Book Review of "The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops," by Kregg Hetherington (Duke University Press, 2020)

On April 20, 2008, Paraguay elected rural bishop Fernando Lugo as its president, ending the reign of the Colorado party that had ruled the country since 1947. The election spurred a political shift to the left and considerably transformed the relationship that the national soy industry had forged with the state bureaucracy in previous decades. Progressives, intellectuals, and activists became employed by the same legal apparatus they had protested against for years. Correspondingly, public institutions that had been partly built by the soy industry were suddenly staffed by some of the sector's most ardent critics. In The Government of Beans, Kregg Hetherington explores this peculiar political juncture so as to offer wider reflections on governance in the Anthropocene. To this end, he relies on 17 short chapters that are grouped into three parts. Part I (Cast of Characters) presents us with the people and plants that the book is about. Over the course of six chapters, Hetherington historicizes the conjectures that laid the groundwork for the emergence of soy and its politicization, guiding us past, among others, the Stroessner dictatorship, cotton-growing colonists, soy-growing colonists displacing the earlier cotton growers, herbicides, Roundup Ready beans, the present–absent state, and 1990s neoliberalization.