Hetherington, Kregg. The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020, 296 pages

Thinking about agriculture, states, and colonialism together offers great insight into this age often referred to as the Anthropocene. This is what Kregg Hetherington’s book The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops does marvellously well. While the book talks some about the beans themselves, it centers on soy’s interactions with things that seem to exist apart from soy in Paraguay—borders, the regulatory state, landscapes, and campesino communities. This approach is indicative of Hetherington’s understanding of soy as a “hyperobject” (Morton 2013)—widely distributed, agential, and unknowable. In other words, soy’s effects across its borders—on landscapes, campesinos, and the state—are deep and wide-ranging. Drawing on his long history of ethnographic engagement in Paraguay, Hetherington is able to both display soy’s vast, inscrutable presence and offer a powerful and situated indictment of the ways that monocrops can devastate the communities and landscapes they displace and the governments that attempt to control them. Most concretely, The Government of Beans traces the many ways that “la soja mata” (soy kills)—a slogan of rural activists. There is the “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) of soy’s toxic pesticides that poison landscapes and sicken campesinos in ways that are largely illegible within medical and judicial systems. There is soy’s replacement of cotton as the dominant crop. And then there is the way that this replacement destroys campesino livelihoods and governmental promises of rural welfare and citizenship, which were long attached to cotton in rural Paraguay. While Hetherington’s analysis has a lot to say about and will be of great interest to students of Paraguayan and Latin American politics and history, it is also an essential contribution to critical scholarship on the Anthropocene. Soy deviates from and destroys cotton’s labour-dependent promise of rural welfare, Hetherington shows. Yet soy also reinforces, at great speed and great scale, cotton’s Green Revolution-focus on intensified production and the colonial and genocidal displacement of Indigenous peoples and forests that come with it. This is what Hetherington terms “agrobiopolitics,” a concept that both draws from and critiques Foucault’s biopolitics. Reflecting on the accepted separation of humans and “nature,” Foucault did not think much about food production, Hetherington argues, despite its centrality to biopolitical governance. Attention to crops like soy and cotton offers a powerful way into the entwined histories of settler colonialism and monocrop-linked deforestation—a key dynamic of the environmental devastation of this era. More broadly, the book offers an account of the rise and fall of one of Latin America’s leftist governments in the first two decades of the twenty-first century—that of President Fernando Lugo, who governed from 2008 until a parliamentary coup in 2012. Lugo’s administration sought to use the state to regulate the environmental and social harms of soy and to promote a certain kind of rural citizenship (what Hetherington calls “regulatory” citizenship)—convinced, like many, that the state could be not just the cause of environmental and social problems but also their solution. Following the fraught and thwarted efforts of state critics-turned state bureaucrats, Hetherington terms this “the Government of Beans,” which he contrasts with the “Soy State” that had essentially facilitated soy’s spread. Contributing to scholarship on extractivism in Latin America (Gudynas 2021), Hetherington explores the tensions and continuities between the Government of Beans and the Soy State, which ultimately facilitated the former’s dismemberment. Like some other governments of the Latin American left, Lugo’s administration was undone by its inability to replace or otherwise extricate itself from the clientelist and monocrop-promoting bureaucracies that proceeded it. Hetherington’s writing is one of the book’s great strengths. He is makes the details of things like monocrops, bureaucracy, and measurement …