Eating through the forests.

• Author: Brown, Lester R.
• Position: Growth in the global production and consumption of soy beans - EYE ON ECOLOGY

SOME 3,000 YEARS AGO, farmers in eastern China domesticated the soybean. In 1765, the first soybeans were planted in North America. Today the soybean occupies more U.S. cropland than wheat and, in Brazil, where it spread even more rapidly, the plant is invading the Amazon rain forest. For close to two centuries after its introduction into the U.S., the soybean languished as a curiosity crop. Then, during the 1950s, as Europe and Japan recovered from the war and as economic growth gathered momentum in America, the demand for meat, milk, and eggs climbed. With little new grassland to support the expanding beef and dairy herds, farmers turned to grain to produce not only more beef and milk but extra pork, poultry, and eggs. World consumption of meat, at 44,000,000 tons in 1950, already had started the climb that would take it to 280,000,000 tons in 2009.

This rise partly was dependent on the discovery by animal nutritionists that combining one part soybean meal with four parts grain would boost the efficiency dramatically with which livestock and poultry converted grain into animal protein. This generated a fast-growing market for soybeans from the mid-20th century onward. It was the soybean's ticket to agricultural prominence, enabling it to join wheat, rice, and corn as one of the world's leading crops.

U.S. production of the soybean exploded after World War II. By 1960, it was close to triple that in China. By 1970, the U.S. was producing three-fourths of the world's soybeans and accounting for virtually all exports. By 1995, the fast-expanding U.S. land area planted to soybeans had eclipsed that in wheat.

When world grain and soybean prices climbed in the mid 1970s, the U.S.--in an effort to curb domestic food price inflation--embargoed soybean exports. Japan, then the world's leading importer, soon was seeking another supplier, and Brazil was looking for new crops to export. The rest is history. In 2009, the area in Brazil planted to soybeans exceeded that in all grains combined. In Argentina, meanwhile, the suddenly popular vegetable staged the most spectacular takeover of all--today more than twice as much land in Argentina produces soybeans as produces grain. Rarely does a single crop so dominate a country's agriculture as the soybean does Argentina's. Together, the U.S., Brazil, and Argentina easily produce four-fifths of the world's soybean crop and account for 90% of the exports.

During the closing decades of the last century, Japan...