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Drawing on the monopoly rent concept in the Marxist tradition, this study examines recent transformations in East Asian agriculture through a case study of edamame. The analysis develops rent as an analytical framework—edamame monopoly rents—by incorporating recent literature of "technoscience rent" and "value grabbing." Based on empirical research of edamame industries in Taiwan and China, I conclude that before edamame industries adopted the World Trade Organization legal frameworks on patenting and intellectual property rights, edamame monopoly rents acquired more characteristics of value grabbing of heterogeneous edamame nature. After the World Trade Organization patented and established legal frameworks in the edamame sector, edamame monopoly rents acquired more characteristics of technoscience rent. Overall, this study identifies value politics and edamame rent regimes through which socio-ecological-technological breakthroughs under rentier capital accumulation have been paving new ways to internalize new commons and terrains in East Asian agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper examines how the proliferation of the new Japanese food‐safety regime has influenced the edamame industries of China and Taiwan—the two largest producers of edamame beans in the world. Edamame is not only a popular cuisine in the Asia‐Pacific region, it is also responsible for the largest‐scale frozen vegetable flow in East Asia. This study addresses how the interaction between geopolitical realities and the subcontracting of edamame crops has created an access regime governing the vegetable trade in East Asia. By addressing the complexity of the geopolitics related to contract farming, this study considers the extent to which the Japanese edamame trade has subordinated edamame producers in multiple places in Asia, while Taiwan's edamame industry has positioned itself to obtain preferential access to the edamame flow between Japan, Taiwan, and China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]