Paper short abstract:

I explore how agroecologists in Córdoba's green belt reject their simultaneous susceptibility to agro-chemicals and economic exclusion which a liberal approach to agro-industry has enabled. In place of liberalism, ecological thinking in Córdoba helps foment a commitment to nationalist-populism.

Paper long abstract:

In 2012, then Argentine president, Cristina Kirchner, announced an agreement with Monsanto for the construction of a seed processing plant in Malvinas Argentinas, a peri-urban locale on the outskirts of Córdoba. After three years of community resistance, the project was dropped. Malvinas Agroecologica, an agroecological farming collective, had emerged directly from that struggle, and yet, as a social movement were throwing their efforts behind the return to power of Cristina Kirchner. Thinking with the multiple resonances of domesticity in my ethnographic data, I explore why it is that the agroecological movement was aligning with a political figure so linked to agro-industrial development. I suggest that the particular attentiveness to the local which agroecology develops, foments a populist political subjectivity as farmers interact with plants and soil, redolent with nationalist and populist symbols. Agroecology also provides a language through which to protest their simultaneous economic exclusion and geographic susceptibility to agro-chemical poisoning. In contrast to the current liberalist approach - over which Malvinenses have neither choice nor ownership - I argue that Kirchner's project of nationalist-populism represents a domestication of agro-industry. Kirchnerism promises to re-configure the current distribution of risk and reward surrounding soy cultivation. It offers strong-arm, nationalist rebukes of industrial-agriculture's excesses, while simultaneously bringing home the financial benefits of the industry to peri-urban Cordobés through a return to the years of soy-funded redistributive policies.