Soy Expansion and Displacement of Landless Farmers in Paraguay

It rarely begins with bulldozers or police. It begins with paperwork. A land survey. A new road cut through fields. Crop dusters flying lower than they used to. People notice the wind changing, literally and politically. That is how soy arrives in rural Paraguay, not as a single rupture, but as a slow tightening of space, options and time.

Dr Kregg Hetherington, a Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, describes displacement as something that starts long before anyone physically leaves. Families may still sleep in the same houses, but their farms no longer work the way they once did. Credit dries up. Neighbours sell. Pesticides drift. Markets shift. Livelihoods thin out. By the time people move, the decision has often already been made for them.

Soy’s expansion began in earnest in the 1970s, when Brazilian migrant farmers, many displaced themselves, crossed into eastern Paraguay. Land was cheap, fertile, and lightly regulated. Demand was growing. For a while, soy coexisted with cotton, maize and mixed farming. Then came the late 1990s and the widespread adoption of genetically modified soy. Labour needs collapsed. Yields rose. Scale became everything. Farmers who had already established themselves expanded fast. Others were squeezed out.

Paraguay’s soy economy is often told through rankings and percentages. 6th-largest producer. 4th-largest exporter. 18%  of GDP. Missing from that story is who scaled up and who scaled out. As soy production surged after 1990, large farms expanded aggressively. Smallholders were left behind.

Between 1991 and 2008, land dedicated to soy expanded by nearly 350%. On farms larger than 1,000 hectares, soy cropland grew by almost 1,700%. On farms smaller than 20 hectares, it shrank by 10%. Size was destiny. As agribusiness consolidated, land concentration accelerated. Almost 80% of Paraguay’s cropland is now planted in soy. Less than 17% is dedicated to food crops or other income sources for small producers.

Dispossession, Dr Hetherington explains, is rarely brute force. It works through bureaucracy. Many rural communities were formed through Cold War–era resettlement schemes. Legal pathways to formal land titles existed, but they were slow, expensive, and often never completed. Families farmed land they occupied but did not fully own. That legal grey zone became an opening.

Land changed hands informally, often below official prices. Wealthier buyers accumulated parcels. When people refused to sell, pressure increased. Soy fields crept closer. Pesticide spraying intensified. Cotton failed. Water sources were contaminated. Staying became harder than leaving. Law and bureaucracy did much of the work. Farmers who stayed were recast as ‘illegal occupants’ or inefficient users, even as market pressure, chemical exposure, and land consolidation narrowed their options. Environmental damage intensified the squeeze. Over the past 2 decades, Paraguay lost one of the largest shares of forest on Earth.

Roughly 92% of its original 8 million hectares have been replaced, largely by soy, maize, wheat, and cattle. Soy production alone releases nearly 27 million litres and 2.3 million kilograms of pesticides each year. Crops fail. Health deteriorates. Soils thin. People may remain on their plots, but farming no longer sustains a life.

Food security suffers in quieter ways. Paraguay exports massive volumes of soy, yet rural diets have narrowed. Local food production declines as diversified farming disappears. Households buy more food, often processed and imported, exposing them to volatile prices. National productivity rises. Nutrition does not. It is possible, in the same season, for a country to post record exports while rural children eat less varied meals.

These changes reshape social life. Some communities rent out their land to soy producers, pooling parcels into large blocks. The fields stretch unbroken. Houses line the road. Older residents collect rent. Younger generations leave. Work disappears. What remains is a landscape that looks productive but feels hollow.

Soy’s power is sustained by how it is explained. Experts frame it as efficient and unavoidable, leaving little room for alternatives. Weak regulation and low taxation protect entrenched interests.

According to Dr Hetherington, the result is uneven citizenship that travels with displacement. Rural poverty still exceeds 50%, but it does not remain rural. As families leave the countryside, they settle in informal urban peripheries, where poverty deepens rather than disappears. Paraguay’s urbanisation rate grew from 54% to 64%  between the early 2000s and 2022, and the urban poor now make up more than 50% of city residents. Extreme poverty in urban areas has more than doubled in two decades. The state is encountered not as support, but as boundary-setter. Citizenship becomes conditional, negotiated through paperwork and precarity.

Soy itself is not the villain. Paraguay will not return to a pre-export economy. The question is how its gains are governed. Mixed agricultural systems, stronger environmental enforcement and taxation that redistributes some of the wealth flowing in are not radical ideas. They are pragmatic ones. Without them, displacement will continue quietly, one survey at a time.

Soy expansion in Paraguay is not just an economic transformation. It is a social one. It decides who can stay, who must leave and whose lives count as productive. The fields may look orderly from above. On the ground, the story is far messier, and far more human.

Further information and opportunities to engage with organisations working in this area are listed below:
https://www.misereor.de/en/donations/projects/project/paraguay-brazil-right-to-land
https://www.diakonia.se/en/where-we-work/latinamerica/paraguay/
https://www.solidaridadnetwork.org/story/a-commitment-to-the-land-in-paraguay/

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