![]() She has a partial foot extending directly from her right thigh, and two fingers are missing from her right hand. Miguela Céspedes Bogado (above), 15, was born in the village of San Isidro, Alto Paraná, without legs. Eighty-five percent of the soy produced in Paraguay is genetically modified and unsuitable for human consumption. Lote 8, once a town of several hundred, is virtually gone today, with almost all of its territory given over to soy plantations.Ĭhemically treated transgenic soybeans (above) are marked with pink dye before planting, to distinguish them as toxic and inedible. ![]() “It’s either leave, or stay and die,” says Ángel. They, like many of their neighbors, sold their land once crop fumigation in the area began. 3īrothers Ángel and Pedro Ramírez (above) stand on the plot where their family’s home once stood, now the site of a transgenic soy field, in the town of Lote 8, in the Minga Porá district of Alto Paraná. But that is changing: Since the first soy boom in 1990, almost 100,000 small-scale farmers have been forced to migrate to urban slums about 9,000 rural families are evicted by soy production each year. ![]() 2 Unlike many other Latin Americans, most Paraguayans live in rural areas and are farmers by trade. Today, about 77% of Paraguayan land is owned by 1% of the population. In the last decade, the Paraguayan government has given away or illegally sold this public land to political friends in the soybean business, pushing the peasants out. The soy boom has been disastrous for small farmers, who, after living for years on government-allotted forestland, have begun to be uprooted. 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. 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. Slightly smaller than California, Paraguay is the world’s fastest-growing producer of soybeans and the fourth-largest soy exporter in the world. 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.
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