Evan Abramson
In October, I visited rural communities in two Paraguayan departments, Alto Paraná and San Pedro, to photograph the social conflicts generated by industrial soy production. Slightly smaller than California, Paraguay is the world’s fastest-growing producer of soybeans and the fourth-largest soy exporter in the world. In 2007, soy covered 6.2 million acres of the country, and the area devoted to the crop was expected to increase to 6.5 million acres by the end of 2008.1 This exponential increase is a result of the rising demand for meat and cattle feed in China, as well as the booming agro-fuel industry in Europe. Industrial soy serves these markets.
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Miguela Céspedes Bogado (above), 15, was born in the village of San Isidro, Alto Paraná, without legs. She has a partial foot extending directly from her right thigh, and two fingers are missing from her right hand. Her father used to use a backpack kit to apply pesticides and herbicides to his fields for his family’s own consumption, but stopped doing so about eight years ago. San Isidro, a small community composed of 100 or so houses clustered around one single road, is surrounded by transgenic soy plantations on all sides, at a higher elevation than the community itself. Cancer rates are high in the area; miscarriages are common, and several children have been born with birth defects.
Due to a dangerous combination of widespread corruption among local authorities, porous borders, and lax enforcement of environmental laws, soy cultivation dumps more than 6 million gallons of pesticides and herbicides into the Paraguayan soil every year, including several that are classified by the World Health Organization as extremely hazardous, like 2,4-D, Gramoxone, Paraquat, Metamidofos, and Endosulfan. About 90% of the soy produced in Paraguay is transgenic Roundup Ready, a variety engineered by the St. Louis–based Monsanto Company to be resistant to its patented herbicide.5 Fields of RR soy are indiscriminately fumigated with the herbicide, which kills everything in its path except the soy.
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