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I n october, i visited rural communities in two para-guayan departments, Alto Paraná and San Pedro, to photograph the social conflicts generated by indus-

trial soy production. Slightly smaller than California, Par-aguay is the world’s fastest-growing producer of soybeans and the fourth-largest soy exporter in the world. In 2007, soy covered 6.2 million acres of the country, and the area devoted to the crop was expected to increase to 6.5 mil-lion acres by the end of 2008.1 This exponential increase is a result of the rising demand for meat and cattle feed in China, as well as the booming agro-fuel industry in Europe. Industrial soy serves these markets.

The soy boom has been disastrous for small farmers, who, after living for years on government-allotted forest-land, have begun to be uprooted. In the last decade, the Paraguayan government has given away or illegally sold this public land to political friends in the soybean business, pushing the peasants out. Today, about 77% of Paraguayan land is owned by 1% of the population.2 Unlike many other Latin Americans, most Paraguayans live in rural areas and are farmers by trade. But that is changing: Since the first soy boom in 1990, almost 100,000 small-scale farmers have been forced to migrate to urban slums; about 9,000 rural families are evicted by soy production each year.3

Soy: A Hunger for Land

Photographs and text by Evan Abramson

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Brothers Ángel and Pedro Ramírez stand on the plot where their family’s home once stood, now the site of a transgenic soy field, in the town of Lote 8, in the Minga Porá district of Alto Paraná. They, like many of their neighbors, sold their land once crop fumigation in the area began. “It’s either leave, or stay and die,” says Ángel. Lote 8, once a town of several hundred, is virtually gone today, with almost all of its territory given over to soy plantations.

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Chemically treated transgenic soybeans are marked with pink dye before planting, to distinguish them as toxic and inedible. Eighty-five percent of the soy produced in Paraguay is genetically modified and unsuitable for human consumption.4 {

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_ Online feature: For a full-color version of this photo essay, visit nacla.org/soyparaguay.

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Miguela Céspedes Bogado, 15, was born in the village of San Isidro, Alto Paraná, without legs. She has a par-tial foot extending directly from her right thigh, and two fingers are missing from her right hand. Her father used to use a backpack kit to apply pesticides and her-bicides to his fields for his family’s own consumption, but stopped doing so about eight years ago. San Isidro, a small community composed of 100 or so houses clus-tered around one single road, is surrounded by trans-genic soy plantations on all sides, at a higher elevation than the community itself. Cancer rates are high in the area; miscarriages are common, and several children have been born with birth defects.

Due to a dangerous combination of widespread corrup-tion among local authorities, porous borders, and lax en-forcement of environmental laws, soy cultivation dumps more than 6 million gallons of pesticides and herbicides into the Paraguayan soil every year, including several that are classified by the World Health Organization as extremely hazardous, like 2,4-D, Gramoxone, Paraquat, Metamidofos, and Endosulfan. About 90% of the soy pro-duced in Paraguay is transgenic Roundup Ready, a variety engineered by the St. Louis–based Monsanto Company to be resistant to its patented herbicide.6 Fields of RR soy are indiscriminately fumigated with the herbicide, which kills everything in its path except the soy.

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One of Cargill’s 41 industrial facilities in Paraguay. The company, which earns more than $3 billion a year and dominates the world grain market, first be-gan operation in Paraguay in 1978, at the height of the military dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. Today it leads the Paraguayan agribusiness sector with the commercialization of more than 1.3 million tons of soy, wheat, and corn each year. This amounts to about a third of Paraguay’s annual harvest.{

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In San Marcos, a village in San Pedro, farmers were de-tained by national police after a court-ordered eviction of a landless settlement on the property of a soybean producer. Two-hundred families living in the surround-ing area began the occupation in June 2008, arguing that the owner does not have a title to the property. Paraguayan peasant resistance to agro-industry has been the strongest in San Pedro.

Since the soy boom gathered steam during the last five years, a wave of peasant land takeovers has swept the nation. Land invasions generally have an ecologi-cal as well as a social character: Landless farmers not

only demand land to work, but also protest the soy producers’ widespread deforestation and use of agro-chemicals.

Although locals frequently complain of headaches, nausea, skin rashes, vision problems, and respiratory infections—as well as a suspiciously high incidence of birth defects in soy-producing regions—such reports seldom make it into Paraguay’s news media. In the days following a fumigation, it is also common for farmers’ chickens to die, and for the cows to abort their calves and their milk to dry up. The non-soy crops that farm-ers produce for their own consumption also perish.

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An armed private security guard patrols the 30,000-acre property of the multinational soybean producer Agropeco. A landless farmers’ settlement is seen in the distance, right outside the property’s edge. Landless farmers claim that Agropeco occupies more property than it owns. A public corporation comprising U.S., Italian, and Paraguayan own-ers, Agropeco formed in 1983. It sells most of its production to Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland for export.

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Land reform is the single most important political issue in Paraguay, and the biggest challenge for the country’s presi-dent, Fernando Lugo. His supporters plan a national survey to determine who owns what land—a project that could take at least two years. But landless farmers groups aren’t waiting. In recent months, land invasions in Paraguay have gotten increasingly violent, and it has become common for

large landowners to hire teams of private armed guards to stand watch over their crops 24 hours a day. In October, the Paraguayan government prohibited the sale of land to foreign citizens, after the killing of a peasant activist, the first since Lugo assumed the presidency in mid-August, highlighting the urgent and still unresolved issue of how the government intends to carry out land reform.

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In Lote 8, 150 landless families occupy the edge of a 700-acre property belonging to a Brazilian transgenic soy pro-ducer, hoping the land will be granted to them if the owner cannot present a title. The day after this photograph was taken, a local district attorney ordered the families evicted, just in time for the planting season.{

Evan Abramson is a freelance photographer based in New York (evanabramson.com). His images have appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic Adventure, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, FT Weekend Magazine, Courrier Japon, and The Progressive.

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notes

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target for 2012: Monsanto Company, “Monsanto Sees Record Sales in Fiscal Year 2008; Growth Serves as Strong Base for 2009. Monsanto in-creases gross profit target for 2012 to $9.5 billion to $9.75 billion,” press release, October 8, 2009, available at monsanto.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=650.

8. Tom Knudson, Edie Lau and Mike Lee, “Globe-Trotting Genes: Welcome or Not, Modified Strains Pop Up in Crops Near and Far,” Sacramento Bee, June 7, 2004; Agence France-Presse, “New Study Points to GM Contamination of Mexican Corn,” February 23, 2009.

9. International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, avail-able at isaaa.org/resources/publications/briefs/39/pptslides/default.html.

10. Gabriela Pechlaner and Gerardo Otero, “The Neoliberal Food Regime: Neoregulation and the New Division of Labor in North America,” article under review.

11. Mexican economist José Luis Calva, cited in G.L. Zaragoza, “Balance nega-tivo en el agro después de 14 años de TLCAN: académicos,” La Jornada (Mexico), March 1, 2008.

12. Adjusting for income increases, CEPAL estimates that the figure will actually be 10 million, but this estimate may not have properly taken into account the overproduction glut that helped bring down food prices in 2008. United Na-tions Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, “Food Price Hikes May Increase Poverty and Indigence by Over Ten Million People in Latin America and the Caribbean,” CEPAL News 28, no. 4 (April 2008): 1.

13. Notimex, “Subieron 15% los alimentos básicos y cayó 30% el consumo,” January 7, 2009.

14. Miguel Teubal, “Genetically Engineered Soybeans and the Crisis of Argen-tina’s Agriculture Model,” in Gerardo Otero, ed., Food for the Few: Neolibral Globalism and Biotechnology in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2008), 189–216.

15. Strong doubts about effective economic performance: Kathy McAfee, “Export-ing Crop Biotechnology: The Myth of Molecular Miracles,” in Otero, ed., Food for the Few, 61–90; pesticide use and bias in favor of large transnational cor-porations: Friends of the Earth International, Who Benefits From GM Crops?, report series available at foei.org/en/publications; limited benefits to small farmers or the hungry: Teubal, “Genetically Engineered Soybeans and the Crisis of Argentina’s Agriculture Model.”

16. See also Otero and Pechlaner, “Latin American Agriculture, Food, and Bio-technology: Temperate Dietary Adoption and Unsustainability,” in Otero, ed., Food for the Few, 31–60; Pechlaner and Otero, “The Neoliberal Food Regime”; Teubal, “Genetically Engineered Soybeans.”

17. Robert Marquand, “Food Crisis Softens Resistance to Genetically Modified (GM) Food,” The Christian Science Monitor, June 6, 2008.

18. Armando Bartra, “Rebellious Cornfields: Toward Food and Labour Self- Sufficiency,” in Gerardo Otero, ed., Mexico in Transition: Neoliberal Global-ism, the State and Civil Society (Zed Books, 2004), 18–36; David Barkin, “The Reconstruction of a Modern Mexican Peasantry,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 30, no. 1 (2002): 73–90.

Soy: A Hunger for Land1. Cámara Paraguaya de Exportadores de Cereales y Oleaginosas (CAPECO),

“Evolución del area de siembra de soja” (Asunción, 2009), available at capeco.org.py/estadisticas.php.

2. La Vía Campesina and Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN), “La reforma agraria en Paraguay. Informe de la misión investigadora sobre el es-tado de la realización de la reforma agraria en tanto obligación de derechos humanos” (Heidelberg, Germany, 2007).

3. Tomás Palau, Daniel Cabello, An Maeyens, Javiera Rulli, and Diego Segovia, “Refugiados del modelo agroexportador. Impactos del monocultivo de soja en las comunidades campesinas paraguayas” (Asunción: BASE Investigaciones Sociales, October 2007).

4. Altervida, “Transgénicos” (Asunción, forthcoming 2009), altervida.org.py.5. Altervida, “Informaciones socioeconómicas y ambientales por departamentos

y por temas específicos del Bosque Atlántico, Alto Paraná. Sistematización de fichas técnicas” (Asunción, 2004).

6. Altervida, “Transgénicos.”

MALA: The Fun House Mirror1. See Center for Economic and Policy Research, “U.S. Should Disclose Its Funding

of Opposition Groups in Bolivia and Other Latin American Countries,” September 12, 2008, available at cepr.net.

2. The Hill publication Politico ran an article by Clint Rice, reporter for American University newspaper The Eagle. Opinion pieces by journalist Amy Goodman and CEPR co-director Mark Weisbrot also described Morales’s visit, but these were not news articles.

3. The Associated Press, “Bolivia’s Morales Seeks International Support,” Novem-ber 20, 2008. The Hill publication Inside U.S. Trade did mention the statement, as did a McClatchy Tribune Information Services column by Weisbrot.

4. See Pamela Constable, “Bolivia’s Morales Diplomatic, Defiant in Visit to D.C.,” The Washington Post, November 20, 2008.

5. Constable, “Bolivian President Evo Morales Visits Washington, Talks of Fresh Start With U.S. Under Obama,” WashingtonPost.com, November 19, 2008.

6. Levin, Jonathan J. “Bolivia Seeks to Renew U.S. Ties, Choquehuanca Says (Update2),” Bloomberg, January 29, 2009. Bloomberg articles are not archived in Nexis.

7. Eduardo Garcia, “Foes of Morales Stage General Strike in Bolivia,” Reuters, August 19, 2008.

8. Franz Chávez, “Bolivia: Divisions Emerge in Opposition Strategy,” Inter Press Service, September 4, 2008.

9. Agence France-Presse, “Bolivia Orders US Ambassador Out, Warns of Civil War,” September 10, 2008.

10. Frank Bajak, “Facebook Nixes Group Seeking Morales ‘Liquidation,’ ” Associated Press, January 27, 2009.

11. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Press Release, “IACHR Deplores Violence in Bolivia and Urges Punishment of Those Responsible,” no. 22/08 (May 29, 2008), available at cidh.org.

12. Jack Chang and Alex Ayala, “Two More Bolivian Provinces Weigh Autonomy,” The Miami Herald, May 30, 2008; Franz Chávez, “Bolivia: Armed Civilians Hu-miliate Local Indigenous Leaders,” Inter Press Service, May 27, 2008.

13. Los Angeles Times, “Young Bolivians Fuel Mob Violence in Civil Conflict,” September 20, 2008.

14. Mery Vaca, “UNASUR: ‘Hubo masacre en Bolivia,’” BBC Mundo, Decem-ber 3, 2008.

15. Associated Press, “Bolivian Opposition Criticizes ‘Massacre’ Report,” December 5, 2008; Eduardo Garcia, “Bolivia Violence Was Massacre, Says Regional Re-port,” Reuters, December 3, 2009 (Reuters is not archived in Nexis); Rick Kearns, “Tensions Increase Between U.S. and Bolivian Governments,” Indian Country Today, December 26, 2008; Alexei Barrionuevo, “At Meeting in Brazil, Washing-ton Is Scorned,” The New York Times, December 16, 2008.

16. See Corte Nacional Electoral, República de Bolivia, Referendum Revocatorio 2008 Resultados, available at www.cne.org.bo.

17. See results for the department of Santa Cruz in ibid.18. Joshua Partlow, “Bolivian Deadlock Remains as President, Foes Are Returned to

Office,” The Washington Post, August 11, 2008.19. Tyler Bridges, “Voters Give Morales and Foes a Stalemate,” The Miami Herald,

August 11, 2008.20. Antonio Regalado, “Bolivians Projected to Approve New Constitution,” The Wall

Street Journal, January 26, 2009. See also Associated Press, “Bolivian Constitu-tion Vote Unlikely to Heal Divide,” January 23, 2009, and Chris Kraul, “In Bolivia, Vote Unlikely to Heal Divide,” Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2009.

21. Editorial, “President Obama,” The New York Times, January 20, 2009; Janine Jackson, “Let’s Talk About Race—Or Maybe Not,” Extra!, March 2009. Some conservative commentators, disputing the existence of a strong electoral man-date for Obama, tended to emphasize national disunity. See, for example, Rob-ert D. Novak, “No Mandate for Obama and No Lopsided Congress,” syndicated column, November 6, 2008.

22. See uselectionatlas.org/results.23. Richard Lapper and Hal Weitzman, “Morales Poised for Win in Bolivia,” Finan-

cial Times, December 19, 2005. 24. See, for example, Angus Reid Global Monitor, “President Morales Drops to

56% in Bolivia,” January 10, 2009, and “Bolivians Continue to Back Morales,” December 6, 2008.