Brazil soy farmers tap GM black market in key state
Date: 06-Sep-00
Country: BRAZIL
Author: Reese Ewing
According to the Brazilian Association of Seed Producers (Abrasem), farmers in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul are well placed next to the Argentine border to buy seeds from the world's second largest GM producer after the United States.
Although planting of GM soy has been reported in the state for the last three years, grains traders say they see no noticeable decrease in sales abroad to GM-wary European or Asian markets.
"I believe farmers are buying contraband GM seed on the black market," said Abrasem President Ywao Miyamoto.
"Last year Rio Grande do Sul planted about a million hectares - 30 percent - with GM soy. This year it's going to plant a lot more in November," Miyamoto told Reuters, adding that Abrasem's estimate on GM plantings was still unofficial.
Miyamoto said he arrived at the figure by comparing the fall in state sales of soybean seed developed by the research arm of the Agriculture Ministry Embrapa and the state's planted soy area, which had varied little over the last few years.
Brazil is the only country in the Western Hemisphere that attempts to ban the commercial planting, importing or sale of GM, which has turned out to be a daunting task. Brazil is the world's second largest soybean producer.
Embrapa carries out three-year programmes of selective cross-breeding to develop disease-resistant seed varieties and issues them to a handful of licensed growers who then multiply the hybrids and sell them to the end user, the farmer.
"Official sales have been down so much over the last few years that seed vendors are saying that they are going to cut production," said Miyamoto, voicing concern over the long-term economic and environmental effects of a black market in seeds.
Chief soybean specialist Flavio Franca of independent analysts Safras e Mercado told Reuters that no official estimates on the planting of GM soybeans in Brazil existed.
"Transgenic soybeans are a touchy issue. They are illegal, so why test for something that isn't supposed to be there?" he said. But he was not prepared to dismiss Abrasem's estimate, albeit unofficial.
Franca said he could imagine scenarios, such as the replanting of beans from a previous harvest to cut costs, which would account for some drop in official sales but none would amount to a fall even close to 30 percent.
"The area planted hardly fell at all last year, so his (Miyamoto's) argument about the planting of GM is quite reasonable," said Safras' Franca.
Miyamoto said illegal GM planting has gone on for years in Rio Grande do Sul despite government threats to confiscate or burn crops found to harbour altered DNA. In a year with normal rains, the state produces 15 percent of the national soy crop.
Over the last three years Brazil has not exactly been consistent in its GM policy.
Watchdog groups like Greenpeace, Brazil's consumer protection agency and landless movement have opposed the wide-scale use of biotechnology on national soil which they say lacks sufficient environmental and health studies.
The government, its biosafety board and biotech giants such as Monsanto have been fighting in the courts in a bid to open Brazil's borders to biotechnology and work out safety regulations that will not close out the possible economic and health benefits of GM.
The Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oils Industries (Abiove) reports that it first imported and processed GM soy shipments in 1997, but it has since stopped these imports.
Ships with GM corn from Argentina have been unloading their cargo for Brazil's northeast poultry and pig industry in recent months because of a shortage in the national corn supply caused by a drought and frosts over the southern farming belt.
And Brazil imported from U.S. agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland 75 million litres of anhydrous alcohol made from corn for its automobile fleet last month. The United States is the world's largest grower of GM corn.