The world's most comprehensive, well documented and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographic index. 189 photographs and illustrations, many in color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.

This book examines the changing roles and functions of the soybean throughout world history and discusses how this reflects the complex processes of agrofood globalization. The book uses a historical lens to analyze the processes and features that brought us to the current global configuration of the soybean commodity chain. From its origins as a peasant food in ancient China, today the protein-rich soybean is by far the most cultivated biotech crop on Earth; used to make a huge variety of food and industrial products, including animal feed, tofu, cooking oil, soy sauce, biodiesel and soap. While there is a burgeoning amount of literature on how the contemporary global soy web affects large tracts of our planet’s social-ecological systems, little attention has been given to the questions of how we got here and what alternative roles the soybean has played in the past. This book fills this gap and demonstrates that it is impossible to properly comprehend the contemporary global soybean chain, or the wider agrofood system of which it is a part, without looking at both their long and short historical development. However, a history of the soybean and its changing roles within equally changing agrofood systems is inexorably a history about globalization. Not only does this book map out where soybeans are produced, but also who governs, wields power and accumulates capital in the entire commodity chain from inputs in production to consumption, as well as identifying the institutional context the global commodity chain operates within. The book concludes with a discussion of the main challenges and contradictions of the current soy regime that could trigger its rupture and end. This book is essential reading for students, practitioners and scholars interested in agriculture and food systems, global commodity chains, globalization, environmental history, economic history and social-ecological systems.

The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographic index. 162 photographs and illustrations - including many early seed catalog covers. Free of charge in digital PDF format.

The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographical index. 115 photographs and illustrations - many color. Free of charge in digital PDF format.

One of the world's most comprehensive, well documented and well illustrated books on this subject, With extensive subject and geographic index. 106 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital format on Google Books.

The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographic index. 25 photographs and illustrations. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.

A corporate history that also illuminates a difficult and significant period in U.S. history.

The Informant is Mark Whitacre, a senior executive with America's most powerful food giant, who put his career and his family's safety at risk to become a confidential government witness. Using Whitacre's secret recordings and a team of agents, the FBI uncovered the corporation's scheme to steal millions of dollars from its own customers. But as the FBI closed in on their target, they suddenly realized that Whitacre wasn't quite playing the game they'd thought ... This is the gripping account of how a corporate golden boy became an FBI mole and went on to double-cross both the authorities and his employers in one of the most extraordinary cases of global corporate corruption of the last thirty years.