Tech | March 30, 2012 | 3 comments

Raising Resistance: The GM soya war in South America

source: http://ff.hrw.org/film/raising-resistance?city=4

JanforGore
Beautifully shot and interweaving interviews with scenes from soy fields in Paraguay, Raising Resistance explores Latin American farmers’ struggle against the expanding production of genetically modified soy in South America. Biotechnology, mechanisation, and herbicides have radically changed the lives of small farmers in Latin America. For farmers in Paraguay this means displacement from their land, loss of basic food supplies, and a veritable fight for survival. Geronimo Arevelos and a group of small farmers stand defiantly in a corporate-owned soy field adjacent to his own, blocking a tractor from spraying herbicides that will decimate his crops and expose nearby families to toxic chemicals. As corporate farms seize farmland and rapidly expand production of genetically modified soy, Geronimo and the campesinos find themselves in a life and death struggle. Raising Resistance illustrates the mechanisms of a global economy that relies on ‘monocrop’ agriculture and corporate ownership of land. In telling the story of Paraguay, Raising Resistance poses the larger question of whether the global community wants to go on living with a system that allows one crop to prosper at the expense of all others.

(Official Selection International Documentary Festival Amsterdam 2011)
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3 comments // Raising Resistance: The GM soya war in South America // Video

  • JanforGore
    • +1
      JanforGore  

    • http://www.i-sis.org.uk/SDILA.php
      GM soya disaster in Latin America.

      "Millions of hectares of Roundup Ready soybean were planted in Brazil in the period 2002-2003, while a moratorium was in effect. How did the big multinationals manage to expand cultivations of transgenic crop so extensively in developing countries? During the early years of introducing transgenic soybean into Argentina, Monsanto did not charge farmers royalties to use the technology. But now that farmers are hooked, the multinational is pressuring the government for payment of intellectual property rights, despite the fact that Argentina signed UPOV 78, which allows farmers to save seeds for their own use. Nevertheless, Paraguayan farmers have just signed an agreement with Monsanto to pay the company $2 per tonne."
      ~~~~
      Monsanto is the new drug dealer in town. How much of it have you eaten?

    • 1 year ago
  • JanforGore
  • JanforGore
    • +2
      JanforGore  

    • The expansion of the GM soy industry in Paraguay has occurred with a violent oppression of small farmers and indigenous communities. Farmers have been bullied into growing soy with pesticides at the expense of their food crops, health, and subsequently their farms. Farmers who live next to the soy fields have been driven away by the chemicals (Round up) which kill their crops and animals and cause illnesses. Almost 100,000 small farmers have been evicted from their land. Many indigenous communities have been forced to relocate and mechanization is driving more to urban areas and poverty. Farmers refusing to leave their land are targeted by hired security forces employed by the surrounding soy growers in the hope that they will eventually sell their land through intimidation. More than a hundred campesino leaders have been assassinated and more than two thousand others have faced trumped-up charges for their resistance to the intrusion of agribusiness.There is now a war taking place in South America over GM soy. And the American media is silent.

    • 1 year ago
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