Understanding the Expansion of Commodity Frontiers
Yann le Polain de Waroux
Project Description
The challenges and contradictions of sustainable development are nowhere more apparent than in commodity frontiers — places where commodity agriculture expands over natural environments —, which some see as an opportunity for economic growth, while other perceive as an ecological and social catastrophe. Agricultural frontiers have been studied for a long time, but their dynamics are changing. Earlier frontiers in Latin America often took the form of state-planned smallholder colonization. In recent decades they have been increasingly driven by capitalized agriculture operating with minimal government intervention. The greater agency of corporate actors in commodity frontiers has implications for how we understand their dynamics, and hence for how well we can predict their emergence and expansion. We study these implications through the case of the Gran Chaco, a dry woodland ecosystem that covers over seventy million hectares in Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, and has experienced among the highest deforestation rates in the world over the last two decades. (see our paper on frontiers of the Gran Chaco).