Geopolitical crisis and changing global commodity markets: responses by agribusiness and the state in Argentina

Abstract

The war in Ukraine has compromised one of the world’s largest grain production areas, opening possibilities for those few countries that together with Russia and Ukraine concentrate production. The article explores reverberations of this restructuring in global commodity trade in Argentina. It argues that agrarian capitalists have renewed pressures on capital valorization conditions, reshaping struggles over accumulation and challenging the state’s capacity to handle effects of the world crisis. The paper is intended to contribute to debates on agrarian extractivism in Latin America and calls attention to the complexity of state-capital relations for a better understanding of class political struggles.