Latin American women Campesina women promoting native seed fairs. Photo by Julio César Mereles/Latin America Press.

Latin American women Campesina women promoting native seed fairs. Photo by Julio César Mereles/Latin America Press.

Traditional food systems are disappearing as large-scale farming expands.

Farming, as a campesino or indigenous family practice that for centuries ensured natural food on Paraguayan land, is threatened by a small number of producers that are developing a farming model based on large-scale modern agricultural technology, which continually decreases the need for manual labor and in which multinational corporations take control of much of Paraguay’s natural resources like land, water, and biodiversity.

In the early 1970s, during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89), Paraguay opened itself up to agro-businesses, including the mass production of soy—at first conventional, then transgenic—by multinational corporations.

Since then, the advance of this practice, which is based on mechanization and the use of pesticides, has been constant. The landowning sector and transnational agricultural corporations— including Monsanto, Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland, or ADM, Shell Agro, Dow, BASF, Mosaic, Bunge, Dupont, Syngenta, and Bayer, among others— that monopolize the market of genetically modified seeds, pesticides and grains, have appropriated large land tracts.

This economic production model forces the rural population to substitute desired foods, like beef, for others that are less valued and less nutritious, affecting their ability to adapt to new environmental conditions and deteriorating their traditional food system, according to Marcos Glauser, an anthropologist and researcher with the non-governmental organization Base Investigaciones Sociales, or BaseIS.

Doughman explains how “the soy production chain has expanded with such intensity, starting in the east and southeast of the country, that it has made Paraguay the fourth largest exporter of transgenic soy with more than 2 million hectares cultivated, and ranks sixth in world production of this oilseed.”

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