Roundup Ready soybeans have been overtaking much of Latin America's southern cone. But while the changes to the rural landscapes of Argentina and Brazil are well known, fewer are aware of the effects that these two expanding soy empires have had on the much more vulnerable population of their comparatively tiny neighbour, Paraguay. Still a largely rural country with little infrastructure and a subsistence-based peasant population, Paraguay has become the world's fifth largest producer of soybeans in the last decade, and export of raw beans is now the single most important part of the country's economy. {mos_sb_discuss:9}

More importantly, the beans have precipitated an unprecedented re-concentration of land along the border departments with Brazil, undoing an important 1970s land reform. Even though it is illegal for soy farmers to buy land in land-reform areas, these communities are easily bought out after their houses and schools are surrounded by chemical-intensive farms. Peasants cannot afford to plant soy, and their best bet is to sell their land and move to the city, or look for land farther from soy areas.

This is not a question of an ecologically damaging agricultural model replacing an innocuous traditional one. Peasants are heavily reliant on cotton production and a retinue of nasty chemicals. But their farms are mixed: stands of forest are maintained for firewood and large gardens of beans, maize and manioc are planted for subsistence. Monocultural soy production makes this peasant lifestyle virtually impossible in communities near the big farms. The pesticides required by soy cause headaches, nausea, rashes and make people suspicious of the water. On windy days during soy season, as people say in Guarani, "jagua rangue ne:" the whole community smells like a dog carcass.

With land reform out of style in international policy circles, and a government with almost no resources for its fledgling environment ministry, there are no institutional checks on soy's advance. Even if there were the infrastructure for such control, the political will is absolutely absent in a country which stays in the good books of the International Monetary Fund only because its GDP is propped up by all those beans.

The onus has therefore fallen on peasant federations to try to stop the green tide themselves. The country now has three such federations, rent by unfortunate internecine strife, and none is particularly well organized. Nonetheless, they have managed in several communities to hold back soy farms by invading new unplanted plots, slashing and burning fields, or, when well enough organized, starting peaceful legal procedures against soy farmers for environmental crimes and predatory land speculation.

But so far this has only precipitated a predictable but terrifying result. Soy farmers have begun to arm themselves and to hire "security" teams of unemployed rural youths. Last June I attended a small meeting of unarmed peasants complaining about police and soy farmer harassment in their community. The meeting was attacked by soy farmers in passing trucks, who killed two men and gravely injured another by firing into our midst with shotguns from the back of a cargo truck. They had been trying to buy land in the community for years, but organized peasants had been preventing their entry.

While there was an immediate expression of national outrage about this incident, no-one was formally charged. In fact, the lasting effect has been that soy farmers have bought even more weapons in the area, claiming that it is the only way to protect themselves from what they call peasant delinquents. This does not bode well for rural Paraguay, which is still a relatively peaceful place. In the absence of an institutional framework to mitigate or at least regulate the massive changes that soybeans bring, guns may end up being primary means of regulation.

Originally published in Ram's Horn #234: November-December 2005.