Malvinas Argentinas, Córdoba

Notes from the Route of the Green Gold Rush

Agriculture is the bright light of today’s investment universe.

(JetFin Agro Conferences, Geneva/Zurich, 2011)

Genes are the “green gold” of the biotech century. The economic
and political forces that control the genetic resources of the planet
will exercise tremendous power over the future world economy, just
as in the industrial age access to and control over fossil fuels and
valuable metals helped determine control over world markets. In the
years ahead, the planet’s shrinking gene pool is going to become a
source of increasing monetary value.
(Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century, 1998)

Genetic-industrial agriculture will not only most likely exacerbate

existing ecological problems associated with chemical-industrial
agriculture, but also threatens to create new kinds of ecological and
human health problems and risks. Some of these new threats can
be understood in terms of the introduction of an entirely new form
of industrial pollution into the world — genetic pollution — to add
to the already existing problems of chemical and nuclear forms of
pollution.
(Gyorgy Scrinis, Colonizing the Seed, Published in Arena Magazine, No. 36, 1998)

The ongoing boom of agroindustrial biotechnology started in

Argentina in 1996, when the first genetically modified (GM) crop
was commercially released for cultivation: Monsanto’s Roundup
Ready™ glyphosate-tolerant soybeans. Since then, the monoculture
model — of which GM-soy is the principal protagonist — is applied
in Argentina as if territories were open laboratories, without taking
a precautionary principle into consideration. Year after year the
cultivated area is expanded, record harvests promoted and new
GM-traits and crops introduced. The area cultivated only with
soy rose from 6.67 million hectares in 1996/97 to 21 millions in
2012, which by then constituted 60% of the cultivated land. The
application of agrochemicals rose from 98 million litres to 370 million
per year in the same time span. Areal and terrestrial spraying takes
place 3 up to 48 times per year and next to rural communities,
neighbourhoods and schools, heavily affecting them. Cancer,
malformations, DNA-damages, chronic diseases and other health
problems are significantly increasing, especially in areas close to
GM-plantations. Children are the most vulnerable and therefore the
most quick and severe to be affected. The closer living conditions are
to GM-plantations, the more health problems encountered. Slowly,
the urban population starts to become scared. The agrochemicals
appear in food products they buy. Glyphosate, the most widely
used ingredient of the pesticides, can even be found in the rain that
falls from the sky, or as recently discovered in an Argentinian study,
in most of the samples of cotton sanitary products. Risks of GM-
organisms, being approved and commercially grown in the fields for
almost 20 years already, are not sufficiently studied or discussed.

In contrast to the Gold Rushes that took place in the 19th century,
the migration related to the 21st century “Green Gold Rush” is
moving away from where the transgenic green gold is extracted.
Peasants and indigenous communities are “in the way” and expelled
from their land. Many end up forming part of the poor suburban
populations of the big cities. The countryside is transformed into a
space to be used for the commercial application of techno-scientific
inventions and experiments without precautionary measures. The
heavily mechanised (and probably soon automated) agroindustrial
mode of production doesn’t need farmers, but rather a pool of
specialists, investors, controllers of agribusinesses, and some rural
contractors performing specific seasonal tasks. The monocultural
mode of production has more and more in common with remote-
controlled warfare. 1100 fumigation airplanes are in use in Argentina,
“an Airforce of Fumigation”, how Dr. Medardo Ávila Vázquez,
network coordinator of Médicos de Pueblos Fumigados (Doctors
of Fumigated Villages), called it. The herbicide 2,4-D, which is
increasingly used together with Glyphosate, was an ingredient of
Agent Orange during the Vietnam War produced by Monsanto and
Dow Chemical, the same companies that successfully provide seeds
and agrochemicals today.

After the economic crisis of 2001, the recovery of Argentina went

hand in hand with the GM-soy boom and its resulting retention taxes.
The National State strongly promotes — together with transnational
and national companies, the complicity of local governments,
universities and prestigious science institutions — the modern idea of
progress based on continuous techno-scientific innovation, without
taking into account the question: what kind of science? For whom,
and for what?

The open laboratory expanded from Argentina and Brazil to

neighbouring nations, what the multinational chemical and seed
company Syngenta was to name the “United Republics of Soy” in
one of their advertisements. In this model, territories are dealt with
as abstractions on a strategic map of investment, ignoring national
borders and violating human rights. The commodity is not only the
crop, but nature, people and genes.

Malvinas Argentinas

Malvinas Argentinas is a growing municipality with about 12,000

inhabitants located only 14 km east from the centre of the capital
city of Córdoba. For this reason locals called it a “sleeping room
town”: most of the people who live there work in Córdoba, and only
travel to Malvinas to sleep at night. Until a few years ago neighbours
generally did not have much contact with each other.

In June 2012, the Argentinian president Cristina Fernández de

Kirchner announced at the Council of the Americas in New York
City Monsanto’s investment plan to build one of the world’s biggest
corn seed processing plants in the town of Malvinas Argentinas. The
news was announced on a national Argentinian TV channel, while
Kirchner was taking part in the General Assembly of the United
Nations. Paradoxically, Kirchner’s discourse at the United Nations had
as a main subject the conflict between the UK and Argentina on the
sovereignty of the other Malvinas, the Falkland Islands, which gave
origin to the name of this small town in Córdoba.

Raquel and Rula, whom we met during one of our research visits,
told us how they decided to live in a quiet place and move from
Córdoba city to Malvinas in January 2012. A close friend of Raquel, a
scientist, long ago showed her Marie-Monique Robin’s documentary
“The World According to Monsanto”. When she heard the news
announced by the President, Raquel was shocked. The place where
she tried to find a quiet life started to appear like a scenario from
a future nightmare. For a big part of Malvinas’ population it might
have looked like a good news — a factory in town that could bring
more employment — but she started to put her worries into action,
making DVD-copies of Robin’s film and spreading them in the
neighbourhood.

The town has been surrounded, as so many other communities

elsewhere have, by monoculture plantations and the spraying of
pesticides. At the same time evidence of agrochemical spraying
and its consequences have been growing nationally, along with
resistance, thanks to initiatives like “Paren de Fumigar” (Stop the
Spraying), or the news-making register of cancer cases and activism
of the “Mothers of Ituzaingó” from the outskirts of the city of
Córdoba.

People in Malvinas Argentinas started to acquire more information

about Monsanto and what this factory could mean for their
environment and their health. A process of discussion started in the
community and resistance formed against the installation of the
factory and in Monsanto more widely. The company also started
to get active. With the support of the local government, they went
from home to home, offering educational training programs and
development for Malvinas, and invited neighbours to visit their
factory in Rojas, Buenos Aires Province, so that they could see how
all accusations against Monsanto were lies.

But what nobody believed would be possible became reality: the

multinational has been stopped. After three years of the construction
of the plant been blocked, Monsanto is leaving the town and
it’s sealing the land where . In Malvinas, two popular assemblies
are active (Malvinas Lucha por la Vida / Malvinas Lucha Por La
Vida - Línea Fundadora) and the blockade in front of the halted
skeleton of the construction is maintained by an independent
socio-environmental activist group (Bloqueo a Monsanto Malvinas
Argentinas - Córdoba).

19 years after the approval of the first GMO in Argentina, the

ensuing “Soy Miracle”, denounced by Dr. Andrés Carrasco — who
tested the ill effects of glyphosate on health — as an ongoing
“massive experiment”, is showing it’s disastrous, nightmarish face.
As the negative socio-ecological consequences, disturbing health
issues, and scientific evidence are piling up, it becomes more difficult
to silence them. Monsanto has become a target and a symbol of the
growing global distrust and resistance against the agro-industry and
the corporate control of seed, food and life itself.

These are notes from an ongoing shared investigation.

Aurelio Kopainig and Julia Mensch, Buenos Aires, November 2015.