Genetic engineering in organic soy

A report by Sandra Dütsschler in the current issue of Lateinamerika Nachrichten.

The sun is at its highest point, the sky is deep blue, the heat presses into the basin. Cows lie in the shade of the trees that line the little stream which flows between the fields and meadows. Beside the pasture grows a strip of sugarcane, behind it the hills rise around the basin covered in forest. The scene is extremely idyllic — if it were not for the relentless clatter of a combine harvester.

It is harvest time in Capanema, in southern Brazil. Roberto Rama, who farms this land in the second generation, is harvesting his soy today. His father and brother, with whom he shares the land, help him. A neighbor provides his truck for transporting the harvest for a fee, and the combine harvester together with driving services was rented from another acquaintance. As smallholder farmers, the Ramas cannot afford a truck or their own agricultural machinery.

“Monsanto has prices in its hands and can adjust them arbitrarily according to the profitability of soybean cultivation.”

Anyone familiar with the common image of Brazilian large landowners, who send combine harvesters by the dozen across their fields, will be taken aback at this point: a soybean farmer who cannot afford his own machines? But that is not all: Roberto Rama farms according to international organic farming standards and runs his farm by the rules of biodynamic agriculture designed by Rudolf Steiner around 1924. Roberto Rama is one of about 300 smallholders in the region around Capanama, in the southwest of the Brazilian state of Paraná, who produce organic soy. Many of them have never farmed any other way: “Pesticides have never been used on my fields,” Roberto Rama says with no small amount of pride. Others switched to ecological farming at a time when organic was still a marginal phenomenon in Europe: driven by poisoning incidents in their families and fish die-offs in the rivers, a group of farmers questioned conventional cultivation methods. They decided to forego chemicals and sought more sustainable production methods that are harmless to people and the environment. In 1994 the region’s first company trading in organic soy was founded and paid farmers an additional premium for the considerably greater labor involved.

Today gebana Brasil is active in the organic-soy business. The company, founded in 2002, is a sister company of gebana Switzerland, which emerged from one of the first initiatives for fair banana trade (“gebana” stands for “fair banana”). To this day gebana’s principles are based on those of fair trade and sustainability: production focuses on smallholders who are given direct market access, and prices are paid for the bio-certified soy that are up to 50 percent above the usual market price. Soon the first producer associations are also to be certified with the FLO fair trade label.

But the paths of organic producers in southern Brazil are rocky, as Roberto Rama’s example shows. The young father should actually be satisfied with his harvest: the pale yellow peas are firm and uniformly sized, and the pods hang plentifully from the plants. This is in stark contrast to many other soybean farmers in the region, who lost much of their crop due to an extended drought. However, when Roberto delivers his load to the gebana Brasil headquarters, a rapid test shows that the beans contain traces of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The contamination by foreign plant material likely came from the combine harvester that had previously harvested genetically modified soy, or from the truck that transported such crops. Even with thorough cleaning, these machines can contaminate an entire load via the tiniest residues. But the small family farms rely on borrowed equipment; owning their own machines is unaffordable. Roberto Rama nevertheless receives the full Demeter price for his soy despite the GMO traces, but his disappointment is plain to see: “I deliberately farm organically and try to do everything right — and it’s all for nothing,” Roberto says, disheartened, and after a short pause adds: “Genetically modified soy is a serious problem for us.” Eduardo Mattioli Rizzi, head of agricultural production at gebana Brasil, can only agree. He is already trying to obtain GMO-free seed for next summer, but this is a difficult undertaking. Seed production is largely geared toward genetically modified varieties, and even conventional seed often shows GMO traces, since seed producers are not immune to contamination from pollen of neighboring GMO fields.

The second major problem for gebana Brasil is soybean deliveries from farmers that have been contaminated by pollen or by dirty machines. While tiny traces like those found in Roberto Rama’s load are still tolerated under organic standards, more severe contamination is not. “This year we had to reject deliveries from ten farmers because their GMO levels exceeded the tolerance threshold,” explains Eduardo Rizzi. He says no one enjoys doing this, but contaminated beans must not enter the company’s processing stream. One can easily imagine the frustration of rejected farmers who have always kept their fields according to the rules and weeded by hand.

Farmer Abelino Murinelli prevents contamination of his organic soy by GMOs in his own way. A few kilometers away from Roberto Rama, he sets off with his wife, two neighbors and his two sons for his field. Smiling, Abelino points to his tool, a sickle: “I always harvest my soy by hand,” he explains, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. In the still merciless afternoon sun Abelino and his helpers begin cutting the dried stalks in bundles, gathering them and using a petrol-powered threshing machine to separate the beans from the rest of the plant. They joke and laugh together, occasionally take a sip of water from the brought can, and accept the physically hard work: “That way I at least know for sure that my soy stays clean,” Abelino explains.

For the 1.5 hectares of soy Abelino Murinelli cultivated this summer, hand harvesting may be an option, but even among smallholders few harvest manually anymore. Besides the strenuous physical labor, it is primarily the lack of labor — caused by young people moving to urban areas — that prevents farmers from harvesting with a sickle. It is partly this labor shortage, but above all the cost of labor, that leads more and more large landowners in Brazil, as well as smaller farms, to adopt genetically modified soy varieties. The current generation of GM soy is resistant to the aggressive herbicide glyphosate, which efficiently kills all weeds and thereby saves the user a lot of work and money. That at least was the line of argument used in 2004 when the Brazilian government was heavily pressured not only by the GMO manufacturer Monsanto but also by farmers’ associations to approve the cultivation of genetically modified crops. At the time it was said that heavily indebted farmers would finally be able to farm profitably. But what does the financial situation of Brazilian farmers look like today, five years after the introduction of genetic engineering? “Hardly different from without genetic engineering,” says agronomist Eduardo Mattioli Rizzi and immediately explains why: “Monsanto initially offered its glyphosate-containing herbicide at a favorable price and growing genetically modified soy gave farmers a higher profit margin. But then prices rose massively and the margin disappeared.” Due to its patent rights the multinational Monsanto controls prices and can adjust them arbitrarily to the profitability of soybean cultivation. It is hard to expect that farmers will benefit from this situation in the long run.

Brazilian farmers face many types of dependency, as the example of Oswaldo Jair Woiechowski shows. He spent twelve years fattening chickens for a processing plant. “I didn’t even notice that I was being exploited,” says the now 38-year-old, pushing back his Che Guevara cap. But at some point Oswaldo had enough; he gave up the chicken farm and began practicing organic arable farming. “You have to hit rock bottom to begin to rethink,” he says thoughtfully, and: “Today I earn less, but my life is self-determined and I am more independent — and happier.”
On the cultivation of genetically modified soy, Oswaldo says: “The destructive potential of GMOs is huge; it affects not only plant life but also air and water.” All these effects are of course concealed by the large corporations that offer GMO seed and spraying agents, and people in rural areas do not have the opportunity to question these mechanisms, Oswaldo says. The critical farmer speaks of “raising awareness” and “resistance struggle.” But he is pessimistic about the future of Brazilian agriculture in connection with GMOs: “People only value something once they no longer have it. That is the effect that will happen with the cultivation of GM soy,” he says, drawing a comparison with his own life: “Only when we have hit rock bottom will we realize that genetic engineering is the wrong tool.”

“Only when we have reached the very bottom will we realize that genetic engineering is the wrong means.”

Eduardo Mattioli Rizzi does not see it quite so bleakly, at least not for organic farming. The biggest challenge is to reduce cultivation costs, "that mainly means that we have to get the weed problem under control mechanically," he explains. In the fact that an easing of organic cultivation together with rising demand for organic products could also arouse the interest of large corporations, Eduardo sees both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, these companies could decisively advance research, on the other hand the agronomist is aware that this would also lower prices and thus farmers' profits.

An opportunity could be the growing interest in non-GMO soy. Especially from Europe, premiums and project funds are currently being allocated to promote the cultivation of non-GMO varieties. If these financial resources are effectively implemented and reach the producers, farmers in the Capanema region could again increasingly return to conventional or even organic farming. This would limit the risk of contamination and greatly facilitate the livelihoods of the 300 organic smallholder farmers in the region.