By Evelyn Easton Koehler

Globally animal agriculture consumes 2,422 cubic meters of water a year, resulting in ¼ of the world’s entire water footprint (Sierra Club). In addition to the agricultural water footprint of livestock, the dairy industry releases high levels of greenhouse gasses, especially methane which is the most effective gas at trapping heat in the atmosphere (Sierra Club). In general, large scale industrial dairy farms practice poor land use management, causing the degradation of soil health and soil ecosystems. Increasingly people are becoming more interested in milk alternatives when discovering the harmful impacts of large scale dairy production; however, some of these alternatives are comparably harmful both ethically and environmentally.

Soy milk is one of the most popular milk alternatives to dairy milk because its nutritional value is close in comparison and it’s also one of the cheapest milk alternatives. However, itsprice and its nutritional value are not without ethical and environmental consequences. Recently, in the past couple of years, soy has been the agricultural product with the highest commercial growth rate (Universidad De Navarra). It is largely supplied to the rest of the world by South America where over 50% of the world’s soy supply is grown (Universidad de Navarra). The demand in soy has made it one of South America’s most important commodities and has spurred the expansion of soy fields across the region, it makes up a huge fraction of South’s economic GDP.

Being a supplier of the worlds global demand has been very important for some still developing countries in South America. However, soy production in South America has been the cause behind massive deforestation, specifically the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil (Universidad de Navarra). The deforestation of the Amazon rainforest has induced the loss of many natural ecosystem services including “biodiversity loss when natural ecosystems are converted into soybeans, severe impacts to some of the transportation systems, soil erosion, health and environmental effects of agricultural chemicals, expulsion of population that formerly inhabited the areas used for soybeans, lack of production of food for local consumption because cropland used for subsistence agriculture is taken over by soybeans, and the opportunity costs of government funds devoted to subsidizing soybeans not being used for education, health and investment that generate more employment than does the mechanized cultivation of soy” (Fearnside 2001).

The environmental impacts of the deforestation of the Amazon (as well as other South American forests) are more obvious than the social impacts. Loss of biodiversity and natural ecosystems that sequester carbon in exchange for intensive industrial agriculture, is clearly contributing to the world’s warming planet and environmental footprint. However, the social impacts are just as extreme. Local farmers in South America have been displaced by government subsidized farming of soy, destroying local economies and creating more unemployment, research has shown that “the rise of soybeans displaced 11 agriculutural workers for everyone finding employment in the new production system” ( Fearnside 2001) and “because soybeans require heavy capital investment in machinery, land preparation and agricultural inputs, the crop is mainly the domain of wealthy agribusiness entrepreneurs rather than poor farmers” (Fearnside 2001). The production of soy has further widened economic disparity gaps and contributed to the concentration of wealth in South American countries that are already extremely divided by income.

Maristella Svampa in her article Resource Extractivism and Alternatives: Latin American Perspectives on Development, discusses the impact of the exportation of primary products on South America’s development. South America’s economic growth has been “sustained by the boom in international prices for raw materials and consumer goods, which are increasingly demanded by industrialised and emerging countries” (Svampa), but the economic growth has not occurred without structural failures and has been “accompanied by a loss of food sovereignty, which seems to be linked as much to the large-scale export of food as to the end purpose of this food”(Svampa). It also has added to the “dynamic of dispossession of land, resources and territories whilst simultaneously creating new forms of dependency and domination” (Svampa). While resource extractivism in South America is providing the world with soy, it is furthering economic disparities, exploiting small scale farmers, creating food insecurities and incentivizing massive deforestation. All of the multiple dimensions of soy production are aspects of food production that we should consider when buying soymilk at the grocery store. We must consider how the soy was produced, by who and where. Some soy milks are better than others, investigating where certain companies get their soy and avoiding soy that was produced in South America would be a more ethical and environmentally sustainable option. There are also possible alternatives to buying soy milk, such as making your own alternative milk by using a bean, nut, or seed and water. Regardless of what milk you choose to consume, it is important to be aware of all the implications of the products we are putting into our bodies and to be educated on the environmental, social and economic spheres of production.

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