Rents, Actors, and the Expansion of Commodity Frontiers in the Gran Chaco

Theories of frontierexpansion in the last four decades have been mostly shaped by studies of state-driven smallholdercolonization. Modern-day agricultural frontiers, however, are increasingly driven by capitalized corporate agriculture operating with little direct government intervention. The expansion of contemporary frontiershas been explained by the existence of spatially heterogeneous“abnormal” rents, which can be caused by cheap land and labor, technological innovation, lack of regulations, and a variety of other incentives. Here, we argue that understanding the dynamics of these frontiersrequires considering the differential ability of actors to capture such rents, which depends on their access to production factors and their information, preferences, and agency. We propose a new conceptual framework drawing on neoclassical economicsand political economy, which we apply to the South American Gran Chaco, a hot spot of deforestation for soy and cattle production. We divide the region into a set ...