- Suriname should be wary of promises that foreign agribusiness will modernize agriculture, create jobs, and bring broad prosperity, argues Mark Plotkin, ethnobotanist and President of The Amazon Conservation Team.
- Across tropical America, this model has too often proved a costly folly: forests are cleared, rivers are polluted, and local communities are left with fewer resources while wealth flows elsewhere.
- Rather than expanding export-oriented soy and cattle production, Suriname should strengthen food security, support local producers, protect rivers and forests, and seek the input of the communities most affected.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.
Suriname is being presented with a familiar proposition: foreign agribusiness, whether Brazilian, Mennonite, or otherwise, will modernize agriculture, create jobs, and bring prosperity.
It is an appealing narrative. It is also one that has played out throughout tropical America, from Mexico to Mato Grosso. The result has rarely been shared prosperity. Instead, it has often meant felled forest, poisoned water, long-term loss of control over land and resources, and local populations watching the wealth pass through on its way to somewhere else.
Suriname should pause before replicating this model.
The employment benefits are often wildly overstated. Industrial soy and cattle production are highly mechanized systems designed to minimize labor, often conducted by a skeleton crew running combines and GPS-guided sprayers. A few operators can manage thousands of hectares. The jobs that are created tend to be temporary, low-paid, and sometimes filled by external labor rather than local hires because this business model is predicated on keeping labor costs as close to zero as the machinery allows. In contrast, existing sectors—smallholder agriculture, fisheries, and forest-based livelihoods—support far more people and are deeply embedded in local economies.
The environmental risks are even more significant. Large-scale monoculture depends on heavy use of agrochemicals like glyphosate and phosphorus fertilizer, applied in huge quantities. These inevitably enter river systems, including those that provide drinking water and food for a large part of Suriname’s population. Fish — the primary protein source for many communities — are directly affected. A brutal imbalance is created: beef and soy are exported for external markets while the food systems that local populations rely on daily are undermined. In other words, the beef that this type of farming produces is destined for export markets – compared to the rest of tropical South America, Surinamers consume relatively little beef. What Surinamers do consume – in enormous quantities – is fish from their own rivers, estuaries, and coast, all of which would be negatively impacted by the scale of industrial farming being proposed.
These risks are compounded by existing pressures. Mercury contamination from small-scale gold mining is already affecting Suriname’s waterways. Expanding infrastructure associated with large-scale agriculture, including roads, settlements, and access routes, can accelerate this problem by opening remote areas to further extractive activity.
There are also critical sovereignty concerns. Across the world, large-scale land concessions to foreign investors have often shifted decision-making power away from national governments. Once land is under foreign-controlled production, decisions about land use, labor, markets, and profits are no longer made locally or even nationally. For a small country like Suriname, this can create long-term structural dependency that is difficult to reverse.
Suriname still retains one of the highest levels of forest cover in the world and relatively intact river systems. These are not idle resources awaiting development—they are strategic assets that underpin national resilience, food security, and cultural identity.
This does not mean that Suriname should reject agricultural development. At a time when wars in Europe and the Middle East have driven up the prices of both fuel and fertilizer, Suriname must strengthen its food systems. As a food-importing country facing rising costs, the urgency is clear. But the solution is not large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness to meet foreign, rather than domestic, demand, particularly with foreign ownership.
Suriname needs an agricultural pathway that strengthens food security, reduces prices, supports local producers and communities, maintains healthy rivers and forests, and keeps economic value within the country as much as is reasonably possible.
Before decisions are made, policymakers should ask three fundamental questions. Who benefits? Who sacrifices? And what will remain for future generations?
And most importantly – well before any agreement is signed – they should seek the input of the people who most depend on Suriname’s rivers and rainforests for their daily sustenance.
Ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin serves as President of The Amazon Conservation Team and Host of the popular podcast “Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture, and Conservation”
Banner image: Deforestation for soy in the Amazon. Photo by Rhett A. Butler for Mongabay
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