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Agrofuels and Agrifoods

Counting the Externalities at the Major Crossroads of the 21st Century

Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Buenos Aires, Argentina, wapengue{at}ungs.edu.ar

The economically successful model of industrial agriculture that is currently expanding throughout Argentina is leading to deep social, economic, environmental, and logistical changes that are seriously restricting the sustainability of the rural, urban and environmental systems. The transformation of activities, the arrival of new technologies, the arrival of organizations with large financial and technological capabilities, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of small-scale and medium-scale farmers and their reallocation to new productive functions are not only affecting the social sustainability of the rural sector but are affecting the urban communal plots of villages and towns located on the Chacopampeana Plain. Now, the production of agrofuels as a response to international global demand will promote the ecological and social depletion that Argentina has been facing from the beginning of the 1990s. We argue in terms of ecological economics that externalities should be included in the costs of companies, not just economic costs.

Key Words: agrofuels • soybean • transgenic crops • externalities • ecological economics

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 29, No. 3, 167-179 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0270467609333731


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