Editorial comment: Mono-cultures, industrial farming and animal raising, Genetically Engineered seeds, bio-chemical herbicides
and insecticides (note especially herbicide resistant
weeds due to treatment with Monsanto's killer
insecticide, Roundup
) - in short agribusiness and bio-chemical business (read Monsanto et al.) are very busy ruining the global environment, local farmers' livelihoods and generally our health all over the planet. When will the earth say STOP? When will people's patience run out? - SON
South America is being taken over by a handful of companies in the soy
business that are destroying ecologically sensitive areas and pushing
people from their ancestral land.
Much of South America is rapidly coming to resemble Iowa. Where one
might expect to see virgin Amazon rainforest, lush grasslands or
Patagonian steppe, there are now often monocultures of soybeans,
extending for miles and miles. People and cultures are disappearing in
the transition; small landholders and tenant farmers are being driven off their land (or
pushed deeper into untouched forests or grasslands); and pasture-based
cattle ranches are being replaced by feedlots. In the feedlots the
cattle eat some of the soy produced on the land where they once would
have grazed; but an enormous portion of the soy is never eaten in South
America. Instead, it is exported, mostly to China or the EU. (The United
States is the largest producer and exporter of soy in the world and is
thus not a major market for South American soy.)
The change has occurred only in the last few decades. Soybeans now
occupy huge swaths of land in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and
Bolivia. Together, these nations make up five of the world's top 10 soy
producers. Most significant among them are Brazil and Argentina, which
together produced over 105 million metric tons of soybeans in 2008. Half
of Argentina's cropland is devoted to soy, and the crop makes up
one-third of the country's exports. And for the most part, soy
cultivation, processing and exporting took off in these countries since
the year 2000. Soy is typically crushed into meal, which is fed to
animals, and made into oil used for biofuels or added to many food
products.
The changes in farming that have accompanied the soy boom would
hardly raise an eyebrow for many Americans, where soy has been a major
crop and livestock feed for decades. After all, the U.S. more or less
invented and then exported this farming model. The soybeans are grown on
large farms, often over 1,000 hectares (2,471 acres), and sometimes on
farms significantly larger than that. As the acreage devoted to soy grew
over the last decade, the land became concentrated in fewer and fewer
hands. Soybeans are grown using commercial fertilizer, herbicides like
Roundup (glyphosate), atrazine, and 2,4-D, insecticides like endosulfan,
and fungicides.
In 1996, Argentina was the first to permit GE soy, and now 98 percent
of the nation's soy is genetically engineered. Today, Argentina is also
home to several weeds resistant to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup, a
direct result of overuse of Roundup on GE soy. From Argentina, GE soy
was smuggled and illegally planted in neighboring countries. Brazil
legalized GE soy in 2003, and by 2007, some two-thirds of its crop was
genetically modified.
Along with the soy comes a model of vertical integration and
corporate concentration. Five companies in Argentina -- Cargill, Bunge,
Dreyfus, and two Argentinian companies, Aceitera General Deheza and
Vicentin -- control 80 percent of Argentina's nearly $4.9 billion in
soybean oil exports. Similarly, Cargill, Dreyfus, Toepfer, Archer
Daniels Midland, and Nidera control soybean meal. (Argentina's soy meal
exports were worth over $7.1 billion in 2008.) Often, farmers contract
with these companies, which designate how the farmer is to grow the
beans.
As many of the companies are foreign, as are the companies that make
the seeds, fertilizer and pesticides, Paraguayans complain of a "triple
loss of sovereignty: to rely on export earnings from a single product,
transgenic soybeans, the seeds for which are provided by a single
company, the multinational Monsanto; loss of territorial sovereignty as
large areas are leased or purchased by foreign producers, Brazilians and
Argentinians; and also a loss of food sovereignty, because soy uses
monocultures and displaces food production for dietary staples of the
rural population."
Paraguay is not the only country to see production of dietary staples
displaced. Argentinians are also experiencing displacement of cattle
ranches and farms that might otherwise produce grains or vegetables. The
soy boom has driven up land prices, and it has also driven up food
prices, as more land is devoted to soy for export instead of food for
the domestic market. Argentina, a beef-loving country, now produces half of its beef in its 15,000 feedlots instead of on pasture. Even Argentina's cowboys, called gauchos, are becoming a thing of the past.
As the promise of soy profits gobbles up more land, Argentina is
losing some of its fragile ecosystems, like dry forest and the
Patagonian steppe. Much of the soy expansion takes place in the
country's Chaco region.
The same is true in other countries as well, as Brazil sees the loss of
its Amazon. However, most of Brazil's soy production takes place
outside of the Amazon. Less internationally recognized but more
threatened by soy production is the Cerrado,
Brazil's savannah that now occupies only 20 percent of its original
area. Likewise, Bolivia's soy is centered in its Chiquitano tropical dry
forests, not its Amazon, and Paraguay is losing its Atlantic forest.
Just as startling as the environmental cost is the human cost of the
soy boom. Certainly, some are getting rich from soy, but as they do,
others are losing their land. Peasant farmers in South America,
particularly the indigenous, often do not have legal titles to land
their families have farmed for generations, making them vulnerable to
having the land sold or stolen right out from under them.
In Argentina, the indigenous complain
that loss of land as well as deforestation leave them unable to hunt,
fish, or gather or produce foods and traditional medicines. The
government has responded by handing out meager food aid packages, which
the indigenous see as insufficient.
In Argentina's soy growing areas, poverty is 37 percent,
much higher than the national average of 20.6 percent. In the province
of Chaco, some 20 to 40 percent of the population is estimated to have
left because of soy production. There, and in Paraguay,
soy displaced cotton, which required more labor than soy and thus
provided employment. Peasants who live near soy cultivation also
complain of health problems due to indiscriminate pesticide spraying.
Why have soybeans suddenly taken off in South America? A new report
by Food and Water Watch traces it to trade deregulation. Since the WTO
was formed in 1995, soy imports to the EU's 15 member countries prior to
2004 increased by 51.1 percent. In a world of free trade, soy
processing corporations were attracted to the low prices of land and
labor in South America (compared to the costs in the world's largest soy
producing nation, the United States).
Sophia Murphy, a senior adviser at the Institute for Agriculture and
Trade Policy, notes that the EU's recent enthusiasm for soy imports
might have happened with or without the WTO, as the EU already had
reduced tariffs on livestock feed under pressure from the United States
prior to 1995. But whatever the cause, the result is the same.
Today, a full 80 percent of EU's soy imports come from just Brazil
and Argentina. Where does the soy go? Food and Water Watch traces it to
Europe's largest pork and poultry producing nations: Denmark, France,
Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. Since the
WTO went into effect, notes the report, soy meal imports to these
countries rose by 75.3 percent.
With a cheap source of imported feed, Europe has seen an increase in
so-called factory farms, particularly for pork and chicken. (Since the
early 1990s, as the EU increased its imports, the price of soy has
gradually fallen, although right now prices are sky-high.) For example,
notes Food and Water Watch, in 2007, the largest 1 percent of farms
produced 74 million pigs, half of all pigs in the EU. The concentration
of livestock production on enormous farms leads to environmental
degradation. And the increase in cheap meat, often sold through fast
food chains, does not help the health of European consumers much either.
Food and Water Watch provides a number of policy recommendations to
reverse the trend of increased soy production in South America and
consumption in Europe. First, it recommends, agriculture should be
removed from the WTO and other EU trade deals. FWW also calls out the
Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS) and the Round Table on Sustainable
Consumptions as "industry efforts to greenwash the environmental harm
of global, industrial agriculture," and calls on governments to end both
direct and indirect support for these campaigns.
Perhaps most simply and importantly, Food and Water Watch urges
governments to uphold the law, force companies to pay taxes, and abide
by animal welfare and environmental regulations. Additionally, it calls
on EU governments to "enforce laws that prohibit monopoly power and
economic collusion and prohibit anticompetitive practices" by
supermarkets and grain traders. The EU, for its part, seems to be headed
in the other direction: it has recently loosened its prohibitions on genetically engineered feed.
Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.
AlterNet