- 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.
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- 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.
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- Now researchers fear that the heavy reliance on one crop
may bring economic ruin.
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- The GM soya, grown and sold by Monsanto, is the company's
great success story. Programmed to be resistant to Roundup Ready, 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- One of the problems in Argentina is the rapid spread
of weeds with natural resistance to Roundup Ready. 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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 Ready. The soil was becoming inert, and so much
so that dead weeds did not rot, he told New Scientist.
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- 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.
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- "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."
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,2763,1192869,00.html
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