AN ACTOR NETWORK THEORY APPROACH TO THE PRODUCTION OF GM SOYA IN THE ARGENTINE PROVINCES OF CHACO AND SANTIAGO DEL ESTERO

Master student Thaddeus Bergé

Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

The objective of this master thesis is to show the necessity of applying Actor Network Theory (ANT) in order to do research into the production of soya in the Argentine provinces of Chaco and Santiago del Estero and secondly how such an approach would look like by giving an account of the ANT investigation done by the author in these two provinces in 2013.

Agriculture today is one long chain of human and non-human actors. The production of GM soya consists of a wide network of actors in which farmers, sowing machines, investors, pesticides, multinational corporations, airplanes, GM seeds, foreign ministers, trucks, soils, ships, and mills, to name but a few, all take part. Some of these actors work together, others oppose each other and some let others work for them. In the end the GM soya oil might be used in all kinds of food products or transformed into bio-fuel, while the GM soya meal might serve as animal fodder. To be able to really do research into the soya production in Argentina we need an approach that doesn’t treat human or non-human actors differently, an approach that doesn’t obscure actors and their interrelations by ordering them under dense denominators like “globalization”, “capitalism” or “Green-, or Gene-Revolution”.

Human Geography has always been a science that crosses different disciplinary fields. It has always borrowed theories from other disciplines like sociology, psychology and the political sciences. I want to take this characteristic of Human Geography a little further by adopting the ‘sociology of association’(Latour, 1988, p.205) as developed by Bruno Latour, John Law, Michael Callon and Annemarie Mol. The aim of this research is to investigate the production process of GM soya in the Argentine provinces of Chaco and Santiago del Estero by making all the human and non-human actors speak and to following them in their trials of strength and weakness, without reducing, representing or defining them, but instead led the actors represent and define themselves and the others involved. By using an ANT approach the whole heterogeneous field of forces in which GM soy is being produced is being revealed and makes hundreds of actors visible that otherwise would have stayed obscured under dense denominators like “industrial farming”, “peasant farming” or “pules de siembra”.

Eje temático en el que se desea se evalúe el resumen: Geografía Económica y Agraria