The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

paraguay, brazil, argentina: the “united soy republic” 275The question was hard to answer. At the Ministry of Health, Dr. GracielaCamarra acknowledged that Roundup pollution had become a real publichealth problem but that for now it was impossible to number the victims.“We are trying to set up a reporting system so that we can be informed assoon as a suspect case appears, but it’s not simple. I know of a case of twochildren who died after eating fruit sprayed with herbicide. And then therewas Antonio Ocampo Benítez, talked about in the press, who almost diedafter swimming in a polluted river. There was another tragedy in an indigenouscommunity in the department of San Pedro, where three children succumbedto the effects of spraying. We in the Ministry of Health are trying topersuade our colleagues in the Ministry of Agriculture to enforce the rulesfor the proper use of herbicides, but no one can stand up to the sojeros. Andyet we’re all concerned, even here in Asunción, because the fruits and vegetableswe buy all come from the countryside.”Smuggled Seeds“We are first in the world in soy production per inhabitant, with an averageof sixteen hundred pounds per person,” Tranquillo Favero bluntly declaredin a June 12, 2004, interview with the Argentine daily Clarín. The Paraguayan“soybean king” explained that he had substantially contributed tothis record, since he himself cultivated 125,000 acres in the departments ofAlto Paraná and Amambay.Welcome to Paraguay, which in ten years had risen to the rank of sixthlargestsoy producer in the world and the fourth-largest exporter! From 1996to 2006, surfaces devoted to soybean cultivation went from less than 2.5million acres to 5 million acres, an increase of 10 percent a year. For goodmeasure, the Clarín reporter hastened to add that the Paraguayan boom wasdue to the cultivation model graciously provided by Aapresid, the Argentineassociation of large sojeros closely associated with Monsanto. If he had gonea little further, he could have added that the organization had transmitted toits counterparts in Capeco not just the technique of direct sowing but alsoillegal RR soybean seeds. In 2004, no Paraguayan law authorized the cultivationof GMOs, even though they covered nearly half the cultivated land(this was still true in 2007).