There was an article in a recent issue of New Scientist (last couple of weeks). about the
near monoculture of GMsoya production in Argentina and the problems this is already causing locals and superweeds appearing.
Local Libraries may still have copies or presume see NS website or you can order backcopies from them.

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 tragile 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 (see
Diagram, p 43). 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