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REPORTS: BRAZIL - AGRICULTURE |
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The
Battle Over Transgenic Seeds
Mario
Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, (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.
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