To See the World in a Soybean

Recently the Independent School for the City has wrapped up its latest exploration into the Anthropocene with the four day course "To See the World in a Soybean."

At the Independent School for the City we have used Rotterdam as a pars-pro-toto for other cities in the western world and even further afield. The city represents a number of urban patterns, spatial, cultural, economic and political, that it has in common with countless other cities. So while exploring global themes like migration, the politics of housing or biodiversity, we not only used the knowledge that our participants and teachers brought in from the corners of the world they are from, but we also examined what is immediately surrounding us, what is under our feet and what we can see with our own eyes. Lectures, desktop research and zoom-sessions were combined with mapping exercises and excursions in the Rotterdam area.

While this became something of a fixed mode in how we set up our workshops, seminars and courses over the past seven years, a new perspective started to develop. Rotterdam plays a significant role in shaping global structures on a scale that far exceeds the size of this smallish provincial town of not even 700.000 inhabitants. It is not just representative of global urban phenomena, it is itself a global urban phenomenon, and not one that is necessarily unproblematic. 

In 2022 we invited the Extinction Rebellion offshoot One Planet Port for a series of seminars on the necessity of decarbonising the Port of Rotterdam. A term that was often used in these meetings was that of the scopes of pollution, from scope 1 the immediate effects of carbon pollution on the environment through for example the exhaust pipe of a car, to scope 4, the effect of the extraction of fossil fuels on an ecology and a community far far away. This perspective on pollution, does not just look at the pollution petrochemical plants in the Rotterdam harbor, but at the entire supply chain, from the oilwell to the plastic particles ending up in the foodchain. Neither does it exclude social damage, like the labor conditions on both ends of the supply chain, from extraction to recycling. While we did not adhere to the narrow definition of scope 4 by the World Resources Institute, it became a lens, more specifically a telescope, through which we could see clearly the costs of our own local economy to the planet.

To develop this line of enquiry, we chose one specific commodity that passes through the Port of Rotterdam and followed it through the entire supply chain: the soybean. While (in)famous for its trade in fossil fuels, mineral oils, ore and coal and container freight, Rotterdam is also the main European port for so called agro-bulk, of which by far the largest part is soybeans. The soybeans are grown in the Americas, mainly in the US and Brazil, and are used nearly exclusively as food for cattle, pigs and poultry. The Dutch meat industry, which despite the tiny size of the country the second exporter in the world, has grown to its disproportionate size because of the proximity to Rotterdam harbor, and to the fact that in 1962 it was decided that there were to be no import tariffs of high protein grains to Europe. The magnitude of the pork industry in and outside of Europe has caused an exponential increase in the amount of pork consumed by Europeans. The Pig farms concentrated in the South of Holland, the North of Italy and the East of Denmark, have caused such emissions of active nitrogen, that the biodiversity of these regions is catastrophically damaged. (while visiting the pig farm area in Noord Brabant with our studio we did not just see the mega-pigfarms but also that there was no lichen on the barks of the oak trees, a clear sign of the poisoning of the atmosphere).

On the other side of the supply chain we can see how since the nineteen sixties the Amazon rainforest is being decimated by soy farms, that cut down the forests and plant soybeans, often in circular fields that derive their form from the center-pivot irrigation installations, that irrigate, fertilize and spread pesticides through a kilometer long arm on wheels that endlessly spins around. Nearly the whole Matto Grosso area has thus been transformed into an artificial monocultural toxic landscape of geometric abstract shapes. Rotterdam harbor is not just the receiver of the ships that bring the harvest to Europe; the port actively takes part in building trade corridors for train and trucks, river- and seaports for the swift extraction and transport of the beans. Dutch dredging and engineering companies like Arcadis, Van Oord and Boskalis have acquired huge contracts for building this Dutch-Brazliian equivalent to the Chinese Belt and Road system. 

Meanwhile in the Port Of Rotterdam and also in that of Amsterdam the largest global agricultural monopolists who control the soy trade  like ADM and Cargill and the Brazilian Amaggi have their headquarters from which they coordinate the supply chain, in industrial plants on Maasvlakte 2 but also in anonymous offices in the CBD of Rotterdam.

From the genocidal violence that drives indigenous peoples from their homelands in Brazil, to the dumping on the world markets of cheap, subsidized, meat from Europe, the supply chain of Soy (or corn of palm oil for that matter) finds its European center in the Port of Rotterdam, a 100% municipally owned company that rents out its land and its services to multinational companies. And this is where this perspective on the port of Rotterdam becomes interesting on a higher level than just that of research into a local incarnation of a global phenomenon. The citizens of Rotterdam would in theory be able to weaponize their democratic right to control the Port. It is theirs. Local activism in Rotterdam would not just be local if it pertains to the port. Not just Rotterdam and the Netherlands have an outsized effect on the global economy and ecology, but by extension, so do their citizens. The port of Rotterdam, or perhaps the entire Dutch export and transport driven economy, is a central hub in the world economy. It is therefore also a chokepoint, comparable to the Suez Channel, the Panama canal, Wall Street or the Chinese real estate market. A shutdown or even a temporary stutter, would disturb intercontinental supply chains, which obviously creates opportunities for activists, legal and extralegal.

The Soybean research has not only opened up a new line of inquiry and a new pedagogical practice, but also gives an entirely new perspective on the political weight of activism and protest in our town by the sea. This is a theme we will be exploring over the coming months. Stay alert!