GMO soy bringing poverty, poor health to South America

[Judi Lynn]

GMO soy bringing poverty, poor health to South America
Sunday, November 14, 2010 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

(NaturalNews) Multinational biotechnology giants like Monsanto continue to spread their genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) around the world in the name of ending world hunger and reducing poverty, but a new report out of Sweden has found the exact opposite to be true. According to a recent piece in SvD, a Swedish newspaper, the transition of South American agriculture from small-scale, localized, diversified farming to primarily large-scale, industrialized, GMO soy farming is destroying the environment, increasing poverty, and harming human health.

GMO soy is destroying local food
"The multinationals are talking about solving climate problems and food supply through GMO, but they are really only interested in making money," explained Jorge Geleano, an advocate for small farmers' rights in South America, to SvD. "Their methods destroy traditional farming that provides food for our population and replaces it with soy, which goes into animal feed to provide meat for the West."

According to Galeano, thousands of family farms in his native homeland of Paraguay have been forced off their land in order to make room for large GMO soy plantations. A nation that was once highly self-sufficient and that grew a lot of its own native foods like potatoes, sweet potatoes, legumes, and lentils, Paraguay has literally been transformed into a corporate-dominated, industrial soy-producing machine. And other South American countries are facing the same peril.

GMO soy is destroying people's lives
Galeano explained to SvD that he helped try to lead a resistance back in 2005 along with about 40 other families that refused to give up their land to the GMO-giants. But these families were ultimately forced off the land anyway, their houses burned down, and even some of their friends and family members gunned down by armed paramilitary forces for not complying with orders.

More:
http://www.naturalnews.com/030390_GMO_soy_poverty.html

Familiar pattern, by now, isn't it?

[dipsydoodle]

1. Associated issue

From 2008 :

Amidst renewed fears over the impact of biofuels on the environment, which a recent Royal Society report warned could "do more harm than good," the European Union has issued a draft law that would propose a ban on the imports of biofuels derived from crops grown on certain types of land — such as forests, wetlands and grasslands. It would also require them to deliver a — as yet undetermined — "minimum level of greenhouse gas savings."

The ban would particularly target environmentally harmful crops like palm oil, which Europe imports from Southeast Asia; it could also affect a few crops grown in Latin America, including soy, wheat and sugar beets. The decision to enforce a ban comes in the wake of a rash of studies that have downplayed or thoroughly discredited some of the more bullish claims made by biofuel producers.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/01/european_union_biofuel_ban.php

In the case of soy its where its being planted on areas which are stripped rainforest. A few years ago it lead to ban on import of soy chicken feed from some Latin American countries here in the UK.

See also 2 meg PDF : http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/livestock_impacts.pdf

[naaman fletcher]

2. to be fair

Although I hate Monsanto, it's not Monsanto throwing people off of their land. that is the fault of paramilitaries and/or the government of, in this case, paraguay.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Your comment is so naive as to be unbelievable. nt

[naaman fletcher]

4. only

if one believes that blame for things should be put at the feet those most directly responsible. Of course, if one lives in your world where the fault of every single thing in the world is "bushwackers" then of course yes, I am naive.

[glitch]

5. You should read Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins.

Excellent book, you won't be able to put it down. He shows how multinational corporations work together with the corrupt and their paramilitaries. And when they aren't corrupt they get removed from power, one way or another. His subsequent books are excellent as well.

[naaman fletcher]

6. I did read it,

And I agree with it, but it is silly and ridiculous to have an article like the one above and not even mention the government and the judicial system in question.

I suspect the reason why is that the president of paraguay is a leftist, and there is a lack of intellectual honesty on this forum.

[glitch]

7. You are being intellectually dishonest to blame the corruption in Paraguay on their new president.

They've been far right wing since the end of WWII.

:thumbsdown:

[naaman fletcher]

8. I didn't blame it all on the new government,

I said though I suspect why there was no mention of the government is because it is a leftist leader. I do wonder, however, how long it will be before problems in paraguay are allowed to be blamed on him. two years? 30 years?

[Judi Lynn]

9. You're right. President Fernando Lugo was the 1st non-Colorado President in Paraguay in over 50 yrs

The National Republican Association-Colorado Party was the party of Nazi-supporter, Dr. Mengele friend, protector after WWII, Alfredo Stroessner, a man who ruled for almost 35 years, gave haven to the monstrous Mengele and led his own genocidal war against Native Paraguayan people.

There's no way in hell a man whose entire family was terrorized, harrassed, imprisoned and tortured by Stroessner would be able to cleanse the country in his brief time in office after the Colorado Party absolutely controlled the entire country and everything in it for FIFTY YEARS. The oligarchy in Paraguay has been fascists seemingly forever. The following article points to some accerated hostilities during the _{George W. Bush} administration. You recall we were aware of the belief in Paraguay that _Bush had purchased a large swath of land in the same region owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, above the Guarani Aquifer, the largest inland body of underground fresh water in the world.

U.S. MARINES BLAMED FOR DEATHS

On July 12, Paraguayan campesino groups and social organizations held a press conference to announce that US Marines and special groups acting as paramilitaries "are responsible for more than 30 disappearances and deaths" since April of workers and campesinos in Paraguay. "In less than three months there were more than 30 disappearances and several deaths, all at the hands of the landowners of each place," Nicolas Barreto of the Paraguayan Campesino Movement (MCP) told the Argentine news agency Telam. (Telam, July 12)

Paraguayan armed forces spokesperson Col. Elvio Antonio Flores Servin told Telam the charges were untrue: "There is not a single US Marine here in Paraguay," he said. But according to Barreto, "in Paraguay, the army and the paramilitary groups act in the evictions with brutal repression against campesinos, leaving people wounded, dead and disappeared, with the direct control and intervention of marines. (Territorio Digital, Posadas, Misiones , July 14)

"Recently the boy Silvino Talavera died in Itapua from toxic agrochemicals, his mother reported it and in vengeance they dismembered her brother and threw him out there so everyone could see what these people are capable of doing," Barreto explained. That incident apparently took place in Mariscal Estigarribia, where activists charge the US Southern Command has posted a force of 2,800 Marines. In the same area, the Paraguayan government has created a Citizen Security Guard, a special group that acts as a sort of legalized paramilitary group. Barreto said the paramilitary groups recruit their members from among the children of the campesinos. When human rights groups recently called on the government to dismantle the groups, deputy interior minister Commissary General Mario Agustin Saprisa responded: "in the United States and Colombia exist and have had good results."

Barreto said the violence has emerged in response to stepped-up campesino struggles. "With his announced zero tolerance policy, President Duarte Frutos militarized the struggle and gave it a framework of unusual violence," said Barreto. "To such a point that the Marines participate in the repression and even occupy agricultural schools. That is, they act like a true occupation army." (Telam, July 12)

More:
http://www.ww4report.com/node/2252

~~~~~
There's some helpful information on Paraguay's paramilitaries in the following, and an interesting point made on Colombia's paramiltaries which I've never known, which is good to know now!

Paraguay: Militarism and Social Movements
Written by Raul Zibechi
Sunday, June 03 2007 08:33

~snip~
However, the militarization of Paraguayan society is a much less visible process but with long term repercussions. 2004 was the tipping point. President Nicanor Duarte Frutos decreed the use of the armed forces in the streets to carry out internal security tasks in rural areas and at the same time promoted the creation of Citizen Security Councils, paramilitary organizations armed by the Ministry of the Interior. If the use of the military for police tasks is a grave development, the creation of the Security Councils marks an unprecedented move in the continent. It is true that the Colombian paramilitaries, formed forty years ago at the behest of US advisers, control a large part of the country and State apparatus; and that in Guatemala the paramilitaries played a significant role in the fight against the guerrillas and that in Peru the "rondas" civilian patrols armed by the army played a similar role. But in those three countries one might argue - from a "scorched earth" logic – that their wars led to the arming of genocidal paramilitary groups.

Paraguay's case is different. Here, the paramilitaries have grown out of social conflict, from the struggle of the campesino movements for land and agrarian reform. And it has been the Paraguyan State that has created them. The big landowners took the first step ten years ago by creating the Committee for the Defence of Private Property. Now it is the very government, via the Interior Ministry, that has created the Citizen Security Councils, a parallel structure, armed by the State and protected by soya planters and big landowners. In the last decade, the area sown with genetically manipulated soya went from 800,000 hectares to 2 million hectares, taking up 64% of the country's agricultural area. The soya frontier advances over communal lands and those of small farmers and has led to a dramatic clearance of rural working families from the land. When Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship fell in 1989, 67% of Paraguayans lived in rural areas , now barely 47% remain on the land. Around a million and a half Paraguayans live in Argentina, 50,000 in Spain. (1)

Soya's advance was accompanied by the rise of the rural workers movement, gathered in two large organizations : the national Coordinating Table of Campesino Organizations (MCNOC), linked to Via Campesina and the National Rural workers Federation (FNC). Marches, roadblocks, land occupations and sit-ins in public buildings turned the rural workers movement into the most important in the country. The movements' power was such that they managed, in 2002, to hold up neoliberal privatization policies and were able to settle thousands of families. But the Duarte Frutos government that took office in 2003 took a severe anti-popular and above all anti-rural workers line. With the police and the governing Colorado Party's client networks of control overrun, hardline policies were imposed. One eloquent statistic :the Citizen Security Councils today have 22,000 members, many of them recruited from the Colorado Party or from criminals, compared to just 9,000 police.

More:
http://medialeft.net/main/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=256%3Aparaguay-militarism-and-social-movements&catid=27%3Aenergy-wars&Itemid=2

[Judi Lynn]

10. You don't even know who controls the paras in Paraguay?

You imagine everything works the way it does in Colombia?

You desperately need more information as soon as possible. Why not stop "winging it," and break down and do some actual studying on the subject?

[naaman fletcher]

11. I'm simply stating

that the government of paraguay bears a certain responsibility for what goes on in paraguay. But since the president is a leftist you don't want to discuss that.

I noticed you also had little to say when the leftist president was fighting communist rebels.