Introduced in the 1970s, the area planted with soybean in Argentina reached 5.1 Mha in 1990 and exploded to 14.6 million hectares in 2005. Argentine production more than tripled between the early 1990s (11 million tons) and 2005 (38.8 million tons).

In 2004, Argentina accounted for half of the world trade in soybean oil. For the same year, Argentina's share of world trade in soybean flour and grain was, respectively, 43% and 13% . Exports of soybean oil, flour and grain were about 8 billion dollars, or about 45% of the Argentine agroindustrial exports (Rossi, R., "La soja, un fenomeno que asombra al mundo", Clarin, 6 August 2005, p. 6).

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The most dramatic diffusion of an innovation in Argentine agriculture is the 1996 introduction of genetically modified (GM) soybeans tolerant to glyphosate (an herbicide that controls weeds but does not affect GM soybeans).

This technology has been adopted at an impressive rate: the area planted with GM soybean increased from less than 1% of the total soybean area in 1996/97 to well over 90% of the 12 million hectares planted in 2001/02 (Trigo & Cap 2003). This rate of adoption is even higher than that in the United States, the first country to introduce this technology. Midwestern US states took about 15 years to exceed 90% adoption, whereas in the Pampas that level was reached in seven seasons (Trigo & Cap 2003).

The main reason for the quick adoption of GM soybean is its clear economic advantage for farmers. Trigo & Cap (2003) estimated cost reductions of about 20 $ ha^-1 from better weed management and lower energy costs. The GM technology has significant synergies with no-tillage sowing, a technology that evolved in parallel. The combination of both innovations allowed not only significant energy savings, but also the harvest of two crops (wheat followed by late-cycle soybean) for a given piece of land.

From the point of view of this project that centers on complex systems, the soybean expansion is interesting because it is not the result of explicit governmental policies or incentives, but rather is the emergent effect of tens of thousands of individual decisions on the amount of land dedicated to this crop each year in response to a context (climatic, environmental, economic) that favored soybean against other crops. Decisions (land allocation) made at the farm scale clearly influence much larger scales; however, such effects are more than the simple summation of individual behaviors and emerge from a system of interaction between individuals, each other and their environment (Schelling 1978).