ARGENTINA: Soy Steadily Encroaches on Indigenous Land, Forest Reserves

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 2 2004 (IPS) - ”They’re like the devil, they come to alter the peace and to break off our roots, but we will be human shields in defence of our land,” says Ramón Ferreira, a small farmer in Argentina fighting the steady expansion of soy crops.

”History is repeating itself. Our rights are being trampled once again,” Ferreira, who was referring to the rights of poor campesinos or peasant farmers, most of whom are indigenous and mestizo or mixed-race people, complained to IPS.

Thousands of rural families in the department of Figueroa in the northern province of Santiago del Estero have come under pressure from large farmers and agribusiness interests hungry for more land on which to grow soy, which has become Argentina’s main export product.

Ferreira described the agribusiness interests and farmers who show up and claim to be the rightful owners of land inhabited for generations by indigenous people and their descendants as a ”power bloc”, and complained that they ”enter our fields, batter down doors, release our livestock into the fields, steal our tools and harvests and throw us behind bars.”

Conflicts over land ownership was one of the catalysts for the central government’s April takeover of the corrupt provincial government of Santiago del Estero, where 40 percent of the impoverished region’s 840,000 people live in rural areas.

The province is one of several in Argentina ruled for much of the past century by powerful families at the head of semi-feudal regimes.

Santiago del Estero was governed for more than 50 years by Carlos Juárez and his wife Mercedes Aragonés, who took turns in the governor’s seat.

”The problem of land ownership is one of the main questions on the human rights agenda in Santiago del Estero, because the uncontrolled advance of the agricultural frontier, led by soy, undermines the rights of ownership and the cultural patrimony of peasant communities,” states a report by the Justice Ministry, which has been investigating cases of corruption and human rights abuses in the province.

The document says agribusiness interests from neighbouring provinces (Córdoba and Santa Fe), claiming to be the rightful owners of land belonging to local peasant communities, finance ”gangs of armed rural labourers” who threaten local farmers with summary evictions or judicial orders, and pressure and intimidate them in other ways, like setting fire to nearby forests, releasing livestock to trample their crops, and poisoning their animals.

The Argentine constitution recognises ”communal possession and property rights over the land traditionally occupied” by indigenous peoples and their descendants, which ”cannot be alienated”.

The constitution also stipulates that ”communities must participate in the management of their natural resources and other interests that concern them.”

According to a report by the ombudsman’s office, cited in the Justice Ministry document, there are 24,000 campesinos in Santiago del Estero with legitimate property rights over land, although many of them lack legal title to the property due to the high cost of the paperwork involved in applying for title deeds.

The challenges to the property rights of campesinos became even more acute just before the federal government’s takeover of the provincial government, when the Juárez regime made it easier to evict small farmers from their land, based merely on a single request filed by a large landowner laying claim to the property.

Argentina’s production of soy, which was grown on a small scale just two decades ago, ballooned from 11 to 36 million tons in the past five years, making this country the world’s third-largest producer, after the United States and Brazil.

A full 98 percent of the soy grown is transgenic, and the United States and Argentina account for 84 percent of the genetically modified soy planted worldwide.

Argentina’s soy output, which is exported almost in its entirety, now represents more than half of the country’s agricultural production.

Soy, which initially expanded in the country’s central plains, has now displaced dozens of other crops, while encroaching on forests, nature reserves, and the land belonging to poor rural communities.

In Santiago del Estero the land has never been suitable for intensive agriculture, but property prices have been driven up by the soy boom and land is now worth as much as rural property in Argentina’s fertile pampas region.

The soaring land prices underlie the conflicts over rural property rights.

Similar problems are seen in other provinces in the northern and central parts of the country, according to community, environmental and religious organisations.

Greenpeace Argentina has created an interactive map showing logging operations, that provides an on-line form making it easy to denounce the felling of native forests to grow soy.

The government Secretariat of the Environment is also aware of the reports that native forests are being cut down to expand the soy frontier, but has not yet taken any measures.

”At this very moment, hundreds of bulldozers are cutting down the last one-third of native forest to plant soy,” Emiliano Ezcurra, head of the international watchdog Greenpeace’s biodiversity campaign in Argentina, told IPS, referring to the last remaining portion of the forests that covered much of Argentina just over a century ago.

Greenpeace has reported three cases of deforestation in the northwestern province of Salta, involving 1,000 hectares around Urundel, in the Yungas jungle; 500 hectares in El Talar; and a 25,000-hectare reserve that thousands of Wichí Indians depend on for their livelihood.

The Salta legislature gave the provincial government authorisation this year to sell the General Pizarro reserve, protected since 1995, to a company that will plant soy.

”They cut down the forest all the way up to the borders of the reserve to plant soy, and now the bulldozers are coming into the reserve itself,” said Ezcurra in a late April protest in that province, organised by Greenpeace and local communities.

In Santiago del Estero, Greenpeace also reported three cases of uncontrolled deforestation, involving 19,000 hectares – including an over 200-year-old virgin forest – in Aguas Coloradas; an area in Cazadores; and forests in Figueroa, where 1,300 families live.

In some cases, the property has been legally purchased and logged, but in others, the circumstances have been murky.

Deforestation by agribusiness interests has also been reported in the northeastern provinces of Formosa and Chaco.

In Chaco, the land planted in soy increased from 70,000 to 750,000 hectares in the past three years, displacing cotton, the region’s traditional crop.

Local authorities in Chaco even allowed the sale this year of a Toba Indian cemetery containing 380 tombs. Families with relatives buried there were unsuccessful in their legal action against the local government and the company that bought the land.

The Environment Defence Foundation of Argentina reported that the soy boom is encroaching on indigenous territory, small farms and nature reserves in Formosa and Chaco.

The head of the environmental group, Raúl Montenegro, accused the provincial governments of ”flexibilising” laws and procedures to facilitate the transfer of public land to large private companies, which clear it to plant soy.

Hit hardest in that area are the Wichí, Quom and Mocoví indigenous communities.

The provincial government amended the forestry law and is selling off public land that is home to indigenous groups, violating their communal rights over ancestral territory and depriving them of the areas where they obtain their food and medicine.

”Soy has brought a new form of colonialism, and is fuelling genocide of indigenous peoples,” said Montenegro.

Similar stories are heard in Misiónes in the north, the central province of Córdoba, and the eastern province of Entre Ríos, where the Ecological Forum of Paraná brought a lawsuit last month to try to keep the government from revoking an environmental emergency law protecting native forests.

Jorge Daneri, the head of the Forum, told IPS that the new provincial government of Entre Ríos, in its quest for more land for growing soy, the new star of the economy, repealed the law on the grounds that the declaration of an environmental emergency violated the 1950 forestry law, which allows forests to be exploited for their wood.

In Misiónes, rural communities have brought legal action against Brazilian farmers who have purchased thousands of hectares in that province in the past few years, complaining that the pesticides the soy farmers use are polluting surrounding areas.

But lawyer Silvia Borselino with Promotion of Rural Women, a local Santiago del Estero organisation, said in an interview with IPS that what makes rural inhabitants particularly vulnerable is the ”highly precarious” status of land ownership, because so many people lack title deeds to their property.

Although campesinos have Argentine laws and the constitution on their side, which recognise the property rights of those who can show that they have lived on their land for a long period of time, the high costs often make it impossible for poor rural residents to apply for title deeds and take their cases to court.

And even when they do win formal recognition of their property rights, they are at risk of losing everything, as the case of Gisel Quiñones shows.

Her father had finally won a title deed to their 480-hectare farm in Taboada, in the province of Santiago del Estero, after a nearly 20-year trial that concluded in 1993 with a ruling that he and 40 other local families were the legal owners of their land.

But the lawyers claimed 40 percent of the property as payment, Quiñones explained to IPS.

After her father died, she once again contacted the lawyers, to handle the inheritance proceedings.

But ”One day they came to see my mother, who is illiterate, and had her sign some papers. A few months later, a notice arrived evicting us for defaulting on a 200,000-dollar debt,” said Quiñones, whose old lawyers now represent the family’s supposed ”creditors”.

The Quiñones have been evicted five times from their farm, where the ”new owners” have planted soy.

”The last time, a judge who only handled the case for 48 hours showed up with 80 police and the supposed ‘owners’. They threw my brother in jail, and my mother and I had to go and live in Los Juríes,” she said.

Quiñones is a schoolteacher in Los Juríes, a nearby town, and takes part in the meetings of the Campesino Movement of Santiago del Estero, which is providing her with legal aid in her struggle to recover the family farm.

Ferreira, who is active in a small farmers’ organisation, the Mesa de Tierras, said his indigenous community in Figueroa speaks Quechua and has lived on the same land for over 200 years.

The large farmers ”don’t understand that this land is not suitable for soy,” he complained. ”They run their bulldozers over quebracho and carob trees, and nothing is left, nothing at all, the land becomes just a flat expanse. But we are going to resist, we don’t want to lose any more land.”