| WELCOME TO THE GM REPUBLIC OF SOYA BEANS
by
David Jones
the Saturday Star in South Africa, 19 June 2004
* * * * * * * * * * * *
When I studied geography at school, I was captivated by photographs of the Argentine pampas: an unimaginably vast wide-open plain, replete with golden fields of wheat & corn, and rich green pasture dotted with cattle.
During the late 1990's when I first visited this enormous country - the world's eighth largest - the landscape was just as enchanting, wild and varied as it had seemed in those dog-eared textbooks.
Yet, when I returned there recently, I was shocked and saddened by what I saw. The magnificent pastel-shaded plains had changed beyond all recognition.
Driving west from Buenos Aires, the continent's first natural farmland has been smothered with a monotonous orange-brown carpet spreading for hundreds of kilometres in every direction.
The beef and dairy herds which once grazed freely - giving their products a unique flavour - are mostly corralled in cramped, European style feed-lots. The traditional cereal crops, peas, green beans, rice and lentils have all but disappeared.
As one of the landowners making millions of pesos from this ugly new agricultural system told me, rubbing his hands: "There has been a revolution here, yes?
Welcome to our wonderful new country, the Transgenico (genetically modified) Soya Bean Republic of Argentina."
The "carpet", he explained, was made from row upon row of sun-ripened GM Soya waiting to be harvested. The crop now covers a staggering 12 million hectares of the countryside. That is more than half of Argentina's arable land.
I hardly needed to be told what it was, for the giant biotechnological companies profiting from the "GM Revolution" have colonised the land so effectively that their propaganda posters are everywhere.
On my outward journey I had smiled at these inventive Technicolor hoardings. But after a week spent examining the social, ecological and environmental effects of Argentina's new love affair with the GM Soya bean, I am no longer amused.
I met families, whose small, traditional farms have been devastated by the abuse of the powerful chemicals that are increasingly needed to control the swathes of so-called "volunteer Soya" spreading beyond the planted fields, effectively becoming superweeds and choking other crops.
I heard of farm animals born with deformities; of malformed banana and sweet potato plants; of lakes filled with dead fish. And I saw children with unsightly blotches on their legs - all, it is claimed, a result of excessive pesticide spraying. Slowly but inexorably, the rush to produce Soya, and nothing else, is robbing the soil of it's richness too.
Whereas corn, for example, nourishes the land and maintains it's structure, with the chaff that is left behind after it is harvested, Soya leaves little behind and leeches away the soils nutrients so it requires more and more chemical fertiliser.
I saw the destruction this soil erosion can cause while visiting a farm in Pergamino. In one over cultivated soy field, a huge crack, perhaps 10m wide and 3m deep - had opened, rendering it useless.
According to Buenos Aires agro-ecologist Walter Pengue, who specialises in the impact of GM Soya, such scenes could soon become commonplace, turning the world's most fertile arable plains into barren wasteland.
"If we continue on this path, perhaps, after 50 years, the land will not produce anything at all," he warns. "We need to go back to the rotation between cattle and different types of crop, which has been our tradition for the past 100 years."
But Argentina's seismic shift to GM Soya production is also taking a terrible human toll. For every farmer profiting from "transgenic Soya", thousands of farm workers have lost their jobs. While a three hectare peach orchard or lemon grove, required 70 or 80 labourers, the same area of Soya needs only one or two.
Thus, some 300 000 farm workers have lost their jobs, causing depopulation of the countryside and a huge migration to over-crowded Buenos Aires, where one third of Argentina's 37 million population already struggle to eke out a living. In Salta, a remote, densely forested province, being razed as the GM Soya belt expands unstoppably north and west, dozens of families who subsisted in the time-honoured Amerindian manner - hunting and gathering wood and nuts - are being evicted.
Near the town of General Pizarro, I came across one such aboriginal community of 73 people. Nine years ago, their forest home was designated an untouchable national park.
But last month, without warning, the law which created their reserve was revoked, and the land sold to one of the big new farming syndicates muscling in on the GM industry. The greedy local government officials who made the deal doubtless took their cut.
Although millions of British consumers refuse to buy GM food and are appalled at the idea of GM crops being grown here, we have unwittingly also played a part in their cultivation in Argentina.
To understand how and why, I should first explain why Argentina - which together with the U.S. accounts for 80% of the world's GM crop yield - chose to abandon the mixed farming system it had practiced for generations. The transition dates back to the early 1990's, when the husk from Soya beans was the cheap new cattle fodder of choice for European beef and dairy farmers, including the British. Soy was also increasingly in demand from the Chinese, who, in addition to feeding cattle, eat vast quantities of the beans and their oil. The pampas farmers were more than happy to grow Soya beans for the Europeans and Chinese - for obvious reasons.
First, the market for their traditional crops - corn, wheat, rice, fruit, lentils - had fallen away under fierce competition from overseas producers. Second, they were offered big incentives to switch to soy because the Argentine government, which charges a 23% levy on cereal exports, needed the revenue to pay off its crippling foreign debt.
But the gentle ebb towards soy became a tidal wave in 1996, when executives from the American biotechnology company, Monsanto, arrived in Argentina, extolling the benefits of an exciting new product.
It was called Roundup Ready Soya, because it was genetically designed to be used with a Monsanto manufactured weed-killer called Roundup. And they promised it would improve yields and drastically reduce the amount and frequency of herbicide that needed to be sprayed. If the Argentine farmers harboured any doubts about switching to this unfamiliar new cash crop, they were persuaded by Monsanto's generous conversion package. Not only would they supply the seeds and weedkiller; they would throw in the necessary machines and send experts to teach them to use the new technology.
Within months the golden cornfields began to change colour, and - without one murmur of public debate about the consequences to the environment and human health - the GM Soya carpet has kept on rolling ever since. Inside the Genetically Modified Soya Republic, the effects have been felt at every level of society.
In Buenos Aires where ordinary folks are still reeling from the great financial crash of 2001, and child beggars stand at every street corner, speculators who have grown rich by investing in Soya beans, splash out their fortunes in fashionable restaurants and shops.
Meanwhile, according to a recent report, more than 250 000 Argentine children are suffering from malnutrition because the cheap, farm produced foods they once ate are no longer available.
In an attempt to tackle this crisis, churches, local government officials and farmers groups such as Soya Solidarity have belatedly launched a campaign to "educate" families on the culinary delights of the GM Soya bean. Mothers are also being advised to feed their babies on Soya milk but, in a nation of beef-eaters, it shows little signs of catching on.
The hatred for GM Soya and all it represents, is nowhere stronger than in the impoverished northern province of Formosa, which has paid a heavy price for the arrival of the Soya bean magnates. In a small hamlet called Colona Loa Senes, reachable only by a bumpy dirttrack, I visited Filemon Sandoval, (61) and his wife Eugenia (50), who live in a cosy, self-built wooden hacienda, with a thatched roof and a water pump which produces sufficient electricity for hot water and a TV. This hospitable couple are typical oldstyle Argentine subsistence farmers, supporting their seven children by growing delicious organic crops such as peanuts, squash, beets and bananas, and keeping chickens, ducks and pigs. Until last year, they had never heard of genetically modified crops, much less Roundup Ready soy.
But then, one February morning, a strange smell wafted in with the warm northerly breeze and the fields were thickly shrouded in mist.
"At first we had no idea what it was," said Eugenia. "But it hung over our farm for two days and on the second day, our plants began to wither and die."
She beckons her daughter Zunilda (17), and asks her to show me her calves. They are covered in brown, bruise like blotches.
"The children also started coming out in terrible sores. They felt like their legs were exploding from the inside and they could hardly stand up because of the pain."
Eventually they realised the "poison mist" was gusting across from the adjacent farm, which had been rented by GM Soya bean farmers from neighbouring Salta province. The inept farm contractors they hired had caused "volunteer soy" superweeds to spread across the fields, so that when they came to sow a fresh crop they found the fields overgrown with these superweeds. Since the soy was genetically engineered to resist Roundup, their weedkiller of choice, they had been forced to attack it with a potent cocktail of different chemicals, including 2,4-D and, it is thought, Paraquat. Such was their hurry, they sprayed it when the wind was blowing strongly. This caused devastation, not only to the Filemon farm, but to 23 others nearby.
The rogue farmers promptly retreated to Salta, denying all responsibility. Predictably, the provincial government refused to help the devastated families too: after all, they were trying to attract more GM barons, not drive them away.
"They even suggested that my daughters legs were bruised because she didn't wash properly." says Eugenia, shaking her head. "But we hired our own expert to prove we had been poisoned, and a local judge ruled in our favour."
"Now we are suing for compensation because we lost everything. The leaves changed shape, bananas sprouted from the middle of the branch instead of the top; the chickens were born deformed - one had its bottom in the middle of its spine. It was terrifying. Even today, on a warm rainy day, you can smell the chemicals."
An appalling story, but how precisely does it relate back to Britain?
The short answer is that we are lining the pockets of Argentina's GM Soya bean producers - plus of course, companies such as Monsanto - simply by eating British beef and dairy produce. And although scientists assure us that the GM cattle fodder cannot be passed on to meat-eating humans, some would argue that by consuming animals that are reared on the stuff, we are indirectly consuming it ourselves.
Indeed, the latest statistics reveal our increasing dependence on Argentine Soya. In 2001 - 2002 we imported 112 065 tons of Soya meal, but the following year the figure had doubled to 220 210 tons. This comprises 11% of Britain's animal feed.
In the same period, our imports of Soya beans, which are sold raw or processed for human consumption, quadrupled, from 2184 tons to 9962.
If the great GM experiment goes wrong, the farmers of Europe and China will find something else to feed their cattle. But for the Genetically Modified Soya Bean Republic, there is no turning back now.
The Saturday Star
19 June 2004
(There is a photograph with this caption:)
"A man shelters under an umbrella in a field of oilseed rape in Scotland after the British government announced that farmers were unknowingly growing a genetically modified strain of the crop imported from Canada. Genetically modified crops have been shown to spread to neighbouring fields and farms, and their "designer" resistance to pesticides effectively turns them into superweeds, strangling other crops, as the Argentinean experience shows.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
|
