Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

AGRICULTURE-BRAZIL: The Battle Over Transgenic Seeds

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 23 2003 (IPS) - Besides questions of human health and the environment, the battle over genetically modified (GM) crops involves a global market of seeds that moves around 30 billion dollars a year.

That is the estimate of Rabobank International, a Dutch bank with close ties to agriculture that predicts that the business could triple in size, given the potential of the market.

Trade in GM seeds is competing with traditional methods of growing, in which farmers hold onto part of their harvest for seeds – a system that is losing ground in the face of intellectual property laws and legislation designed to protect crops that are genetically engineered to boost yields and resistance.

Groups like Vía Campesina, an international farmers’ organisation, argue that seeds are part of humanity’s heritage, and should be freely available to farmers and not subject to the rules of the market.

In Brazil, GM crops represent ”the consolidation of an agricultural model of conservative modernisation,” which ”has increased the concentration of land ownership, leading to a rural exodus that has ’emptied’ the countryside,” Roberto Baggio, one of the coordinators of Brazil’s Movimento dos Sem Terra (Landless Workers’ Movement – MST), a group that is affiliated with Vía Campesina, told IPS.

That model, which has been applied since the 1960s, has favoured large monoculture producers of export crops, and has sacrificed Brazil’s ”food sovereignty” by making the country dependent on seeds and other inputs produced by transnational corporations, he said.

If Brazil legalises the commercial production of transgenic crops, it will become ”a hostage of the transnational corporations,” which will monopolise the market for seeds, said the activist.

The main target of the MST and other organisations opposed to GM crops is the U.S. biotech giant Monsanto, which dominates the global market for transgenic seeds with its Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans.

In recent years, the MST has staged several ”invasions” of property belonging to Monsanto to destroy experimental plantations of RR soybeans.

The genome of the RR soybean includes the protein CP4 EPSPS, taken from a common bacterium found in the soil and incorporated into the plant through biotechnology, in order to make it resistant to the herbicide Roundup, which is also produced by Monsanto.

According to the company, Roundup, the trade name for glyphosate, needs to be sprayed in smaller quantities than other weed-killers.

But Peter Rosset, co-director of Food First, a U.S.-based non- governmental institute for food and development policy, said that planting herbicide-resistant soybeans makes little sense for small farmers, who tend to plant their soybeans alongside crops that are vulnerable to the weedicide.

RR soybeans have been planted since 1996 in the United States, and by 2000 they already accounted for 54 percent of the area planted in soybeans in that country, and 95 percent in Argentina, according to Monsanto.

In Brazil, the spread of GM crops has been slowed by a legal ruling that heeded a demand set forth by environmentalists and the Brazilian Institute of Consumer Defence for environmental impact studies to be carried out before permission was granted for transgenic crops to be commercially grown.

Only the experimental planting of GM seeds in limited, controlled areas is currently legal in this South American country of 171 million.

Nevertheless, that legal obstacle has not kept RR soybeans from being widely planted in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where seeds are smuggled across the border from neighbouring Argentina.

The proportion of transgenic soybeans grown in that state has grown steadily, from five percent in 1997 to 70 percent last year, and ”probably to around 80 percent this year,” Narciso Barisón, president of the Association of Seed and Seedling Producers and Merchants of Rio Grande do Sul, commented to IPS.

In the meantime, sales of legally certified seeds produced by the 110 companies represented by the Association has plunged.

The widespread planting of GM soybeans led the Brazilian government to authorise a one-off sale of around six million tons of transgenic soybeans this year. But that ”set a precedent,” according to farmers who said they planned to continue sowing illegal GM soybeans.

The government’s waffling on the matter is ”the worst of both worlds” for seed companies, many of which have gone under, with only one-third of the total that existed prior to this crisis still functioning, said Barison.

”We had to sell seeds of crops like soybeans for consumption, leading to around 20 million dollars in losses,” he complained.

Annual sales of seeds in Brazil amount to around one billion dollars, Joao Lenine Bonifacio, president of the Brazilian Association of Seed Producers, said in a conversation with IPS.

Barison and Lenine Bonifacio advocate the legalisation of transgenic crops and say farmers should be able to freely choose which kind of seeds they want to plant.

GM crops are more expensive, since the royalties charged by Monsanto for its RR soybeans drive up the cost by around 50 dollars per hectare, said Lenine Bonifacio.

The MST’s Baggio argued that GM crops are not needed in Brazil. An MST settlement in the southern state of Parana produced a yield of 3.7 tons of soybeans per hectare, 50 percent above the average national productivity level, with conventional soybeans, he pointed out.