Soya king changes face of pampas - Observer

[Eugene]

Source: The Observer

Soya king changes face of pampas

The GM crop has saved Argentina's economy - but
now threatens the survival of its forests

Rory Carroll in Villa Canas and Oliver Balch
in Tres Isletas
Sunday June 17, 2007
The Observer

The ambition of Manuel Santos Uribelarrea is written in big
black letters on the side of machines reaping the plains of
South America: MSU. It is harvest time and the state-of-
the-art behemoths bearing his initials have a mission to
revolutionise agriculture, change the world's eating habits
and make their owner very, very wealthy.

-snip-

The company, which concentrates on producing and leaves
the processing to others, considers itself one of the top five
growers in Argentina. Soya is now by far the country's most
valuable export and a driver of Argentina's recovery from
the 2001 economic crash. A hefty 27.5 per cent tax on
exports - worth £2.6bn in the first quarter of last year - has
become a significant source of revenue.

Food for the world, dashing innovators, national economic
saviours - there is some truth to that. 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
corner 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, Cordoba 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. The bush savannah of
the Chaco, which covers a quarter of northern and central
Argentina, is also threatened. More than 2.3m hectares of
dry and humid vegetation have been cleared for soya since
1995.

-snip-

Read more: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2104801,00.html

[jilln]

1. What about the deforestation due to cattle grazing?

And a huge percentage of grain in this world goes to feed cattle, not people... so its impact is far worse.

[pitohui]

2. to oversimply -- cows are grazed on low quality soil, crops are grown on high quality soil

between the two of them nothing is going to be left to the wild whatsoever

however if you have to pick one, cattle grazing is better because there is SOME ability for the cow to co-exist with wild species, while soy cannot co-exist with any species, it creates what is known as an agricultural desert

go to where cattle are grazed, and while it may be scrubby, you can still see birds, hawks, "tough" scrubby type vegetation that supports some life

go to where soy is grown and it is death, there is nothing there from horizon to horizon

don't eat soy and don't make excuses for eating soy by saying well, cows are just as bad, they ain't "just as bad," cows graze where you can't grow crops to begin with

[Dogmudgeon]

3. You see this in "movement" literature all the time

Like all high-emotion crusades, there is a drive to pick and choose evidence that fits the ideology of The Cause. Vegetarians often ignore factory farming and corporate control of the entire food chain; it's all about the evils of eating meat.

Not to demonize simply vegetarianism, but there are any number of crusades that are making it difficult to see WTF is happening with our world. The biggest one now is the "global warming skeptics" movement. And everybody claims that Science is on their side, just as it was with God a hundred years ago. But the idea of "a survey of the literature" is unknown -- or reason to believe that there is a conspiracy afoot.

There are many climatologists, vegetarians, etc., who are NOT driven by the emotion of a Cause, but they do not have a fraction of the clout that the self-described radicals do.

What will it take to de-ideologize science, anyway?

--p!