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Land use and soy expansion

*NEW Cliff Welch on the soy economy in Paraguay Interview with professor Welch about the plans to turn the department of San Pedro into a purely soy region. Soy is needed in Europe and China as fodder, and for agrofuel. But it creates a total disaster in San Pedro and elsewhere.

Land reform
*Latin American intellectuals about land reform

*NEW (in Spanish) Manifestation against soy intrusion in Mariscal Lopez. Report on the manifestation on November 12th to denounce the illegal fumigations in the area. Mariscal Lopez is a colony in Caaguazú, and greatly suffers from the expansion of soy fields in the community over the past years. But the people there are convicted to keep their community livable.

*NEW Elderly people in Tekojoja. This is a testimony of people living next to a soy field of the mayor of Vaqueria, who is also a soy farmer. The old man and woman are immobile because of their age, and suffer the regular poisonous fumigations with bitterness and anger. The mayor from his part, is bluntly denying the existence of intoxications in Paraguay.

The Round Table on Responsible Soy has been strongly criticised by many social and campesino movements from soy producing countries. Nevertheless, Dutch NGOs Solidaridad and WWF now go a step further by organising the 'GM soy debate - Common sense on GM soy' in order to make GM soy certifyable as 'responsible'. This shows how perverted the RTRS process really is.
With video of protest action in Amsterdam on dec 9, 2008

Solidarity with campesino struggle in Belgium:

17th of April 2008, international day of peasant struggle... the blockade lasted all day long and was the initiative of activists of SEVEN European countries. Más: lasojamata.org/en/node/135

Wednesday April 23, 2008, Buenos Aires:During a plenary session of the 3rd conference of the Round Table on Responsible Soy, a group of representatives of organisations signing the declaration denouncing the RTRS, made an intervention expressing their rejection of the greenwash caused by the RTRS. "Responsible soy is an unresolvable contradiction and in no way a viable option". Watch video clip from protest below.

Islands surrounded by land. Ben Brown and Jessica Weisberg are editing a documentary about the social impacts of soy expansion in Paraguay. They follow the mother of a ten year old boy Silvino Talavera, who died in 2003 after being sprayed by agrochemicals while walking past the soy fields that border his family's house. They also speak with people from the community of Tekojoja, where inhabitants tried to halt the invasion of a soy field in their community, and suffered several violent police raids as a result of their protests.

Here is a short clip from the documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSeySYzzil8.