Beans

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Beans

Beans, widely cultivated legumes that have nourished the people of Latin America for millennia. Throughout the region, few meals lack beans. In Mexico, people typically eat mashed beans with corn tortillas, whereas in Brazil, since colonial times, a ladle of soupy beans poured over rice is the core component of many daily diets. In this way, the majority of Latin Americans survive on the near complete protein provided by a mixture of beans and rice or maize.

While hundreds of species exist, many of them indigenous to the American tropics, the multiple varieties of the common bean (phaseolus vulgaris), including dried black, pinto, and red beans, are the most widespread in Latin America. Another species, commonly known as lima or butter beans (phaseolus lunatus), is also widely grown in the region. Both were among the earliest domesticated plants of the Western Hemisphere, with evidence of their cultivation dating from 7000–5000 bce.

Archaeologists differ over the locations in which bean agriculture first developed in America, but it is now believed that it occurred independently in Mexico's Tamaulipas desert and Peru's highland Callejon de Hayulas valley. The culture gradually spread throughout North and South America well before 1492. After Columbus, Europeans eventually recognized the utility of dried beans on long ocean voyages, and their journeys helped introduce American beans throughout the world.

The production of beans has generally been taken for granted in Latin America. Their low cost and high nutritional value assured that they were always being cultivated by someone. Indians grew them with maize, weaving the vines between stalks of corn. On sugarcane plantations, captive Africans commonly received small plots of land in order to grow beans to feed themselves. Peasants invariably mixed beans with other subsistence crops. Coffee growers frequently left extra space between the rows of trees in order to intercrop beans and other vegetables.

Competing export crops and livestock land uses have caused problems for bean farming in Latin America. The expansion of soybean agriculture in the last decades of the twentieth century reduced the land devoted to growing common beans, and in Brazil the once ubiquitous black bean nearly disappeared from the market. At the same time, the population explosion caused increased demand, and bean prices skyrocketed. To keep underpaid workers fed, some governments subsidized bean farmers, while many others artificially manipulated prices. All the same, as late as 1980, small family farmers produced more than three-quarters of the beans grown in Latin America, revealing the continued decentralization of bean cultivation.

Bean supply shortages and price hikes worsened as Latin American governments tried to liberalize their economies. Strapped by heavy foreign debt burdens, officials simultaneously encouraged foreign exchange-earning export crops while cutting back on subsidies for staple crops like beans. In the inflation-plagued 1980s and 1990s, fluctuations in the availability of beans and other basic foodstuffs contributed to social and political unrest in Peru, Argentina, and Venezuela. In Brazil, the looting of supermarkets in cities such as Rio de Janeiro became commonplace in 1992.

In the twenty-first century, soybean production has continued to expand, due to the large demand from China. However, this expansion has sparked debate because Brazil in 2005 lifted its ban on genetically modified (GM) crops. GM soybeans are productive but both environmental and consumer groups have raised concerns about their unknown effects. The increase in soybean production has also been a major driver of Amazon deforestation.

See alsoCoffee Industry; Nutrition; Soybeans.