilda Baraibar Norberg, Lisa Deutsch. 2023. Ch 2: The first soybean cycle (domestication to 900 CE). The Soybean Through World History. Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866-2

The archaeological record and the earliest available sources suggest that the deep history of soy reaches back several millennia. Based on a thorough overview of early Chinese texts, this chapter details the roles of soy under the first cycle (from domestication to 900 CE). During the roots phase (from soy’s origins to roughly 200 BCE), soybeans were grown as one among several crops in the highly stratified early agricultural ...

Matilda Baraibar Norberg, Lisa Deutsch. 2023. Ch 3: The second soybean cycle (1000–1860). The Soybean Through World History. Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866-3

This chapter examines the second soy cycle, which begins to take root around the turn of the first millennium, under the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Soy now begins to take key and manifold roles outside China, reaching into East and Southeast Asia. The full regime phase, discernible approximately between 1650 and 1790, is marked by “rise of the West”, and by the Dutch and British commercial penetration of East Asia. Under this cy...

Matilda Baraibar Norberg, Lisa Deutsch. 2023. Ch 4: The roots of the third soybean cycle (1860–1949). The Soybean Through World History. Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866-4

This chapter is devoted to the roles and functions of soy exclus during the roots phase of the third soy cycle, the period 1860–1949 that leads up to the regime. By the mid-19th century, soy had not yet become a key global commodity. However, the set of transformative forces rooted in this phase – new technologies, commodity chain activities s, uses and power configurations – would ultimately usher in the post-World War II reg...

Matilda Baraibar Norberg, Lisa Deutsch. 2023. Ch 5: The regime of the third soybean cycle (1950–today). The Soybean Through World History. Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866-5

This chapter analyzes the third soy regime – when the United States took the helm of the global food system and the soybean was inserted into the industrialized (mechanized and high input) agriculture of Corn Belt in 1950. The soybean fit perfectly into the Western vision of the Green Revolution in food production – to provide large enough quantities that are cheap enough to allow access to feed poor “underdeveloped” populatio...

Matilda Baraibar Norberg, Lisa Deutsch. 2023. Chapter 6: Historicizing soy Toward a new rupture? The Soybean Through World History. Routledge Studies in Food, Society and the Environment. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866-6

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 th...

Wood, Amanda, Queiroz, Cibele, Deutsch, Lisa, Gonzalez-Mon, Blanca, Jonell, Malin, Pereira, Laura, Sinare, Hanna, Svedin, Uno, Wassenius, Emmy. 2023. Reframing the local-global food systems debate through a resilience lens. Nature Food. https://doi.org/10.1038/S43016-022-00662-0

Despite the growing knowledge that food system solutions should account for interactions and drivers across scales, broader societal debate on how to solve food system challenges is often focused on two dichotomous perspectives and associated solutions: either more localized food systems or greater global coordination of food systems. The debate has found problematic expressions in contemporary challenges, prompting us to revi...

Baraibar Norberg, M., & Deutsch, L. (2023). The Soybean Through World History: Lessons for Sustainable Agrofood Systems (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367822866

This book examines the changing roles and functions of the soybean throughout world history and discusses how this reflects the complex processes of agrofood globalization. The book uses a historical lens to analyze the processes and features that brought us to the current global configuration of the soybean commodity chain. From its origins as a peasant food in ancient China, today the protein-rich soybean is by far the most...

Silvana Juri, Matilda Baraibar, Laurie Beth Clark, Mauricio Cheguhem, Esteban Jobbagy, Jorge Marcone, Néstor Mazzeo, Mariana Meerhoff, Micaela Trimble, Cristina Zurbriggen, Lisa Deutsch. 2022. Food systems transformations in South America: Insights from a transdisciplinary process rooted in Uruguay. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2022.887034

The wicked nature of sustainability challenges facing food systems demands intentional and synergistic actions at multiple scales and sectors. The Southern Cone of Latin America, with its historical legacy of “feeding the world,” presents interesting opportunities for generating insights into potential trajectories and processes for food system transformation. To foster such changes would require the development of col...

Rocha, J. C., M. Baraibar, L. Deutsch, A. de Bremond, J. Oestreicher, F. Rositano, and C. Gelabert. 2019. Toward understanding the dynamics of land change in Latin America: potential utility of a resilience approach for building archetypes of land-systems change. Ecology and Society 24(1):17. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10349-240117

Climate change, financial shocks, and fluctuations in international trade are some of the reasons why resilience is increasingly invoked in discussions about land-use policy. However, resilience assessments come with the challenge of operationalization, upscaling their conclusions while considering the context-specific nature of land-use dynamics and the common lack of long-term data. We revisit the approach of system archetyp...