blindpig
08-08-2009, 08:01 AM
[div class="excerpt"]Saying No to Soy
The Campesino Struggle for Sustainable Agriculture in Paraguay
April Howard
When Paraguay elected Fernando Lugo, its first non-Colorado Party president in more than sixty years, the mood was elated. In the streets of Asuncion that night in April 2008, “Grandmothers, wrapped in the Paraguayan flag, danced with children in the streets, and cried at the top of their lungs that this [was] the moment they’d been waiting for their whole lives.”1 While Lugo’s election was a clear victory for the social movements that united to elect him, movement leaders knew that this was just the beginning. As Worker Party and Indigenous Farmer organizer Tomás Zayas told me the previous year: “Lugo will not solve our problems. If Lugo is elected, it will be a door, an opening, through which we can add to our movement and demands.”
One sector of Paraguayan society that has the most to gain from this transfer of power is the dwindling, poisoned, and often criminalized campesino (peasant farmer) population. Across Latin America, incomplete or corrupt agrarian reforms have left farmers fighting for their right to grow food for themselves. The flourishing soybean industry in Paraguay is leading towards an industrial agricultural export model that leaves no room for small food producers. While many Paraguayan campesino families have moved into urban peripheries, tenacious farmers have fought not only for their right to land, but also to redefine and recreate the agricultural model based on cooperative, organic, and people-friendly alternatives.
Leftist presidents, recently victorious in Bolivia and Ecuador, are contemplating land reform and agricultural planning to serve internal consumption. Such actions have been at the heart of revolutionary struggles for centuries. Cuba remains a leader in this area. Venezuela, under the leadership of Chávez, has made major advances in this realm through encouraging endogenous development and cooperatives. Both of these examples have much to offer Paraguayan campesinos, as they continue to mobilize and exert pressure on the new government to institute agricultural change.
snip
The Agricultural Export Industry — A Poisonous Green Desert
A biologically diverse Interior Atlantic Forest once covered 85 percent of Eastern Paraguay. Intermingled with the necessary shade and fruit-bearing trees of the forest, farmers grew diverse crops and raised a variety of livestock. However, today only 5–8 percent of that forest remains. The land now resembles the rolling hills of a green desert. Brazilian industrial farmers have invaded Eastern Paraguay and bought up the much of the land, bit by bit, in order to grow monoculture crops for export. Their bounty is sold to such companies as Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Bunge. They transform communities and strong-arm farmers to produce soy, corn, and cotton for export. Paraguay and parts of Brazil and Argentina have become “soy republics.”
Soy production has increased exponentially in recent years to keep up with worldwide demand for animal feed, as well as the ecologically bankrupt, but still thriving, agrofuel industry. Industrial soy is directed toward these markets, not human food. Today, Paraguay is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of soybeans. In 2003, five million acres of land were devoted to soy cultivation — more than double the amount ten years before that.5 Today, according to sociologist Javiera Rulli, that number is closer to thirty million acres, and is expected to continue rising exponentially.6
The expansion of the soy industry in Paraguay has occurred in tandem with the violent oppression of small farmers and indigenous communities. Farmers have been bullied into growing soy with pesticides, at the expense of their food crops, health, and subsequently their farms. Farmers who live next to the soy fields have been driven away by the chemicals, which kill their crops and animals and cause illnesses. Since the first soy boom, almost 100,000 small farmers have been evicted from their homes and fields. Countless indigenous communities have been forced to relocate. Mechanized production reorganized labor relations, as those who stayed to work in the soy fields were replaced by tractors and combines. Entire communities fled to the cities to be street vendors and live in the exploding semi-urban slums around large cities. Farmers who refuse to leave their land are targeted by hired security forces, employed by the surrounding soy growers, in hope that they will eventually sell. A simultaneous campaign of “criminalization” has allowed the soy industry to use the state security and judicial apparatus to remove and punish resistant farmers. More than a hundred campesino leaders have been assassinated, and more than two thousand others have faced trumped-up charges for their resistance to the intrusion of agribusiness.
Various campesino organizations have joined forces to fight the violence and criminalization experienced by their members. The Front for Sovereignty and Life is made up of the National Workers’ Center, the Authentic Unitarian Center of Workers, the Permanent Popular Plenary, the Coordinating Table of Campesino Organizations, the National Campesino Organization, and the National Coordinator for Life and Sovereignty.7 Some groups have taken the next step and are working not only to stop the fumigations and criminalization, but to create alternative models of agriculture.
Though the soy plants are green, they represent the death not only of the way of life of Paraguayan farmers, but of the land itself. According to campesino leader Tomás Zayas, “transnational businesses are not concerned with the destruction and contamination of the land because when the land can’t give any more, they just move to another country.” Soy cultivation dumps more than 24 million liters of toxic agro-chemicals in Paraguay every year, including pesticides designated by the World Health Organization as “extremely hazardous” and “moderately hazardous.” These include Paraquat (a toxin with no antidote), 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), Gramoxone, Metamidofos (which reduces sperm count and health in exposed males), and Endosulfan (which causes birth defects in the infants of repeatedly exposed mothers). Rather than “pesticides” or “herbicides,” Paraguayan campesinos call them “chemicals,” “agrotoxins,” and “venenos” (venoms).
http://www.monthlyreview.org/090615howard.php[/quote]
More where that came from.
The Campesino Struggle for Sustainable Agriculture in Paraguay
April Howard
When Paraguay elected Fernando Lugo, its first non-Colorado Party president in more than sixty years, the mood was elated. In the streets of Asuncion that night in April 2008, “Grandmothers, wrapped in the Paraguayan flag, danced with children in the streets, and cried at the top of their lungs that this [was] the moment they’d been waiting for their whole lives.”1 While Lugo’s election was a clear victory for the social movements that united to elect him, movement leaders knew that this was just the beginning. As Worker Party and Indigenous Farmer organizer Tomás Zayas told me the previous year: “Lugo will not solve our problems. If Lugo is elected, it will be a door, an opening, through which we can add to our movement and demands.”
One sector of Paraguayan society that has the most to gain from this transfer of power is the dwindling, poisoned, and often criminalized campesino (peasant farmer) population. Across Latin America, incomplete or corrupt agrarian reforms have left farmers fighting for their right to grow food for themselves. The flourishing soybean industry in Paraguay is leading towards an industrial agricultural export model that leaves no room for small food producers. While many Paraguayan campesino families have moved into urban peripheries, tenacious farmers have fought not only for their right to land, but also to redefine and recreate the agricultural model based on cooperative, organic, and people-friendly alternatives.
Leftist presidents, recently victorious in Bolivia and Ecuador, are contemplating land reform and agricultural planning to serve internal consumption. Such actions have been at the heart of revolutionary struggles for centuries. Cuba remains a leader in this area. Venezuela, under the leadership of Chávez, has made major advances in this realm through encouraging endogenous development and cooperatives. Both of these examples have much to offer Paraguayan campesinos, as they continue to mobilize and exert pressure on the new government to institute agricultural change.
snip
The Agricultural Export Industry — A Poisonous Green Desert
A biologically diverse Interior Atlantic Forest once covered 85 percent of Eastern Paraguay. Intermingled with the necessary shade and fruit-bearing trees of the forest, farmers grew diverse crops and raised a variety of livestock. However, today only 5–8 percent of that forest remains. The land now resembles the rolling hills of a green desert. Brazilian industrial farmers have invaded Eastern Paraguay and bought up the much of the land, bit by bit, in order to grow monoculture crops for export. Their bounty is sold to such companies as Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Bunge. They transform communities and strong-arm farmers to produce soy, corn, and cotton for export. Paraguay and parts of Brazil and Argentina have become “soy republics.”
Soy production has increased exponentially in recent years to keep up with worldwide demand for animal feed, as well as the ecologically bankrupt, but still thriving, agrofuel industry. Industrial soy is directed toward these markets, not human food. Today, Paraguay is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of soybeans. In 2003, five million acres of land were devoted to soy cultivation — more than double the amount ten years before that.5 Today, according to sociologist Javiera Rulli, that number is closer to thirty million acres, and is expected to continue rising exponentially.6
The expansion of the soy industry in Paraguay has occurred in tandem with the violent oppression of small farmers and indigenous communities. Farmers have been bullied into growing soy with pesticides, at the expense of their food crops, health, and subsequently their farms. Farmers who live next to the soy fields have been driven away by the chemicals, which kill their crops and animals and cause illnesses. Since the first soy boom, almost 100,000 small farmers have been evicted from their homes and fields. Countless indigenous communities have been forced to relocate. Mechanized production reorganized labor relations, as those who stayed to work in the soy fields were replaced by tractors and combines. Entire communities fled to the cities to be street vendors and live in the exploding semi-urban slums around large cities. Farmers who refuse to leave their land are targeted by hired security forces, employed by the surrounding soy growers, in hope that they will eventually sell. A simultaneous campaign of “criminalization” has allowed the soy industry to use the state security and judicial apparatus to remove and punish resistant farmers. More than a hundred campesino leaders have been assassinated, and more than two thousand others have faced trumped-up charges for their resistance to the intrusion of agribusiness.
Various campesino organizations have joined forces to fight the violence and criminalization experienced by their members. The Front for Sovereignty and Life is made up of the National Workers’ Center, the Authentic Unitarian Center of Workers, the Permanent Popular Plenary, the Coordinating Table of Campesino Organizations, the National Campesino Organization, and the National Coordinator for Life and Sovereignty.7 Some groups have taken the next step and are working not only to stop the fumigations and criminalization, but to create alternative models of agriculture.
Though the soy plants are green, they represent the death not only of the way of life of Paraguayan farmers, but of the land itself. According to campesino leader Tomás Zayas, “transnational businesses are not concerned with the destruction and contamination of the land because when the land can’t give any more, they just move to another country.” Soy cultivation dumps more than 24 million liters of toxic agro-chemicals in Paraguay every year, including pesticides designated by the World Health Organization as “extremely hazardous” and “moderately hazardous.” These include Paraquat (a toxin with no antidote), 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), Gramoxone, Metamidofos (which reduces sperm count and health in exposed males), and Endosulfan (which causes birth defects in the infants of repeatedly exposed mothers). Rather than “pesticides” or “herbicides,” Paraguayan campesinos call them “chemicals,” “agrotoxins,” and “venenos” (venoms).
http://www.monthlyreview.org/090615howard.php[/quote]
More where that came from.