To the European eye, long accustomed to square hedgerows and neatly tilled arable land, the countryside of eastern Paraguay is unexceptional, almost pretty. The bare, rolling hills spread out languidly toward the far distance. The sky is vast, its domination of the horizon broken only by the occasional homestead, leafy copse or bulky metal silo.
But to 47-year-old Meliton Ramirez, this is no Arcadian paradise. It’s a wasteland. Juddering down a farm track in a mud-strewn Jeep, he points to a wide field buttressing the roadside. It has recently been sown with soya and the green-leafed plants are just sprouting. It looks like it could be a huge flowerbed of wild clover.
“Thirty years ago, almost all of this was woodland,” said Ramirez, who’s been a farmer in Alto Parana state all his life.
He grew up surrounded by the Interior Atlantic Forest, listening to the sound of bare-throated bellbirds and saffron toucanets. Before the advent of commercial farming, the forest covered 85 percent of eastern Paraguay. Now, with roughly 12 percent of it still standing, silence fills the air.
“There used to be 2,000 families living here. Now there’s only 30, if that,” he said.
The story of Ramirez’s home village of Minga Pora is typical of what is happening across swaths of South America. It is a story that starts on the dinner tables of rich nations, where a global hunger for meat and dairy products is fueling an ever-rising demand for the industrial farming of animals that depend on high-protein feed. At the bottom of this food chain is the soya plant.
Millions of hectares of intensively cultivated soya plants are fueling the destruction of tropical forests and savannah — displacing farmers and communities, leading to poverty, ill health and even violence, ruining habitats and exacerbating global warming.
HARROWING REPORT
A report by campaign group Friends of the Earth (FoE) published on Tuesday aims to focus the attention of UK consumers and the government on the scale of destruction caused by the mass appetite for soya. It details for the first time the cutting, burning and spraying that occurs as a consequence.
The report, What’s Feeding our Food?, will be used to launch a campaign urging the government to take action, including ending subsidies and other policies to encourage intensive farming and making sure public money spent on food is not propping up damaging practices.
Across the main soya-producing countries of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, an area the size of California has been cleared for this one crop, which is then exported around the world, mainly to the EU and China. As the third biggest customer in the EU, the UK requires nearly 1.2 million hectares to generate the 1.7 million tonnes of soya beans and 652,000 tonnes of crushed soya meal imported in the most recent year for which figures are available, 2006 to last year.
That provides the vast majority of soya used by UK farmers who produce 850 million broiler chickens, 855 million dozen eggs, 10 million turkeys, 4.9 million pigs, and 10 million cattle for dairy and beef. Some of this food is exported, but imports, mostly from the EU, are also reared using soya feed, the report says.
“Even though bacon, burgers, milk and cheese may be produced in the UK, most will have come from animals fed on crops grown on the other side of the world,” the report says. Nor is the pace of change slackening: this year official estimates judge that soya production will increase in all three major producers. Although demand for meat is largely flat in the UK, it is growing in developing countries.
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