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Contribution short abstract:

This work addresses the different perceptions of the soybean territorial advance in Brazil during the Great Acceleration: a plant that produces both modernity (techno-scientific and wealthy) and, on the other hand, inequalities.

Contribution long abstract:

The IRI Research Institute (IRI) was a philanthropic research institution founded by US multimillionaire brothers Nelson and David Rockefeller in 1950. Initially, the institute's purpose revolved around developing small scale projects of agricultural technification in Brazil and Venezuela. The expertise developed by the institute over the course of the 1950s, however, expanded the IRI's area of activity in the following decades through contracts financed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Alliance for Progress initiated by the John Fitzgerald Kennedy administration in 1961. Conceived on the premise of neo-Malthusian and anti-communist notions, the IRI adapted its approach to the context of the Cold War and the Green Revolution, in the belief that the improvement of the so-called underdeveloped nations would be based on the technical utilization of available natural resources, combined with experiments in agriculture and livestock farming. The focus of this paper, therefore, is on the experiments to introduce exotic plants and animal breeds with a view to producing fats to supply the foreign market. In particular, the experiments on soybeans and the change in pig herds followed the demands of the international market, contributing to significant changes in animal management techniques, the clearing of forests to plant soybeans and, finally, the replacement of lard by soybean oil as the main oil consumed in the Global South.