Pesticides – Agricultural land in Argentina: Slow violence

A few years ago, an advertisement from the agricultural chemical company Syngenta proclaimed the “United Soy Republic,” a fiction born of the imagination of the agricultural sector that seems to be becoming more and more real as the years go by. It extends across several national borders in South America’s Cono Sur, the area around the Tropic of Capricorn. Since the 1990s, Asian beans have triumphed throughout the region. And with it the players in the associated technology package: large agricultural companies, chemical and seed companies, global agricultural traders, investors. At the very edges of the soy republic, in the Chaco region in northwestern Argentina, which is threatened by deforestation, the dark side of this development model is particularly evident.

On a warm, humid day in February – it is summer in the southern hemisphere and rainy season in the Chaco – I meet Isaías Fernandez and Nancy López, indigenous leaders of the small Wichí-Weenhayek settlements of Quabracho and Oka Puckie, for an interview. Some of the wooden huts look badly damaged after a storm the night before, but the people I talk to remain unmoved. There are more important things to report. Now in the rainy season, local agricultural companies are starting to have the fields cultivated. For the residents of the settlements, this means having to suffer from the harmful effects of the pesticides sprayed on the neighboring soy fields.

The two communities settled years ago along the arterial road on the edge of the small town of Tartagal: 24 families on 95 hectares of land. The community lives in a permanent conflict over their land – there is currently another eviction notice and the people are acutely threatened with eviction. Life here is difficult, everyday life is characterized by many hurdles. Since there is no drinking water connection, water is transported in plastic canisters. If you look closely you can see the skull and the warning “Veneno”, gift. They are recycled pesticide canisters that farms and people in the area resell.

Shortly before, there had been another night-time spraying campaign right next to the settlement. Nancy’s heavily pregnant daughter suffered seizures and had to be taken to the hospital where a cesarean section was performed. Her child was born as a result of a shock reaction to pesticides. What does the future look like for a newborn who sees the light of day under this auspices?

Isaías is aware that living in such a polluted environment has long-term health consequences. Here and also in the next larger settlement, Misión Kilómetro 6, people report tumor diseases, respiratory and skin problems, and premature births and miscarriages. At some point, the residents of Oka Puckie and Quebracho decided they had had enough and confronted the driver of a sprayer truck that was driving in the soybean field next door under the cover of darkness. The subcontractor, who knew nothing about the existence of the neighboring settlement, had insight and switched off the machine – for the time being.

Today they are killing us with papers

The identity of the indigenous population of the Chaco was shaped by the historical experience of colonization by the Spanish Conquista and later by the Argentine nation-state, explains Nancy. The incursion of agribusiness and the associated deforestation in the region led to numerous conflicts over land use rights and property titles, simply called “papeles” (papers) in local jargon. She describes the expulsions and precarization of the indigenous population as a new wave of colonization, as an acute threat: “If you lose the forest, you lose your culture. If the companies come and cut down the forest, we will lose everything. They used to kill us with guns – now they kill us with papers.”

Starting in the 2000s, during the commodity boom and the world’s high market prices, Argentine agriculture expanded beyond the fertile Pampas region and led to alarming deforestation in the Chaco region to the north. The soy fields ate into forest areas that were used for agriculture for the first time. Scenes of destruction are unfolding that, for many residents of the Chaco, amounted to an apocalypse: bulldozers, protests and evictions. The end of local self-sufficiency destroyed ways of life and communities.

The harsh conditions of this region once prevented the Spanish from conquering the entire Chaco. In the rainy season everything turns into a muddy landscape, small country roads and farm roads become impassable and many villages and farms are cut off from the outside world. In summer temperatures sometimes exceed 40 degrees, which makes working outdoors impossible. Nevertheless, there is a lot of investment going on here. Huge silos operated by international grain traders such as Cargill, Bunge and Cofco are being built along country roads. The concentration of land here in the north is particularly high; agricultural operations with tens of thousands of hectares dominate the business. Legendary you can see small makeshift settlements, abandoned schools or cemeteries. They seem like brief irritations between the immense, monotonous soy and corn fields that stretch to the horizon. This remote and often referred to as marginal region is fully connected to the global food industry value chains.

The growth of agricultural and raw material exports was the financial salvation for the Argentine economy, which was able to quickly restructure itself after the national bankruptcy in 2001 and briefly free itself from excessive indebtedness. With export taxes of over 30 percent, the soy boom represented a lucrative source of foreign currency. But today the sacrifices that the soy production model demands can hardly be overlooked. People in rural Argentina are organizing themselves and establishing active networks like that of the Pueblos Fumigados, the sprayed villages. In Tartagal, the community radio station Voz Indígena plays an important role. Women from the indigenous communities in particular take part in workshops and produce their own radio shows. This is where she “woke up,” says Mónica Medina from Quebracho. They cannot be further sprayed with pesticides or distributed.

Responsibility of the pesticide manufacturer

It’s a colder April day in the Northern Hemisphere, 12,000 kilometers from Tartagal. Numerous guests are gathered in the event room of the Berlin human rights organization ECCHR, representatives of partner organizations from Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina as well as from German environmental organizations. It’s about the responsibility of the German Bayer AG and the demand that the company fulfill its duty of care to limit the harmful effects of products such as glyphosate on people and the environment. At the same time as the Bayer shareholders’ meeting at the end of April, the alliance submitted a complaint to the German contact point for the OECD Guidelines, accompanied by numerous information events. It’s about the technology package that Bayer has been selling since taking over the Monsanto Group: genetically modified soy seeds and pesticides tailored to them. And it’s about business practices in a social environment that is characterized by countless conflicts due to the advance of the agricultural sector.

The complaint is based on a detailed dossier, meticulous research into Bayer Crop Science’s sales structures in four Cono Sur countries (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay), as well as reports and interviews with people from the rural regions there who are affected by pesticides. Drift, polluted waters, unusable drinking water sources and serious health consequences from contact with pesticides are reported. Half of Argentina’s total agricultural area is used for soy cultivation, as well as huge areas for growing genetically modified corn. Glyphosate and other pesticides are used almost uncontrollably on all of these areas – the average consumption of 12 to 15 liters of pesticides per hectare by Argentine farmers is twice as high as in the USA. It is similar in neighboring countries.

Abel Areco, the lawyer who traveled from Paraguay and head of the BASE-IS organization, talks about the death of Rubén Portillo: The small farmer from Colonia Yerutí in eastern Paraguay died in 2011 due to pesticides, and 20 other people were poisoned. Local farms had improperly disposed of pesticide containers; The gift ended up in the wells of neighboring residents. Arecos Organization has been working with affected small farmers and indigenous communities for years and has accompanied many such cases. María José Venancio from the Argentine human rights organization CELS also reports on her work as a lawyer in Santiago del Estero, a northern province of Argentina. As she speaks of the numerous conflicts surrounding the expansion of agribusiness in her region, she becomes consumed with anger.

The author Rob Nixon describes this everyday violence against people and nature, in many small stages along the supply chains for agricultural products and food production, as slow violence – human rights violations through pollution and resource extraction that usually do not produce any spectacular news. It is a slow violence that spreads territorially, that is distant and absolutely normalized. Violence that many in Europe have little idea about and that people like Nancy and Isaías in distant Tartagal have long been analyzing. It still remains to be seen whether the German OECD contact point also agrees with their analysis.