Interview with Postdoctoral Researcher Diego Silva at CIES

You are currently doing fieldwork for the ‘Accounting for Nature’ project in Argentina. Could you tell us where in Argentina and what you are doing there?

I am currently in the city of Rosario, in the province of Santa Fe, investigating local initiatives of carbon accounting for soy and wheat crops. By carbon accounting I mean strategies to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions associated with a particular sector.
I am also exploring links to larger initiatives of carbon accounting that are coordinated by the provincial chambers of commerce and agricultural production chains of Argentina. These efforts take me to the country’s capital, Buenos Aires, but also to agricultural fields located in other regions of the country, such as Entre Ríos.

Why Argentina?

Our project has a broad geographical focus, including cases from Canada, India and Argentina. In Argentina, the agricultural sector has suffered three severe droughts in the last 15 years, and soy farmers are currently experiencing a fourth one. Since Argentina is the third largest producer of soy in the world, it is important for us to analyse what the state, corporations and farmers are doing in order to adapt to and mitigate extreme weather conditions. It is also important to investigate what they are doing to account for the country’s agricultural performance in terms of greenhouse gases.

The choice of Argentina is also related to my previous research on “climate smart” agricultural strategies. In this project, I analysed a seed system known as ECOSeed, created by the Argentinian company Bioceres ( more on this project here ). The ECOSeed combines multiple technologies, including a drought tolerant transgenic seed and microbial seed treatments that promote plant protection and growth. The ECOSeed system also includes a digital layer and a strategy of product traceability known as “Programa Generación HB4,” which helps the company keep track of all the stages of the production process. This agricultural program is interesting for our project because it allows the company to produce environmental indicators for their products. This can potentially help the company reduce its carbon footprint, sell their products in specialised markets and enter international markets with increasingly stringent environmental regulations.

Bioceres’ Agronomist Isidro Silveyra and Agribusiness professional Juan Janisch pose for a picture after monitoring the progress of a HB4 soybean crop in the province of Entre Rios, Argentina. (Photo by Diego Silva).

Can you briefly explain the focus of your project and the type of work you are doing in Argentina?

Agricultural cases that promote product traceability, such as “Programa Generación HB4”, can help us to understand how local actors are trying to account for the carbon footprint. We ask, for example, how are they influenced and how do they choose from the multiple accounting frameworks of carbon accounting and ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) reporting that exist at the international level? How do they translate and implement these frameworks at the local level?  What challenges and opportunities emerge from these translations?

Clearly these initiatives do not happen in a void. They are informed by the actions that the Argentinian state adopts in the context of international climate discussions. They are also influenced by increasing market demands for sustainable products, and by the efforts that competing companies take to account for their environmental performance. We are interested in these complex dynamics.

Academically, what do you find more interesting about this project?

Conceptually, what I find more interesting is our attention to counter-accounts. We are not only interested in the type of carbon accounting that becomes mainstream and institutionalised. We also interested in analysing different types of accounting that emerge at the margins and that are produced by ecological economics and local communities themselves. From our perspective, the landscape of carbon accounting is conflictual in the sense that certain metrics and objects of measurement become institutionalised, while others are hardly considered and integrated into carbon accounting and ESG frameworks. We want to explore the processes by which certain types of accountings gain traction over others in institutional and corporate agricultural settings.

In terms of methodology, what I find the most challenging, but also enriching, is the possibility to talk to very different social groups (scientists, farmers, accountants, etc.) that espouse different values, codes and interpretations of agricultural mitigation and environmental accountability. The ethnographic method requires us anthropologists to learn these different languages, at least well enough for us to be able to communicate and navigate encounters with these very different types of collectives. In my case, for example, I have to relate with farmers, agronomists, geneticists, policy makers, scholars and CEOs, and these encounters are informed by non-human collectives (plants, soils, genes, microbes and digital platforms, amongst others), which I also have had to learn about.

Biotechnologist Leonel Esconjaureguy, from the Agricultural Biotechnology Institute of Rosario (INDEAR), examines a Petri dish containing plant material that will be used for the process of genetic transformation using HB4 transgenes. (Photo by Diego Silva).