3 government needs to enact further legislation to mitigate the impacts of land grabbing and deforestation and ensure that the groups responsible for carrying out the legislation have the necessary resources. Civil society should continue to push the government to create effective legislation, as this pressure has proved successful in the past. In this article, I discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the soybean industry in Argentina and present potential steps the country might take to balance its reliance on the soybean industry with initiatives to ensure social justice and global environmental responsibility. Background Since 2003, South America has dominated the international soybean market, surpassing North America as the world’s leading soybeanproducing region. Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina hold 5 of the top 10 spots as chief soybean producers around the world (Oliveira & Hecht, 2016). Argentina and Brazil alone are responsible for approximately 49% of global soybean production as of this writing. Exports increased dramatically over the course of the late twentieth century. South America exported nearly zero soybeans in 1970, 10 million metric tons by the mid-1990s, and more than 70 million metric tons by 2015. A majority of Argentina’s soy products are exported to China, leading an Argentina Board of Trade official to comment, “our economy is very dependent on soybeans and China—perhaps too dependent” (Larmer, 2019). Argentina became the top supplier of soybean oil to China by 2010, supplying 80% of Chinese imports of the product. Argentina garners economic benefits from dealing with China; however, the relationship may not be as beneficial as it appears. The growing interdependence exposes Argentina to China’s policy changes. In 2015, Mauricio Macri, President of Argentina from 2015 to 2019, tried to reduce China’s influence on Argentina by canceling some Chinesefunded infrastructure projects, but the Chinese government retaliated by decreasing soybean imports by 30%, which caused a shock to Argentina’s economy. Macri restructured Argentina financially by diversifying the sources of financial support, so Argentina did not depend as heavily on economic support from China (Bernal-Meza & Manuel Zanabria, 2020). Nonetheless, in December 2018, Macri signed over 30 investment deals with President Xi, including an $8.6 billion currency swap, a form of a no-interest loan that bolstered the economy and lessened the nearly 50% inflation rate. As a result of this deal, China became Argentina’s largest noninstitutional lender (Larmer, 2019). China has been able to influence political decisions by threatening to take its business to competing countries, which could lead to devastating impacts on the Argentine economy. Over the past three decades, soybeans have come to occupy almost 50% of Argentina’s cultivated land (Larmer, 2019). While this growth has driven economic benefits, it also has come at a significant cost to indigenous people, the environment, and biodiversity. Greenpeace International states that the main causes of forest area loss, generally, are fires and agricultural expansion due to livestock and transgenic soybeans. In 2019, Greenpeace published a report estimating that 4.3% of global deforestation was occurring in the north of Argentina (Greenpeace, 2020, p. 3). The rising deforestation rates are partly due to the Chinese resource demand, which includes minerals as well as agricultural products. In 2003, approximately 12.6 million hectares of Argentine farmland were devoted to soybeans, producing nearly 35 million tons. As Chinese demand grew, the farmland increased to about 20.5 million hectares of land by 2016, yielding almost 59 million tons of soybeans. This represents a 63% increase in soybean farm area planted and a 69.5% growth of soybean production (Bernal-Meza & Manuel Zanabria, 2020). As Argentina continues to produce more soybeans for China, barring any changes in land use legislation, the deforestation rate will continue to rise. Recognizing the seriousness of the problem, the scientific community, NGOs, national and local governments, and civil society joined forces to advocate for a policy to mitigate the disastrous effects of deforestation. The Argentine government enacted the Forest Law in November 2007 to reduce deforestation. The law designates certain areas of land into categories, and the category indicates the level
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