Soybeans offer a powerful lens to understand today’s global food system. Soy is a highly efficient crop that is used in animal feed, oils and processed food, and for direct consumption. Yet the same crop is deeply entangled in environmental degradation, land-use change, and geopolitical tension. Thus raising a central question: why does soy continue to expand, even in places where its social and environmental costs are widely understood? 

Nowhere is this tension more visible than in Latin America, where soy is transforming landscapes at scale. But what does that expansion actually look like on the ground, and what forces are driving it? 

This TABLE webinar focuses on Bolivia, one of the fastest-changing soy frontiers in the region, and contrast it with Brazil, a place that is often synonymous with soy production. In Brazil, soy production is large-scale and deeply integrated into global markets. In Bolivia, expansion is more recent, shaped by land access, shifting policies, and weaker enforcement. Looking at them together helps clarify how the same crop can follow different trajectories—and why expansion continues, even when its consequences are widely recognized. 

This discussion will be led by Matt Abel (Southern Methodist University; Dallas, Texas) and Stasiek Czaplicki Cabezas (Independent Researcher; Santa Cruz, Bolivia). 

Matt Abel is an economic anthropologist whose work centers on the relationship between environmental governance and shifting global trade regimes with a focus on the Brazilian Amazon. He is an assistant professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is a researcher collaborator with the Rethinking the Global Soy Dilemma project and is conducting fieldwork on Brazil's "Northern Arc" — an effort to transform the Amazon's southern tributaries into a transnational shipping corridor for soybeans and corn.

Stasiek Czaplicki Cabezas is a Bolivian environmental economist, focusing primarily on the drivers of deforestation, especially those linked to commodity frontiers (soy and cattle), land tenure dynamics, and public policy. He works as an independent researcher, journalist, and activist, and is currently co-leading a book project on the agribusiness development model in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. He is also an associated researcher from the Centro de Estudios Populares (CEESP) and Catholic University.

This webinar is part of Rethinking the Global Soy Dilemma — a Kamprad Family Foundation project at SLU.