Soy cultivation spells doom
for Paraguayan campesinos
Written by April Howard & Benjamin Dangl,
In These Times Tuesday, 17 April 2007
Rural eastern Paraguay used to be full of jungle, small farms, schools
and wildlife. Now it is a green sea of soybeans. The families, trees
and birds are gone. The schools are empty. The air is filled with the
toxic stench of the pesticides like paraquat and 2,4-D used to protect
the soy crops.
We drove through the sea of soy on a red dirt road. Meriton
Ramírez was bringing us to the former community of Minga
Porá, to the farm where his family used to live. Ramírez
is a member of the Asociación de Agricultores de Alto
Paraná (ASAGRAPA), a farmer’s union spearheading the fight
against the expansion of the soy industry.
“I didn’t want to leave. I built my farm and raised my children here. I
planted fruit trees. For the first time in my life I had good land,”
Meriton says, motioning to the vacant space that used to be his home.
“Then the soy farmers arrived and we couldn’t stand the fumigation.” As
he walks through the few trees left that his children had planted, he
says, “The days following a fumigation we had terrible headaches,
nausea and skin rashes, problems seeing, respiratory infections. The
chickens died. The cows aborted their calves and their milk dried up.”
His crops perished along with his animals. In 2001, when Meriton and
his family left the land they had occupied to farm, their old
neighborhood had been reduced to nothing but soy fields.
The biofuel gold rush
In the mid ’90s, if the pesticides didn’t drive the farmers from their
land, the soy industry stepped in with offers to buy or rent the land.
ASAGRAPA members told us that when farmers refused to convert or sell,
thugs showed up to convince them to grow soy or leave. “If you tried to
resist, they’d kill you,” Angélica Ramírez, Meriton’s
daughter, says. Minga Porá, once a community of several thousand
farmers, is now a home to only 30 families.
Soy production has increased exponentially in recent years due to
rising demand worldwide for meat and cattle feed, as well as the
booming biodiesel industry. Industrial soy is directed toward these
markets, not the production of food for humans. In 1999, 44 million
acres of soy were grown in South America; by 2004 this had more than
doubled to 94 million acres. In the past six years, annual expansion of
land cultivated for soy in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay has exceeded
10 percent, mainly at the expense of rainforest and savannah.
Paraguay is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of soybeans. In 2003, 5
million acres of land were devoted to soy cultivation—more than double
the amount of 10 years ago. If the current trends continue, by 2020 the
global demand for soy will rise by 60 percent. The projected increase
translates into 370 million acres of cultivated land devoted to soy,
and in Latin America an additional 54 million acres of forests and
savannah destroyed.
Managing this gargantuan agro-industry are transnational seed and
agro-chemical companies like Monsanto, Pioneer, Syngenta, Dupont,
Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Bunge. All have become
household names in Paraguay. In June 2006, the chief executive of
Cargill told the New York Times that the biofuel industry is a “gold
rush.” International financial institutions and development banks have
promoted and bankrolled the agro-export of monoculture crops. Cargill
is a main beneficiary of WTO trade policies that grant increased
subsidies to agribusiness and tax credits to refiners involved in
biofuel production. ADM, whose stock price and profits have more than
doubled since 2003, is another big player in Paraguay.
While Al Gore stresses that biofuels are good for the environment (and
evidently, business), two recent studies suggest otherwise. Researchers
at the University of Minnesota caution that bio-fuels raise a host of
land use issues, while a joint-study by scientists at Cornell
University and the University of California-Berkeley concluded that
both current and to-be-developed biofuels produce less energy than is
consumed in growing and processing the crops. According to their study,
biodiesel from soy results in a net energy loss of 27 percent.
Green invasion
Traditional Paraguayan agriculture is small-scale and based on a
variety of crops, such as yucca, corn, beans and potatoes, and
livestock, such as chickens, pigs and cows. Campesinos (small farmers)
plant fruit trees to shade their houses and their crops during the
blistering summers. “We knew the Brazilians weren’t going to live on
their land,” Meriton says about the owners of the soy business near his
home, “because they never planted any trees.”
In Paraguay and Brazil, the soy industry is made possible by
large-scale deforestation. While statistics are unavailable for
Paraguay, a recent World Wildlife Fund report for the International
Energy Agency reveals that 80 percent of Brazil’s greenhouse gas
emissions come from deforestation. Official figures released in fall of
2006 show that during the 2005 logging season a forested area about the
size of Hawaii was cut. A 2006 NASA study found that in 2003 more than
20 percent of the forests in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso had
been converted to cropland. The last agricultural census in Paraguay
was taken in 1991, making statistics about the how much of that
deforested land is used to plant soy guesswork at best. Embedded carbon
dioxide is released when forests are cut down and the harvested wood is
burned. An acre of land can absorb nearly twice as much CO2 by
remaining forested than it can when used to grow biofuel crops. This
outweighs any climate advantage advertised by biofuel production.
The biologically diverse Interior Atlantic Forest once covered 85
percent of eastern Paraguay. Due to isolation and difficult access,
Paraguay was once a refuge for an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 species,
including rare and endangered flora and fauna such as the giant otter
and the South American tapir. However, by 1991, high rates of
deforestation (higher than that of any other South American country in
the ’90s) reduced Paraguay’s forest by more than 80 percent. The
deforestation has accelerated since, largely due to agricultural
expansion. Today even the most liberal estimates suggest that no more
than 12 percent of the original forest cover remains, and the general
consensus is 5 to 8 percent.
Besides clearing land for agriculture, the soy industry is also
harvesting forests for fuel. More than half of fuel wood consumed in
Paraguay goes toward producing soybean oil, sugar, cement and coal.
According to Angélica Ramírez, an environmental studies
student in the agronomy department of the University of Ciudad del Este
in Paraguay, this includes Cargill’s oil-expelling plants.
Then there is the environmental problem caused by pesticides. “The soy
workers also wash their machines in the river after spraying
[pesticides],” she says. “Combined with the agricultural run-off, this
means that there are no fish left in our rivers, and the water is
completely contaminated.”
“The poison never gives us a rest”
Paraguay has the most unequal land distribution in Latin America, with
95 percent of the land under private ownership in large estates. An
incomplete and corrupt agrarian reform has left most campesinos
landless, occupying unused land for subsistence farming. In Paraguay
especially, the expansion of the soy industry has occurred in tandem
with violent oppression of small farmers and indigenous communities.
Farmers have been bullied into growing soy with pesticides, at the cost
of their food crops and subsequently their farms. Since the first soy
boom, the industry has evicted almost 100,000 small farmers from their
homes and fields and forced the relocation of countless indigenous
communities. More than 100 campesino leaders have been assassinated,
and more than 2,000 others have faced trumped-up charges for their
resistance.
But there is often no need for thugs. Soy cultivation dumps more than
24 million liters of agro-chemicals in Paraguay every year, including
World Health Organization Class I and II extremely and moderately
hazardous pesticides. These include Paraquat, a chemical with no
antidote if ingested, 2,4-D, Gramoxone, Metamidofos, which has proven
to reduce sperm count and health in exposed males, and Endosulfan, a
teratogenic substance that causes birth defects in the infants of
repeatedly exposed mothers, according to the EPA. The Paraguayans we
spoke with didn’t use the terms pesticide or herbicide; they called the
chemicals “venenos,” venoms or poisons.
As we drove though the soy fields, a terrible smell often forced us to
cover our noses and eyes. “That’s the venom,” says Angélica
Ramírez.
“How would you describe the smell?” we ask.
“Dead dog,” she says.
Leonida Laivas is Meriton Ramírez’s old neighbor. Her land is a
tiny island of trees in the sea of soy that is now Minga Porá.
Her entire family suffers from stomach pains, headaches and sight
problems due to the pesticides. “The poison never gives us a rest,” she
says. “Just yesterday the tractors came to spray the soy crops, and the
wind blew it all over us. The water is full of poison too and gives us
nausea and diarrhea.” In the nearby town of San Isidro, cancer rates
are high and several children have been born with malformed limbs.
Alternatives to disaster
Petrona Villasboa, who lives in the southern state of Itapua, Paraguay,
has become an internationally known symbol of resistance to the dangers
of the soy industry. In 2003, her 11-year-old son Silvino died after he
was caught in a cloud of the Monsanto herbicide cocktail Roundup from a
crop duster on his way home from school. Villasboa pressed charges, but
even after sentencing, subsequent appeals and lack of enforcement have
left the owners at home and using the same chemicals. Villasboa is
determined to see them in jail.
“I’m not doing this just for Silvino,” she says “but because there are
lots of kids left who are still alive. So many people have died in our
community, and people said nothing”
Villasboa isn’t the only one saying something today. The Ramírez
family now lives in another community, with another vision. El Triunfo
is a community formed by farmers involved in ASAGRAPA, and is designed
to prove that small-scale, non-chemical agriculture is possible. The
land is communally owned and farmers aren’t allowed to sell their land.
“There has to be a change,” ASAGRAPA President Tomás Zayas says.
“Because if not, we are facing the end of the Paraguayan campesino.”
###
Benjamin Dangl is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and
Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press, March 2007), visit
www.boliviabook.com for book reading tour information. He is the editor
at www.TowardFreedom.com
April Howard is a teacher and journalist. Both are editors at Upside
Down World.