By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 14 2000 (IPS)

Farmers in southern Brazil participating in or benefiting from the smuggling of seeds of genetically modified soya from Argentina are actually acting against their own interests, according to environmentalists.

Doubts as to whether Brazil is able to guarantee that its grains are natural or non-transgenic favour competitors in the United States, warns agronomist Sebastiao Pinheiro, at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

Transgenic crops are widely planted in the United States, but half of the total soya yield comes from conventional seeds, to meet the demand of markets that reject genetically altered products for fear of unknown health risks, Pinheiro pointed out.

The advantage enjoyed by the United States is that it has a more reliable system of crop certification, said Mariana Paoli, an activist involved in the campaign against genetic engineering launched by environmental watchdog Greenpeace in Brazil.

The fact that transgenic soya is smuggled into Brazil further aggravates the impression of a lack of controls on the crops produced and exported by Latin America’s giant.

Brazil is the world’s second largest producer of soya, with an annual yield of around 30 million tonnes, and has not yet authorised the commercial planting of genetically modified soya, already produced on a large-scale in Argentina and the United States.

The Ministry of Science and Technology’s inter-disciplinary National Technical Commission on Biosafety (CTNBio) has come out in favour of transgenic crops. But a court sentence handed down in a case brought by the Brazilian Consumer Defence Institute has stood in the way of authorisation.

The argument put forth by the two non-governmental organisations, which found echo in the courts and the Ministry of the Environment, was that no environmental impact studies have been carried out, a legal requisite for the authorisation of certain activities and projects in Brazil.

The Ministry of Agriculture also has doubts regarding the advantages of transgenic soya, given the resistance genetically altered products continue to face in the biggest markets in Europe and Asia. The higher yields of transgenic crops might not compensate for the higher demand for and better prices fetched by conventional soya.

But the central government has failed to crack down on the contraband and unauthorised planting of transgenic soya, said Pinheiro, who accused Monsanto – the US-based transnational corporation that developed Roundup-Ready Soya, resistant to the company’s own broad-spectrum weedicide Roundup – of fomenting the situation.

Seeds have been smuggled into Brazil from Argentina for the past two years, according to José Hermetto Hoffmann, agriculture secretary of Rio Grande do Sul, a state that has declared war on transgenic soya.

The state government launched an offensive in the past two months, stepping up controls along the borders and testing 700 samples of soya, 3.5 percent of which were found to be genetically modified. Twenty-four farmers were prosecuted, said Greenpeace’s Paoli.

A parliamentary deputy representing the southern state, Adao Preto, introduced a bill in the national Congress under which land planted with transgenic crops would receive the same treatment as property used in the production of illicit drugs: the land would be expropriated and used in the agrarian reform programme.

Hoffmann suspects that the seeds entering as contraband have been taken to other states in south and west-central Brazil, while Pinheiro believes they have made it as far north as Bahia, a tropical state in the northeast, where soya production has only recently begun to take hold.

The central government’s “silent consent” to the contraband is even more serious due to the health concerns involved, because local crops could be contaminated by pests and diseases brought in from Argentina, added Pinheiro.

But Ivo Carraro, the head of the Central Research Cooperative of the state of Parana, said there was no information on clandestine transgenic crops in that southern state.

“It is unlikely,” because Argentine strains do not adapt well to the higher temperatures, the seasons or even the farming culture of Parana, said Carraro, who added that the resulting lower yields would not justify planting transgenic soya in such conditions.

He said the problem of transgenic soya was limited to Rio Grande do Sul, where conditions are similar to those in Argentina.

But even in that state, he said, the contraband is no longer occurring. The area planted in transgenic soya has expanded to the current 700,000 to one million hectares as a result of the reproduction of seeds brought in three years ago, according to Carraro.

Farmers in Rio Grande do Sul produce and use their own seeds around 45 or 50 percent of the time, compared to just 20 percent in Parana, he argued.

Nor does José Neumar Francelino, technical coordinator of the Agriculture Ministry’s National Service of Protection for Improved Crops, believe that illegal crops have spread outside the extreme southern portion of Brazil, due to unfavourable conditions for transgenic crops outside that area.

In the west-central state of Mato Grosso do Sul, the more than 40 areas of authorised experimental crops are causing concern among local environmentalists, who point to the lack of legislation regulating the production, trade and use of transgenic products.

Throughout Brazil, the CTNBio has approved more than 600 experimental projects involving genetically modified organisms.

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