The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

276 the world according to monsanto“How is that possible?” The question startled Roberto Franco, deputyminister of agriculture, whom I met in Asunción on January 17, 2007. Heseemed delighted to see me, so infrequently do European reporters showany interest in his country, which had been stifled for nearly forty years bythe dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954–89).“The transgenic seeds entered illegally,” he said with a nervous smile. “It’swhat we call bolsa blanca, because they came in white sacks with no indicationof their source.”“But where did they come from?”“Well, mainly from Argentina, but also a little from Brazil.”“Who organized the smuggling?”“Large Paraguayan soy producers, who have close ties with their Argentinecolleagues.”“Do you think Monsanto played a role in the smuggling?”“Well, we don’t have any evidence. But it’s not impossible that firms involvedin this technology helped promote their varieties. Faced with this situation,the government had to act, because we export almost all our grain,23 percent of it to the European Union, which requires the labeling of agriculturalproducts that contain GMOs. We have no way of knowing whetherthe soy was transgenic or not. To avoid losing our markets—soybeans accountfor 10 percent of our GDP—we had to legalize the illegal crops.”“Putting it bluntly, the government was confronted with a fait accompli?”“Yes. We have the same problem today with Bt cotton, which is in theprocess of spreading with no official authorization and no law to govern it.”“You don’t think it was a trap?”“Well, we’re not the only ones; Brazil went through the same thing.”A strange coincidence indeed. In 1998, when RR soybeans were invadingthe North American plains and the Argentine pampas, Monsanto seemed tobe champing at the bit in Brazil, the world’s second-largest soybean producer.A petition filed by Greenpeace and the Brazilian Institute for ConsumerDefense (IDEC) secured a temporary suspension of the marketing ofGMOs on the grounds that “with no prior study of the environmental impactand the health risk to consumers, it would violate the precautionary principleof the Convention on Biodiversity” signed in 1992 in Río de Janeiro.By lucky chance, smuggling was organized in the Brazilian state of RioGrande do Sul; seeds were clandestinely imported from nearby Argentina,which led them to being nicknamed “Maradona” after that country’s famed