A boy watches a protest against Monsanto in the central Argentine town of Malvinas Argentinas. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, May 20 2014 (IPS)

The advertising department of Swiss agribusiness giant Syngenta was on a roll in early 2004 when it published a map that dubbed a large area of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay the “United Republic of Soy”.

In this “republic” more than 46 million hectares of transgenic soy are sprayed with 600 million litres of the herbicide glyphosate and are largely responsible for the deforestation of 500,000 hectares a year in the past decade, according to estimates by the international non-profit organisation GRAIN.

The expansion of agricultural biotechnology in South America has occurred under governments described as progressive, and has fuelled a debate between those who see it as scientific and economic progress and those who stress the social, environmental and political damage caused.

According to GRAIN, global biotech corporations stepped up their campaign to spread transgenic or genetically modified (GM) seeds in 2012, when most of the Southern Cone countries had governments that were critical of neoliberal policies and that were in favour of a state that played a strong role with respect to social, educational, health and economic questions.

The two agricultural powerhouses in the region, Argentina and Brazil, are now among the world’s leaders in GM crops, which require large amounts of pesticides and herbicides.

This has to do with “the blind belief among progressive sectors in scientific and technological advances as providers of well-being and progress,” GRAIN Latin America spokesman Carlos Vicente told Tierramérica.

“The corporate power behind GM crops is not questioned, and the socioenvironmental impacts are not analysed,” he said.

There is also an element of “pragmatism,” he said, referring to “the alliance with agribusiness to maintain governability,” especially in Argentina, where taxes on the enormous exports of soy “are a major source of revenue for the state,” Vicente said.

Paradoxically, these earnings help finance “the social programmes that provide assistance to those who are expelled by the agribusiness model,” added the spokesman for GRAIN, an international NGO that promotes food security and works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.

In Argentina, the U.S. biotech corporation Monsanto controls 86 percent of the market for transgenic seeds, and is the company that generates the most noise. But others are quietly advancing, like Syngenta, Raúl Montenegro, the head of the Environmental Defence Foundation (FUNAM), told Tierramérica.

In his view, the struggle against the construction of a plant to process transgenic corn seed in Malvinas Argentinas, a poor community east of the capital of the central Argentine province of Córdoba, prompted other corporations to keep a low profile and “avoid announcing the location of their future installations.”

On the list, Vicente includes other companies that control millions of hectares, such as Germany’s Bayer and BASF, the U.S. Cargill, Switzerland’s Nestlé, and the Argentina-based Bunge.

Syngenta did not respond to Tierramérica’s request for an interview. But its communiqués are clear enough.

In a statement on its 2013 fiscal results that says Latin America is spearheading Syngenta’s growth, the company stressed that its 14.68 billion dollars in revenue were driven by seven percent growth in Latin America and six percent growth in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. In North America, meanwhile, sales fell two percent.

The strong performance in Latin America was driven by Brazil, where “Syngenta’s expanding soybean seed portfolio registered significant gains with the launch of new varieties,” said the company’s Chief Executive Officer Mike Mack.

These corporations make their profits at the cost of an increase in health and environmental problems caused by pesticides, the displacement of small farmers and indigenous people, and the growing concentration of property ownership, said Vicente.

But, he added, these are only seen as “collateral damage” by the governments of “the United Republic of Soy.”

In Argentina, President Cristina Fernández and her ministers “repeat ad nauseam that ‘we produce food for 400 million people’ when what we actually produce are 55 million tonnes of soy bean forage,” he added.

Enrique Martínez, former president of the National Institute of Industrial Technology (INTI), reminded Tierramérica of Monsanto’s lobbying for a law on seeds “that would validate not only patents on species but also the charging of royalties and the regulation of ownership of harvested seeds.”

Martínez, head of the Evita Movement’s Institute for Popular Production, said he believes the law won’t be approved, due to the pressure of public opinion.

In his opinion, the government does not defend an agricultural model based on transgenics. “What it does is argue that the market works well in automatic terms, based on the supposition that productivity improves in a systematic manner, and that this benefits the community,” he said.

But that logic “is not correct,” he said. “We need studies that show that Monsanto has appropriated the majority of the immediate economic benefits, turning farmers into simple hostages of this scheme.”

He added, however, that “biotechnology should not be reviled as the cause of our problems.

“That is a sectarian way of looking at things,” he said. What is needed, he argued, is “the democratisation of knowledge and know-how, to enable an expansion of the actors so that production is not concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.”

Environmental questions “are only one aspect,” he said. “The key is the construction of value chains that depend on the decisions of a corporation. That is what must be fixed.”

Economist João Pedro Stédile, a leader of the La Vía Campesina global peasant movement and Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), said the phenomenon did not reflect an ideological contradiction on the part of progressive governments.

“The movement of capital over agriculture to impose a dominant model based on monoculture, transgenic seeds and toxic agrochemicals has its own logic that does not depend on governments,” Stédile told Tierramérica.

Governments “fool themselves” because of the volume of production and the positive trade balance that this agribusiness model provides, but it does not generate development or distribute wealth, he argued.

Of the 70 million hectares of land under cultivation in Brazil, 88 percent is dedicated to soy, maize, sugar cane and eucalyptus, he pointed out. “So naturally social problems and protests against that model without a future are going to increase,” Stédile said.

And biotech companies know that.

The vice president of Monsanto Argentina, Pablo Vaquero, warned in March that the conflict that has blocked construction of a plant near the city of Córdoba in central Argentina “is a threat to the entire productive model.”

“Today they come out against Monsanto, but it is an excuse to attack the entire sector,” he said.

Vicente says a broad debate on these issues is still needed.

But he stressed achievements such as the blocking of the seeds law in Argentina, restrictions on spraying in some municipalities, and the awareness raised by the National Campaign Against Agrotoxics and for Life.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Field of soy in Não-Me-Toque, in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. Credit: Nilson Konrad/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 30 2013 (IPS)

Ten years ago, Brazil yielded to agribusiness pressure and legalised the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) soy. Today it is the world’s second leading producer of GM crops, surpassed only by the United States.

Transgenic soy had been grown clandestinely in Brazil since the second half of the 1990s.

In 2003, the adoption of Decree 4680, which stipulated the labelling of foods with a genetically modified organism (GMO) content of at least one percent, was considered a landmark decision.

But the most definitive step in this direction was taken by the administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) through its authorisation of GM soy through successive “provisional measures”, which temporarily allowed the legal sale of crops that were being illegally grown in the south of the country with GM seeds smuggled in from Argentina.

Finally, in 2005, the adoption of the Biosafety Law established the National Technical Commission on Biosafety (CTNBio), which is responsible for assessing and approving or rejecting applications for the cultivation and sale of GMOs.

Two years later, another law created the National Biotechnology Commission to coordinate and implement a general policy on biotechnological development.

Plant diseases, pests and invasive species are the main causes of financial losses in agriculture, especially due to the difficulty of monitoring and controlling them, according to agricultural engineer João Sebastião Araújo, from the Department of Agronomy at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro.

“In this context, in 1996 a new technology was introduced, transgenesis, with a variety of maize that contained proteins derived from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt),” providing the maize with the bacterium’s insecticidal properties, Araújo told Tierramérica.

“It became one of the most commonly used technologies in agriculture in the United States, and quickly came to account for the majority of maize crops grown in that country,” he added.

The emergence of this technology was followed by a new escalation in the use of fertilisers, new crop varieties, agricultural machinery and the introduction of entomotoxic (insecticidal) molecules, “all aimed at achieving bigger crop yields,” said Araújo.

This new technological package was then promoted by transnational corporations in countries like Brazil, which is viewed as “an exceptional market” due to its vast areas of soy, maize and cotton plantations, he explained.

As a result, considerable pressure was exerted by these corporations to gain government authorisation for the use of transgenics, with the promise of greater efficiency and lower costs.

According to Céleres, a consulting firm that specialises in the agribusiness sector, GM crops occupied 37.1 million hectares of land in Brazil during the 2012-2013 agricultural year, which reflects an increase of 14 percent (4.6 million hectares) over the previous year.

The leading GM crop is soy, with 24.4 million hectares planted in 2012, accounting for 88.8 percent of total soy production.

GM varieties accounted for 87.9 percent (6.9 million hectares) of the winter maize harvest. As for the summer maize crop, transgenic varieties cover 5.3 million hectares, or 64.8 percent of the total area planted.

Meanwhile, GM cotton makes up just over 50 percent (547,000 hectares) of the crops planned for the 2012-2013 agricultural year, according to Céleres.

Araújo noted that Brazil is highly competent in agricultural research and that its scientists have achieved “exceptional results” and contributed to crop yields that were unimaginable in the past.

However, despite the technological advances made, there are still insufficient answers for a number of concerns about GM crops, he said.

“Caution is needed so as not to use this technology without the necessary discretion. Today, Europe is convinced that its impacts go much further. We are talking about a very recent technique. In Brazil it dates back only 10 years, in Europe, 13 years, and in the United States, 17 years,” he added.

Maurício Lopes, president of the government agricultural research agency, EMBRAPA, emphasised another aspect.

The tropics are the world’s most challenging region for agriculture, due to the impacts of climate change and the need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions generated by this human activity, he said.

“We need to make use of the entire technological arsenal available to us. We believe that modern biotechnology, nanotechnology, new sciences and new paradigms are important. Brazil cannot say no to these techniques, because the current challenges are enormous,” Lopes told Tierramérica.

Lopes believes that the results of these past 10 years have been positive overall, but that it is important to make intelligent, planned and careful use of these new tools.

“We are in favour of transgenesis. We understand that there is a framework of methods and procedures for using it safely,” he noted. At the same time, however, he is critical of the fact that biotechnology remains under the control of a handful of global actors, such as agrifood corporations.

EMBRAPA is currently working on the development of new varieties of beans, tomatoes and papayas.

“We are testing a GM bean that is resistant to a terrible disease, known as bean golden mosaic virus, which is transmitted by an insect. This product has already been developed by EMBRAPA and we are now testing it,” said Lopes.

The next frontier will be vegetables. Brazilian scientists have already obtained a modified lettuce that contains large concentrations of folic acid.

“Folic acid is a key component in the diet of pregnant women, because of its importance for the nervous system development of the foetus. We are testing it and it will have to pass a long battery of tests. But it is a product which might be on our tables in the future,” he said.

While the proponents of GMOs claim that they can be a tool to combat hunger and reduce the use of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and micro-fertilisers, environmentalists warn of the risks they pose for agricultural biodiversity.

The environmental organisation Greenpeace says the release of GMOs into the environment can lead to the loss of plants and seeds that constitute the world’s genetic heritage.

“We defend a model of agriculture that is based on agricultural biodiversity and does not use toxic products, because we understand that this is the only way we will have agriculture forever,” says a Greenpeace statement.

Moreover, the group stresses, there is no consensus in the scientific community regarding the safety of GMOs for human health and the environment.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

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