bitter harvest

[Guest guest]

GM soya 'miracle' turns sour in Argentina

 

Paul Brown, environment correspondent

Friday April 16, 2004

The Guardian

 

Seven years after GM soya was introduced to Argentina as an economic miracle

for poor farmers, researchers claim it is causing an environmental crisis,

damaging soil bacteria and allowing herbicide-resistant weeds to grow out of

control.

 

Soya has become the cash crop for half of Argentina's arable land, more than

11m hectares (27m acres), most situated on fragile pampas lands on the vast

plains. After Argentina's economic collapse, soya became a vital cash export

providing cattle feed for Europe and elsewhere.

 

Now researchers fear that the heavy reliance on one crop may bring economic

ruin.

 

The GM soya, grown and sold by Monsanto, is the company's great success

story. Programmed to be resistant to Roundup, Monsanto's patented glyphosate

herbicide, soya's production increased by 75% over five years to 2002 and

yields increased by 173%, raising £3bn profits for farmers hard-hit

financially.

 

However, a report in New Scientist magazine says that because of problems

with the crops, farmers are now using twice as much herbicide as in

conventional systems.

 

Soya is so successful it can be viewed as a weed itself: soya "volunteer"

plants, from seed split during harvesting, appear in the wrong place and at

the wrong time and need to be controlled with powerful herbicides since they

are already resistant to glyphosate.

 

The control of rogue soya has led to a number of disasters for neighbouring

small farmers who have lost their own crops and livestock to the drift of

herbicide spray.

 

So keen have big farmers been to cash in on the soya bonanza that 150,000

small farmers have been driven off the land so that more soya can be grown.

Production of many staples such as milk, rice, maize, potatoes and lentils

has fallen.

 

Monsanto says the crop is the victim of its own success. Colin Merritt,

Monsanto's biotechnology manager in Britain, said that any problems with GM

soya were to do with the crop as a monoculture, not because it was GM. "If

you grow any crop to the exclusion of any other you are bound to get

problems. What would be sensible would be to grow soya in rotation with corn

or some other crop so the ground and the environment have time to recover,"

he said.

 

One of the problems in Argentina is the rapid spread of weeds with natural

resistance to Roundup. Such weeds, say opponents of GM, could develop into a

generation of "superweeds" impossible to control. The chief of these is

equisetum, known as marestail or horsetail, a plant which rapidly chokes

fields of soya if not controlled.

 

But Mr Merritt said horsetail could be a troublesome weed in any crop. "I

reject the notion that this is a superweed or that it will confer genetic

resistance on other weeds and make them superweeds. It always has been a

troublesome weed."

 

The soya was originally welcomed in Argentina partly because it helped to

solve a problem of soil erosion on the pampas which had been caused by

ploughing. Soya is planted by direct drilling into the soil.

 

Adolfo Boy, a member of the Grupo de Reflexion Rural, a group opposed to GM,

said that the bacteria needed for breaking down vegetable matter so that the

soil was fertilised were being wiped out by excessive use of Roundup. The

soil was becoming inert, and so much so that dead weeds did not rot, he told

New Scientist.

 

Sue Mayer, of Genewatch in the UK, said: "These problems have been becoming

evident in Argentina for some time. It gives a lie to the claim that GM is

good for farmers in developing countries.

 

"It shows it's an intensive form of agriculture that needs to be tightly

controlled to prevent very undesirable environmental effects. It is not what

small farmers in developing countries need."

 

***************************************************************

 

Argentina's bitter harvest

New Scientist, 17 April 2004

 

When genetically modified soya came on the scene it seemed like a

heaven-sent solution to Argentina's agricultural problems. Now soya is being

blamed for an environmental crisis that is threatening the country's fragile

economic recovery. Sue Branford discovers how it all went wrong

 

A YEAR ago, Colonia Loma Senes was just another rural backwater in the north

of Argentina. But that was before the toxic cloud arrived. "The poison got

blown onto our plots and into our houses," recalls local farmer Sandoval

Filemon. "Straight away our eyes started smarting. The children's bare legs

came out in rashes." The following morning the village awoke to a scene of

desolation. "Almost all of our crops were badly damaged. I couldn't believe

my eyes," says Sandoval's wife, Eugenia. Over the next few days and weeks

chickens and pigs died, and sows and nanny goats gave birth to dead or

deformed young. Months later banana trees were deformed and stunted and were

still not bearing edible fruit.

 

The villagers quickly pointed the finger at a neighbouring farm whose

tenants were growing genetically modified soya, engineered to be resistant

to the herbicide glyphosate. A month later, agronomists from the nearby

National University of Formosa visited the scene and confirmed the

villagers' suspicions. The researchers concluded that the neighbouring

farmers, like thousands of others growing GM soya in Argentina, had been

forced to take drastic action against resistant weeds and had carelessly

drenched the land - and nearby Colonia Loma Senes - with a mixture of

powerful herbicides.

 

The villagers took their neighbours to court and won an order banning

further spraying. The judge also found the tenants guilty of "causing

considerable harm to crops and human health". But it was a pyrrhic victory.

In September, new tenants took over the land and started spraying again.

When challenged, the farmers said that the ban did not apply to them, which

was technically true.

 

Colonia Loma Senes is not an isolated case. Over the past eight years, GM

soya farmers have taken over a huge proportion of Argentina's arable land,

leading to regular complaints by peasant families that their crops have been

harmed by glyphosate and other herbicides.

 

"We really don't know how much damage is being done throughout the country,

because the authorities are not monitoring the situation properly," says

Walter Pengue, an agro-ecologist from the University of Buenos Aires who has

studied the impact of GM soya. But he predicts that such incidents will

become more common as a consequence of Argentina's rush into GM soya. And

other experts are warning of potential problems that include the emergence

of herbicide-resistant weeds and destruction of the soil's natural

micro-organisms.

 

GM technology is not entirely to blame for Argentina's agricultural woes.

Economic problems have also played their part. But the country's experience

with GM soya holds worrying lessons for the rest of the world, particularly

developing countries such as Brazil, the world's second largest soya

producer after the US. After refusing for years to authorise GM technology,

Brazil is now rethinking its policy. Farmers in the south have been

illegally planting GM soya smuggled over from Argentina, attracted by

reports of higher yields and lower production costs. This has left the

government with little option but to accept the cultivation of GM soya as a

fait accompli. Last year it reluctantly gave temporary authorisation for the

sale of GM soya on the domestic market and is now debating the finer details

of permanent approval. Argentina's experience suggests that Brazil would do

well to opt for tight controls with rigorous environmental impact studies.

 

In 1997, Argentina became one of the first countries to authorise GM crops,

when Monsanto's Roundup Ready soya was introduced there and in the US. This

GM variety is resistant to glyphosate, which Monsanto sells under the trade

name Roundup. Argentina's farmers jumped at the new technology, which seemed

just what they needed to solve some of their most pressing problems. Since

the late 1980s, Argentina's largest and most fertile farming region, the

Pampas, had been suffering from serious soil erosion. About half of the 5

million hectares of the Pampas's core grain-producing region was suffering

severe erosion, according to the country's National Institute of

Agricultural Technology (INTA), and yields on these lands had fallen by at

least a third. To try and alleviate the problem, farmers were experimenting

with no-tilling - a system in which seed is sown directly on the land

without ploughing or any other form of cultivation. But with no ploughing,

weeds were starting to get out of control, and the farmers were at a loss as

to what to do.

 

Roundup Ready soya seemed a solution made in heaven. Farmers were able to

make the no-till system work because, instead of needing five or six

applications of various herbicides, they could spray only twice with

glyphosate at key moments in the season. What's more, the seed companies

made the move into Roundup Ready easy by supplying the seeds, machinery and

pesticides in a single convenient "technological package". The new

technology was also cheap. While farmers in the US paid a premium of at

least 35 per cent to plant GM varieties, Argentina had not at that time

signed an international patent agreement so Monsanto was able to charge only

a modest fee or risk being undercut by companies making generic copies of

its technology .

 

Driven by the world's apparently insatiable demand for soya to feed to

cattle, Argentinian farmers stampeded into soya, one of the few profitable

sectors in a depressed economy. Desperate to join in, urban investors rented

land from impoverished smallholders and turned it over to soya. Anta, the

farming group that did the damage to Colonia Loma Senes, benefited from such

schemes.

 

By 2002 almost half of Argentina's arable land -11.6 million hectares - was

planted with soya, almost all of it GM, compared with just 37,700 hectares

of soya in 1971. Soya moved beyond the Pampas into more environmentally

fragile areas, especially in the northern provinces of Chaco, Santiago del

Estero, Salta and Formosa. Not even Monsanto had imagined that the move into

Roundup Ready soya would be so rapid.

 

At first everything looked rosy. From 1997 to 2002 the area under soya

cultivation increased by 75 per cent and yields increased by 173 per cent.

In the early years there were also clear environmental benefits. Soil

erosion declined, thanks to the no-till method, and farmers moved from more

damaging herbicides to glyphosate, widely regarded as one of the least toxic

herbicides available.

 

Even when world soya prices started to decline as global supply increased,

Argentinian farmers continued to do well financially. Monsanto progressively

cut the price of Roundup and by 2001 it was selling at less than half its

1996 price. Overall, Argentina's farmers made a profit of about $5 billion

by adopting Roundup Ready soya.

 

Some years ago, however, a few agronomists started to sound alarm bells,

warning that the wholesale and unmonitored shift into Roundup Ready soya was

causing unforeseen problems. In a study published in 2001 by the Northwest

Science and Environmental Policy Center, a non-profit organisation in

Sandpoint, Idaho, agricultural economics consultant Charles Benbrook

reported that Roundup Ready soya growers in Argentina were using more than

twice as much herbicide as conventional soya farmers, largely because of

unexpected problems with tolerant weeds. He also found that they were

applying glyphosate more frequently than their US counterparts - 2.3 versus

1.3 applications a year. Saying that "history shows us that excessive

reliance on any single strategy of weed or insect management will fail in

the long run, in the face of ecological and genetic responses", he advised

Argentinian farmers to reduce their Roundup Ready acreage by as much as half

in order to cut glyphosate usage. If they did not, he warned, they would run

the risk of serious problems. Among his predictions were shifts in the

composition of weed species, the emergence of resistant superweeds, and

changes in soil microbiology.

 

The warning fell on deaf ears. Argentina's economy was in deep trouble, and

with soya now its main export earner the government was in no mood to

intervene. The area under Roundup Ready has continued to grow, and farmers

hurt by the collapse of Argentina's currency at the end of 2001 are

increasingly moving into soya monoculture, as other crops for the domestic

market have become unprofitable. Glyphosate use continues to rise. Pengue

estimates consumption reached 150 million litres in 2003, up from just 13.9

million litres in 1997.

 

Initially Pengue believed that with careful rotation of crops and adequate

controls over the way the herbicide was applied, the move to glyphosate

would benefit the environment. But he is now concerned that the unmonitored

use of this one herbicide is leading to the problems predicted by Benbrook.

In a study into the impact of Roundup Ready soya on weeds, Delma Faccini of

the National University of Rosario found that several previously uncommon

species of glyphosatetolerant weed had increased in abundance. In another

study, agronomists from INTA's office in Venado Tuerto, near Rosario, found

that farmers were having to use higher concentrations of glyphosate. For

now, the problem appears to be limited to the proliferation of weeds that

are naturally resistant, but some agronomists are warning that it is only a

matter of time before glyphosate resistance is transferred to other weed

species, turning them into superweeds.

 

The third problem that was predicted by Benbrook - changes in soil

microbiology - also appears to be happening. "Because so much herbicide is

being used, soil bacteria are declining and the soil is becoming inert,

which is inhibiting the usual process of decomposition," says agronomist

Adolfo Boy from the Grupo de Reflexion Rural, a group of agronomists opposed

to GM farming. "In some farms the dead vegetation even has to be brushed off

the land." He also believes that slugs, snails and fungi are moving into the

newly available ecological niche.

 

Similar problems are occurring to some extent in the US. According to Joe

Cummins, a geneticist from the University of Western Ontario in Canada,

studies of the impact of herbicides, particularly glyphosate, on soil

microbial communities have revealed increasing colonisation of the roots of

Roundup Ready soya with the fungus Fusarium in Midwestern fields.

 

Argentina's farmers are also having to deal with the proliferation of

"volunteer" soya, which sprouts from seeds dropped during harvest and which

cannot be eradicated with normal doses of glyphosate. This has created

marketing opportunities for other agrochemical companies such as Syngenta,

which has been placing adverts with the slogan "Soya is a weed" advising

farmers to use a mixture of paraquat and atrazine to eradicate volunteer

soya. Other companies, including Dow AgroSciences, are recommending mixing

glyphosate with other herbicides, such as metsulfuron and clopyralid.

 

Market forces

 

Not all scientists in Argentina are convinced that the farmers' problems

have been caused by heavy use of glyphosate, and others say that the

difficulties are not yet critical. "We are experiencing some problems of

tolerant weeds, but they are not on a large enough scale to affect overall

yields seriously or to jeopardise the future of soya farming," says Carlos

Senigalesi, director of investigative projects at INTA. He believes it is

the tendency for farmers to grow nothing but soya, rather than the

prevalence of GM strains, which is at the root of the problem. "Monoculture

is not good for the soils or for biodiversity and the government should be

encouraging farmers to return to crop rotation," Senigalesi says. "But here

everything is left to the market. Farmers have no proper guidance from the

authorities. There are no subsidies or minimum prices. I think we must be

the only country in the world where the authorities do not have a proper

plan for agriculture but leave everything to market forces."

 

For the first time however, INTA recently expressed concern. In a report

published in December it criticised "the disorderly process of agricultural

development", warning that if nothing was done, a decline in production was

inevitable and that the country's "stock of natural resources will suffer a

(possibly irreversible) degradation both in quantity and quality". It called

for changes in farming practices in the Pampas, saying that the combination

of no-till with soya monoculture was "not a sustainable alternative to crop

rotation farming". It also warned that, in the north, soya farming "is not

compatible with the sustainability of farming".

 

Monsanto's Argentinian headquarters has refused to comment directly on these

accusations. But the company has expressed concern about the situation,

saying it believes that crop rotation is more sustainable than monoculture.

It is also starting to suffer from the lack of government controls. In

January it unexpectedly halted sales of Roundup Ready soya, saying that

farmers were buying about half of their seeds on the black market and

depriving the company of royalties.

 

To Benbrook, this adds up to a very worrying outlook. "Argentina faces big

agronomic problems that it has neither the resources nor the expertise to

solve," he says. "The country has adopted GM technology more rapidly and

more radically than any other country in the world. It didn't take proper

safeguards to manage resistance and to protect the fertility of its soils.

Based on the current use of Roundup Ready, I don't think its agriculture is

sustainable for more than another couple of years."

 

Argentina used to be one of the world's major suppliers of food,

particularly wheat and beef. But the "soyarisation" of the economy, as the

Argentinians call it, has changed that.

 

About 150,000 small farmers have been driven off the land. Production of

many staples, including milk, rice, maize, potatoes and lentils, has fallen

sharply.

 

Many see Argentina's experience as a warning of what can happen when

production of a single commodity for the world market takes precedence over

concern for food security. When this commodity is produced in a system of

near monoculture, with the use of a new and relatively untested technology

provided by multinational companies, the vulnerability of the country is

compounded. As yet, few countries have opted for GM technology: the US and

Argentina together account for 84 per cent of the GM crops planted in the

world. But as others, including the UK, seem increasingly prepared to

authorise the commercial growing of GM crops, they may be well advised to

look to Argentina to see how it can go wrong.

 

Sue Branford is a freelance journalist specialising in Latin America

[Guest guest]

OMG! Non-rotting vegetation - won't do the soil much good either. What a mess.

 

Jo

 

bitter harvest

GM soya 'miracle' turns sour in Argentina Paul Brown, environment correspondentFriday April 16, 2004The Guardian