The Government of Beans is about the rough edges of environmental regulation, where tenuous state power and blunt governmental instruments encounter ecological destruction and social injustice. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Paraguay was undergoing dramatic economic, political, and environmental change due to a boom in the global demand for soybeans. Although the country's massive new soy monocrop brought wealth, it also brought deforestation, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and violence. Kregg Hetherington traces well-meaning attempts by bureaucrats and activists to regulate the destructive force of monocrops that resulted in the discovery that the tools of modern government are at best inadequate to deal with the complex harms of modern agriculture and at worst exacerbate them. The book simultaneously tells a local story of people, plants, and government; a regional story of the rise and fall of Latin America's new left; and a story of the Anthropocene writ large, about the long-term, paradoxical consequences of destroying ecosystems in the name of human welfare.

Kregg Hetherington is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University. He is the editor of Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene and author of Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay, both also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Governing the Anthropocene  1
Part I. A Cast of Characters  19
1. The Accidental Monocrop  23
2. Killer Soy  32
3. The Absent State  43
4. The Living Barrier  53
5. The Plant Health Service  62
6. The Vast Tofu Conspiracy  70
Part II. An Experiment in Government  81
7. Capturing the Civil Service  85
8. Citizen Participation  96
9. Regulation by Denunciation  106
10. Citation, Sample, and Parallel States  120
11. Measurement as Tactical Sovereignty  130
12. A Massacre Where the Army Used to Be  144
Part III. Agribiopolitics  157
13. Plant Health and Human Health  163
14. A Philosophy of Life  174
15. Cotton, Welfare, and Genocide  184
16. Immunizing Welfare  194
17. Dummy Huts and the Labor of Killing  203
Conclusion. Remains of Experiments Past  216
Notes  223
Bibliography  257
Index 277