fPcN interCultural:

defenders of free tribal life

We call ourselves GRR, Rural Reflection Group, in relation to a proposal made by a conglomerate of NGOs and cereal and biotechnology companies from Argentina and Europe to implement a model of sustainable soya.

Transgenic soya monocultures lead, inevitably, to depopulation of rural areas, increased deforestation, soil desertification and, therefore, more hunger among the population. Companies, as well as important government officials, including the Agriculture Secretary, INTA1, SENASA2 and CONICET3 are committed in the joint effort to elaborate a major national project on biotechnology that will bring increased dependence on the imposed model and greater dependence on inputs from transnational companies. This is a historic moment of special significance, when companies are openly proposing to increase the production from seventy million to one hundred million of grain for exporting. This would require adding perhaps ten or more million hectares to the current 15 million of hectares of transgenic crops. To achieve such an objective and, at the same time, avoid an ecological catastrophe or a social uprising, the companies and the government need the help of NGOs. This new stage that has already begun in Argentina, lead by WWF -with the first call for proposals to Fundación Vida Silvestre and with the attendance of FARN4, Greenpeace, University of Buenos Aires Agriculture Department and several companies- has been dubbed „Sustainable Soya‰.

This new coalition emerges as a soya neo-colonization project. In it, each actor contributes according to its own interests, but they all seem to concur on GMOs and on the role assigned to Argentina within the framework of globalization. Some environmental organizations will seek to preserve the untouched areas of national parks and to negotiate the remaining areas by establishing guidelines and experts to avoid the collapse of ecosystems. Public officials from scientific and technologic organizations will go after a naïve project on biotechnology -as is if it wasn‚t already patented the last lab procedure-, and thus, placing the remains of the State in the service of transnational interests. The agriculture producers will seek to secure their own piece of the pie, challenging the rent on the land and determined not to pay royalties over the seed, while seizing the opportunity to multiple their troops through calls for an „agrarian reform‰ that respects the soya model. In the meanwhile, many urban labor leaders, totally blind to the model of transgenic monocultures, keep on boasting on better distribution of profits and on the need of a „distributive shock‰ that enables consumption to take off, while, at the same time, denounce messes and corruption - such as under billing in grain exports- suggesting that through increased taxes and customs controls it would be possible to raise enough resources to solve more pressing social problems. The Rotary Club and Caritas continue, in the meanwhile, with their plans of installing „mechanical cows‰5 in hospitals and in areas of extreme poverty, as well as adding soy-based foods to indigent childrens‚ canteen menus. By doing that, the Rotary Club and Caritas contribute to legitimizing the model of genetically engineered monocultures among the poorest and, at the same time, establish a double standard in the people‚s diet, standard in which the poor wind up with transgenic forage. Each and every one of those actors contribute to the model‚s continuance; they are all responsible through positive action or omission and have become accomplices of the multinational companies that dominate our export market and that have turned our country into a forage „lousy little forage republic‰.

We need to restore our national dignity and denounce the soya model and the role of exporter of commodities and the biotechnological experiment that we have imposed upon ourselves. We need to rebuild the State to take back charge of International Trade Comptroller office and reorganize the National Grain Commission so that we can impose minimum pricing for food intended for the tables of Argentineans -such as lentils, rice or dairy- that are no longer produced or that face a severe production crisis. We need to go back to producing seeds, recovering our lost genetic patrimony and the basis of a different agriculture model, in which the proposed goals are food sovereignty and local development.

We radically reject the paper issued by WWF last September in Gland, Switzerland, that with the title „Soy boom: doom or boon for South America‚s forests and savannah‰, presents us a model of „sustainable soya‰.6

We reject it because it represents attitude of resignation and acceptance towards the soya global model, a model in which transnational agribusiness comprises all phases of production and commercialization: from production and sale of seeds, distribution of pesticides, the harvesting, sowing and spraying machinery, to the domination of ports of export. For Europe, such production of forage soya results in loss of food quality, the industrial production of beef with genetically modified forages and a further deterioration of rural life. For the countries in South America, the commoditization model manifests itself brutally as a threat of soil desertification, collapse of the agricultural ecosystems and hunger for our peoples.

We reject it because it ignores the social effects of soya - a crop that was never part of the Argentinean diet - as well as the fact that current monocultures are causing innumerable job losses and gigantic migration of rural populations to the big urban areas. Also because the reports ignores that cattle ranching was pushed by soya to marginal areas and to floodable low lands and, worst of all, it ignores the feedlot corrals where the cattle, instead of being fed on pastures, are being fattened with grains ˆparticularly soya- and by adding antibiotics and hormones. Because it ignores that Argentina used to be one of the world‚s largest certified organic producers, until an agriculture system based on agrochemicals and GMOs changed its profile in international commerce. It also ignores that organic corn can no longer be produced due to contamination. And that Argentina‚s honey has been displaced in international market due to chemical residues found in it.

Because our country was once „the breadbasket of the world‰; but now, thanks to soya, we have degraded into a lousy little forage republic.

Because it is naïve and unviable to think that the desertification risk can be lowered through the proposed rotation with cattle. Over millions of hectares of monocultures the soya businessmen have destroyed fences, water dispensers and mills used for obtaining the farm‚s drinking water. The soya monoculture model has only one drive: lowering costs and increasing profits at the expense of natural resources.

This model that has been put in place - an agriculture without farmers, with land concentration and with massive depopulation of rural towns - cannot be turned back by the means proposed in the paper. In reality, the aim of WWF‚s members is not to change the model, but instead, to enable its consummation in the largest agricultural territory without producing the expected and feared social uprising.

Furthermore, WWF‚s paper uncovers its cynical speculations when it states: „it is expected that the demand for soya export, to be used primarily as animal feed, will double within the next 20 years‰. By accepting an argument originated in a reality constructed by transnational corporations, WWF aims to sentence the entire south section of our continent to a role of nothing more than forage producers, without alternatives for defending our food security and food sovereignty. WWF only takes into account the needs of the North, without looking into Argentina‚s growing poverty and hunger. The objective is to multiply the forage production capacity while preserving at least one section of the forests and ecosystems. Pretending make sustainable the growing soya production is, at best, naïve.

WWF‚s document states:

„The study shows that it is possible to achieve higher production of soy without destroying nature‰, said Matthias Diemer, Head of WWF‚s Forest Conversion Initiative. „The development of more intensive and efficient land use along existing roads and near important population centres will reduce the need to clear virgin habitats‰. However, the report also stresses that for such a scenario to happen and work, soy producers, investors, buyers, and regulators will have to support, adopt, and promote more sustainable practices, including encouraging local governments to effectively enforce environmental and land-use laws and regulations.

It would seem, truly, that the writers of the report have not checked what is actually happening in the field in Argentina in relation to soya. One of the phenomena of extension of monoculture is its sweeping away of the greenbelts of big and small cities which -comprised of dairy, poultry and vegetable farms- used to not only be source of local food, but worked as buffer zones mitigating the impacts of agriculture. Today, soya generally reaches the edges of towns, therefore the spraying of glyphosate, Paraquat and Endosulfan have a direct impact of the populations, resulting in countless cases of cancer, malformations, terminal illnesses, miscarriages, etc. In many small villages surrounded by the green desert of soya, the spraying airplanes would do not bother to interrupt their spraying while flying over urban areas, putting the populations under the direct impact and terrible consequences of the herbicides.

We are resolved to construct a notion of State within sovereignty and social justice.

The only way out from the situation created by soya that our countries have, apart from a violent claim of land tenure after a social uprising caused by hunger and extreme poverty, would be the citizen‚s decision to rebuild the State that has been destroyed during the Neoliberal era, and in such a rebuilt State, regulating international commerce ˆcurrently in the hands of transnational corporations, setting minimum prices for foods comprising the people‚s food patrimony, encouraging production of seeds and promoting massive repopulation plans in currently empty areas, along with integrated local development programs.

WWF‚s sustainable soya proposals that we reject reflect the shameful collaboration attempt of environmental groups and NGOs from the First World with the big transnational corporations. However, such corporations need collaborators because they are mindful that their future is more and more uncertain and that the public is becoming increasingly aware of the threat that patenting of the seeds and of the food to which they are accustomed represents to their lives.

WWF and other big NGOs in Europe as well in Latin America pretend to maintain the model, while setting some rules directed both to mitigate the model‚s impacts and to moderate its unavoidable consequences. We, on the contrary, as Rural Reflection Group have declared war on a model that manifests itself in monoculture, expulsion of farmer families, massive deforestation and land conversion, unsustainable, input-dependent agriculture systems that transform us in big factories where the populations live off the surplus and discarded materials.

We are a massive experiment of biotechnological packages, a lab country for the biotech multinational corporations, a colonial Argentina. We are determined to restore our food sovereignty and to rebuild a national project.

The export triumphs of today‚s Argentina are, at the same time, its greatest failure, because they deny the country‚s healthy food producing tradition and because they condemn us to hunger and misery. But, in the same way that our country fails when it is no longer what it once was, when it is no longer itself, Europe should also be aware that when it imposes its forage compulsive extraction model to countries like Argentina, isn‚t any longer what once was, it transforms itself into something else. The globalized Europe that seeks to sustain its „Americanized‰ way of life by forcing us into a role of commodity supplier in order to pay an external debt that was imposed upon ourselves during the military dictatorship, at the cost of State Terrorism and thirty thousand missing people, in reality is no longer Europe, or perhaps is worst, the most sinister and perverse [manifestation] of itself.

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CRR ˆ Rural Reflection Group

October 11, 2004

email: grupodereflexionrural@hotmail.com
email: rtierra@infovia.com.ar

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