Pathways to cheap nature: expansion of the soybean frontier in Brazil

Abstract

This article investigates the expansion of the soybean frontier in Brazil and its production of cheap nature within capitalist world-ecology. This is done via the world-ecology perspective, which identifies capital society as a system for exploiting and appropriating nature. A deductive method was used, along with literature review and qualitative analysis. The article is structured into three main sections: the first presents the production of cheap nature from the world-ecology perspective, the second observes the expansion of the soybean frontier in Brazil as a flow space, and the third analyzes the relevance of infrastructure projects for the construction of space as a place. The main finding is that cheap nature is produced within the contradiction of the expansion-establishment of the soybean frontier: in other words, the pathways created by infrastructure projects establish the border as a place and expand it as a flow, in a process fueled by violence and ecological degradation. This initial contribution needs to be refined with research into other infrastructure projects to understand its explanatory limitations.