Esta entrada , escrita en Inglés y sacada de Google para que sea más explícita,habla sobre el monocultivo de “soja” en Argentina.



Es un tema que me “obsesiona” , porque no se oyen voces del gobierno o de la oposición sobre “su cultivo”.
Es , en mi modesta opinión un tema demasiado importante, por lo tanto, lo dejo para los que me lean.

Susi.

Argentina, The Soya Republic
© Caelainn Barr is an Irish freelance writer, living and working in Buenos Aires. This article is part of her continued study on the effects of genetically modified crops.

“Many people are ill. Many mothers and children have cancers. People are suffering from cancer of the uterus, brain tumours, anaemia, lupus, and purpura. There have been numerous spontaneous miscarriages. The pregnancies don’t continue because the children are so malformed, the body eliminates them…they say it doesn’t matter even though they are killing us. But they’re not just killing us, they’re killing the environment too. To make a few pesos they will destroy the land and our lives.”
This is the voice of Corina Barbosa. Her son, like many others in her community, is ill because he has agrichemicals in his blood. The sicknesses that are rife amongst the people of Ituzaingó in Córdoba province are believed to be due to the chemicals being used to grow genetically modified (GM) soya.
Soya in Argentina
Argentina was once called the “bread basket of the world”. The country produced enough food to feed its population ten times over.
Today Argentina is known as “The Soya Republic”.

The extensive growth in producing the crop has happened rapidly and changed Argentina’s agricultural patterns. With a drive to produce more and more soya for economic gain, there have been few controls set on how the crop is grown. This has lead to the development of mass agriculture focused on a soya monoculture.
Fernando Vilella, director of the Programme for Agribusiness and Foods at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) explains: “Monoculture of any type is careless
The rise of a soya monoculture has affected changes in the country’s environment and diet.
The rush to clear land for soya farming has lead to rapid deforestation with a loss of 25,000 hectares of native forests a year and is the greatest cause of species extinction in Argentina.
The increased production of soya for export has also lead to a decrease of other crops being produced in the country. Consequently Argentina’s population is becoming more dependent on imported foods, causing a rise in food prices.

Others believe that China's huge demand is allowing it to dominate the soya market - and this is risky as Argentina becomes ever more focused on supplying it.
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"It will have a catastrophic social impact that we cannot afford."
Mr Ezcurra argued that the current policy was "madness" and that China was not interested in Argentina out of benevolence.
"China needs soya to feed its poultry and meat industry," he added.
"There is no love here. China is not a Prince Charming."

Argentina's soya king rides high
• Rory Carroll and Oliver Balch
• Guardian Weekly, Friday 29 June 2007
•

The ambition of Manuel Santos Uribelarrea is written in big black letters on the side of machines reaping the plains of South America:
At 28 Santos owns more than 100,000 hectares of farmland in Argentina and Uruguay, is expanding into Brazil and has plans for Ukraine.
This empire is built on soya, which is blamed for the destruction of forests across South America.
The outcry has led to the tabling of a "forestry emergency" bill in Argentina's lower house of congress. It proposes a one-year moratorium on forest clearing and would oblige all 23 provinces to control and protect the region's biggest, most diverse ecosystem outside Brazil.
Santos says his company's drive for efficiency is helping to feed the world. "The environmentalists are extremists who want to leave everything as it is," he says. "But soya is a great crop. It is an important part of sustainable development. We are contributing to Argentina and a better world."
Argentina's reliance on cattle and grain changed in the 90s when the US biotech giant Monsanto turned the pampas into a springboard for genetic modification. Herbicide-tolerant soya turned the countryside brown, with 10m hectares sown in the past decade.
Soya is now the country's most valuable export.
There is, however, a dark side to many soya barons. "They are destroying our forest. These large companies leave nothing but smoke and ashes," said Oswaldo Maldonado, 48, who lives in a rural area of Chaco in northern Argentina and regularly sees what the soya bulldozers have wrought: splintered tree trunks and flattened vegetation.
Traditionally soya cultivation was concentrated in the three central provinces of Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Santa Fe, but demand is driving the plantations into the northern forests. If deforestation continues at its present rate, environmentalists predict that the lower forest ranges of the Yungas will disappear by 2010.
More than 2.3m hectares of dry and humid vegetation have been cleared for soya since 1995.
Agronomists warn that the Chaco's dry bush is unsuitable for intensive agriculture. Yet small farmers have been trying their hand at growing soya. Kilometres of abandoned scrubland bear testimony to their failure.
Last year leading European supermarkets, food manufacturers and fast-food chains pledged not to use soya illegally grown in Brazil's Amazon.
Argentina, however, remains vulnerable.
Campaigners accuse the government of turning a blind eye. In the Chaco savannah there is one inspector to monitor deforestation.

GRAIN
Genetically modified (GM) soya was introduced into Argentina in 1996 without any kind of debate either in Congress or among the public. Since then, its cultivation has spread across the country like wildfire. Today more than half of the country’s arable land is planted with soya. No other country in the world has devoted such a large area to a single GM crop. Argentina provides a unique opportunity to investigate the consequences for a country of intensive GMO cultivation.



“Superweeds” created by ecological imbalances inherent in monocropping with a GM crop, long predicted by ecologists, are jeopardising the long-term economic and environmental viability of RR soya. But instead of rethinking the whole agricultural model and encouraging farmers to return to mixed farming, where natural balances make it far easier to control weeds, the Argentine authorities are offering their full support to Monsanto, which is planning over the next five years to introduce a new form of GM soya. The new soya will have a gene inserted into it which makes it resistant to “dicamba”, a herbicide that kills broadleaf weeds.

According to Robert Hartzler, a weed specialist at Iowa University, dicamba brings its own problems. [12] The compound’s volatility means that it will kill off broad-leaved plants on fields and in houses up to half a kilometre away, which will undoubtedly cause yet further serious problems for the rural population. Monsanto is confident that resistance won’t become a serious problem, but Hartzler is not so sure. “I don’t think we can say that resistance won’t develop”, says Hartzler, “but it is a much lower likelihood than with other herbicide classes. But then, that’s what they originally said about glyphosate.” [13]
Another technical fix and another swathe of problems for Argentina’s communities".
How long will this madness prevail?