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REPORTS: ARGENTINA |
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The
'Green Desert' of Soya
Marcela
Valente
BUENOS AIRES, (IPS) - Soya has become
Argentina's number-one export, and the
area planted with this crop is
expanding each year at the expense of
livestock and other traditional crops
like maize, wheat, cotton, potato and
lentils.
”The Argentine countryside has
turned into a green desert,” a
farmer who is worried about the
advance of soya told IPS.
The national Agriculture Secretariat
is touting this year's soya harvest
for having reached the 36-million-ton
mark, 98 percent of which is exported
to be processed into flour for human
consumption in Asian countries and for
animal feed in Europe.
But environmentalists, agricultural
experts and many farmers warn that the
massive development of soya farming --
thanks to biotechnology and the
practice known as direct planting --
is occurring at the expense of
productive diversity.
In the long term extensive monoculture
of soya depletes the soil and
ultimately drives the legume's price
down, they argue.
Soya prices on the international
markets dropped from 307 dollars a ton
in the mid-1990s, when genetically
modified (GM) varieties were
introduced in the United States, to
around 200 dollars a ton today. Given
the surplus supply, there is little
chance the price will recover any time
soon.
”Ninety-five percent of our members
have turned to soya farming,” says
José Luis Lemos, Buenos Aires
coordinator of the Argentine Agrarian
Federation, an organisation whose
membership dropped from 400,000 small
and medium-sized farmers in the early
1990s to 103,000 today.
The ”soya invasion” is evident in
the northeastern province of Chaco,
which has traditionally been a
cotton-growing region.
In the past ”we had two million
hectares in Chaco planted with cotton,
and some 150,000 people involved in
its cultivation, but now, with soya,
there are just 100,000 hectares of
cotton and we are going to have to
import to meet demand,” Lemos said
in an IPS interview.
”With the dissemination of
genetically modified soya and the
technique of direct planting, soya
production yields more and is simpler
than other agricultural activities,
although we know that in the long term
monoculture hurts soil quality,” the
farmer said.
Traditionally, farmers would rotate
the crops they planted in their fields
to allow the soil to recover
nutrients, or would leave sections for
grazing livestock, allowing the soil
to ”rest” while it receives animal
manure as its main fertiliser.
Direct planting bypasses the
preparatory step of tilling and
ploughing under the remnants of
previous crops, which helps speed up
the pace of production. This technique
keeps the soil covered with dead
vegetation, which decomposes to serve
as a natural fertiliser, and protects
the soil from erosion and from extreme
temperature shifts.
Direct planting is a technique used in
conventional and organic farming
alike. But in Argentina its massive
implementation is associated with the
intensive production of transgenic
soya, which is also noted for higher
yields.
The genetically modified soya variety
Roundup Ready was developed by the
agribusiness and biotechnology
transnational Monsanto to be resistant
to the company's glyphosate-based
Roundup herbicide, which kills the
weeds that grow alongside the soya
plant.
Its utilisation means that farmers do
not have to battle each specific weed,
but they are then left dependent on
Monsanto for its GM seed and the
herbicide.
”The farmer is aware that the GM
soya will make him dependent, that it
depletes the soil and hurts crop
diversity, but 'necessity wears a
heretic's face',” summarised Lemos,
owner of a 100-hectare farm in
Mercedes, in Buenos Aires province.
His land, of course, is planted with
soya.
In a conversation with IPS, economist
Miguel Pereti explained that in the
south of the central province of Córdoba,
the area planted with soya grew 118
percent in the last 10 years,
replacing maize and sorghum crops and
livestock operations.
”It has been a very big and negative
transformation from the perspective of
environmental and social
sustainability,” he said.
Over the past decade, the area
dedicated to livestock shrank 35
percent in that region, particularly
hog farming, which dropped from
470,000 to 152,000 head, according to
Pereti, economics and statistics
coordinator for the National Institute
of Agricultural Technology in the Córdoba
district of Marcos Juárez.
Soya was ”born” as a crop in
Argentina just 30 years ago, in the
humid pampas area extending through
northern Buenos Aires, southern Santa
Fe and southwest Córdoba provinces.
By the 1990s, more than half of the
fields there were planted with this
legume.
”Today, 80 percent of the area's
cultivable lands grow soya, and when
it became evident that the region was
reaching its saturation point with the
crop, the agricultural frontier began
to extend into other areas of those
provinces and in the northeast
provinces of Santiago del Estero,
Chaco, Formosa and Entre Ríos,”
Pereti explained.
This expansion was facilitated by new
technologies that give farmers higher
yields with the same number of
hectares and labour, he said.
”Planting transgenic soya is cheaper
than any other crop,” he added.
When the moment comes to decide what
to plant, the factor of production
cost appears to be more important to
farmers than soya's fluctuating prices
on international markets.
”The land planted with soya is
expanding in the same measure that its
international prices are falling. The
soya crisis that began in the 1990s in
Southeast Asia is being resolved with
the expansion of the crop here,”
said Pereti.
The loudest criticisms of the
phenomenon are heard from
environmental activists.
The spread of soya farming in the
provinces of Santa Fe and Chaco --
where the Salado River begins -- is
one of the causes of the floods that
earlier this year left 24 people dead
and tens of thousands homeless in the
city of Santa Fe, Jorge Capatto, head
of the environmental group 'Fundación
Proteger', told IPS.
The Salado overflowed its banks during
heavy rains in April and May, flooding
the capital of Santa Fe and destroying
thousands of homes.
Environmentalists say that
deforestation in Chaco and Santiago
del Estero, and the low permeability
of the soils used in intensive soya
farming contributed to channelling
more water into the river.
”Plant soya and harvest the flood
victims,” says Capatto with a note
of irony.
More critical even are the members of
the Rural Reflection Group, comprising
farmers, agricultural technicians and
activists. They say that GM soya and
its accompanying herbicides, as well
as direct planting, are turning
Argentina into an ”agricultural
nation without farmers”, noting that
500 small towns have been completely
abandoned.
”The seed transnationals -- Cargill,
Nidera, Monsanto -- have turned us
into a country that produces
transgenic soya and exports forage,”
Jorge Rulli, of the Rural Reflection
Group, said in comments to IPS.
”Meanwhile, we see enormous food
shortages throughout the population”
of 37 million, he said.
”Around 12 million hectares of
transgenic soya -- in a total of 26
million hectares with other crops --,
treated with more than 100 million
litres of herbicide annually, leaave
enormous quantities of soil that lack
any microbial life and that do not
retain water,” Rulli pointed out.
In the last six years, he said, 17,000
dairy farms in Buenos Aires province
shut down operations. ”We are
importing milk from Uruguay,”
cultivation of the 'candeal' wheat
variety has nearly disappeared, and
maize production is on the decline, he
said.
In the Buenos Aires town of San Pedro,
until recently some 6,000 hectares
were planted with potato, producing
two harvests annually. Now that same
land produces soya only. The same
phenomenon is occurring in areas that
used to grow lentils, carrots, peas
and artichokes -- all of which
Argentina must import.
According to the Agricultural
Secretariat, this transformation of
the countryside should not be a cause
for worry, because it is merely a
response to the fact that soya is more
profitable and entails lower risks for
the farmers.
If the soya supply increases and
prices continue to fall, the farmers
can return to growing other crops, say
Argentina's agricultural authorities.
But the Rural Reflection Group argues
that the ”harmful effects of
extensive monoculture can only be
neutralised” if farmers follow a
crop rotation schedule and choose
complementary varieties. In any case,
say the agricultural activists, it is
not easy to return to traditional
production patterns.
In its August report, the Group states
that one way to encourage rational
crop rotation would be to implement a
system of differentiated taxes that
would compensate farmers for the
disparate profitability of soya and
other crops.
But for now the proposal has
apparently been lost in the middle of
Argentina's green soya desert.
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