[08/16/06] "Monoculture is a prison, it always was". Eduardo Galeano writes to MST, Via Campesina

[08/16/06] "Monoculture is a prison, it always was". Eduardo Galeano writes to MST, Via Campesina

ALAI AMLATNA 16/08/2006, Montevideo.

-Our countries are modernizing.
Now the official discourse demands honoring the debt (though it was dishonorable), attracting investments (though these are beneath our dignity), and enter the world (though this would be by the service door).

In reality, we keep on believing the same old stories.

Latin America was born to obey the world market, when the world market was not yet even called by that name, and for good or ill we remain bound to the duty of obedience.

This sad routine of past centuries began with gold and silver and continued with sugar, tobacco, guano, saltpeter, copper, tin, rubber, cocoa, bananas, coffee, oil... What have these splendors left us? They left us without inheritance or affection. Gardens converted into deserts, abandoned countrysides, perforated mountains, putrid waters, long caravans of impoverished people condemned to early deaths, empty palaces where ghosts rove.

Now is the turn of GMO/transgenic soybeans and of cellulose. And once again the history of fleeting glories repeats itself, to whose blaring trumpets our lengthy debacles are announced.

***

Will the past remain mute?

We keep ourselves from listening to the voices that could warn us: the dreams of the world market are the nightmares of the countries submitted to the caprices of that market. We continue to applaud the kidnapping of natural goods that God, or the Devil, have given us, and in that way we work toward our own perdition and we contribute to the extermination of the small amount of nature still left to us in this world.

Argentina, Brazil and other Latin American countries are living through the fever of GMO soybeans. Tempting prices, multiplied yields. Argentina has been for some time now, the second world producer of GMOs, after the US. In Brazil, the Lula government executed one of those pirouettes that turns democracy into a frail favor when he said yes to GMO soybeans, although his party had said no during the electoral campaign.

This signifies bread for today and hunger for tomorrow, as some rural unions and environmental organizations have denounced. But it is already known that the ignorant peasants have yet to understand the advantages of plastic pasturage and the motorized cow, and that the ecologists are killjoys who always spit on the roast.

***

The GMO lawyers claim that it is not proven that GMOs harm human health. In any case, neither is it proven that they do not harm human health. And if they were so inoffensive why do the manufacturers of GMO soybeans avoid announcing, on their product packaging, that they are selling what they are selling? Wouldn’t the GMO soybean label be the best publicity?

And, as is the case, there is evidence that these Dr. Frankenstein inventions harm the life in the soil and diminish national sovereignty? Are we exporting soybeans or soil? And if we were trapped in the Monsanto cages and those of other companies whose seeds, herbicides and pesticides we come to depend on?

Lands that produce everything for the local market are now devoted to a single product to supply foreign demand. I develop toward the outside, and inside I forget myself. Monoculture is a prison, it always was, and now with GMOs, much more. Diversity, by contrast, liberates. Independence is reduced to a hymn and to a flag if it is not based on food sovereignty. Self-determination begins at the mouth. Only productive diversity can defend us from sudden collapses of prices, a phenomenon that is the norm, the deadly norm, of the world market.

The immense extensions of land destined to GMO soybeans are leveling the native forests and forcing out the poor farmers. Few hands occupy these highly mechanized crop fields, which in exchange exterminate small farmers and the family gardens that have been fumigated with poisons. The rural exodus to the large cities is multiplied, where it is supposed the displaced people will consume, if they are lucky, what before they produced. This is a kind of rural transformation that is the very reverse of agrarian reform.

***

Cellulose has also become fashionable, in various countries.

Without going any further Uruguay wants to become the world center of cellulose production to supply the raw material for faraway paper factories.

This is a case of monocultures for export, in the purest colonial tradition: immense artificial plantations that are called forests and that are converted into cellulose in an industrial process that casts chemical residues into the rivers and makes the air unbreathable.

Here they began two enormous factories, one of which is already halfway built. Later they incorporated another project and they speak of another and yet another, while more and more hectares are destined to the fabrication of eucalyptus in series. The great international companies have discovered us on the map and suddenly a love for Uruguay has sprouted, for this Uruguay where there is no technology to control these interlopers, the state grants them subsidies and tax exemptions, the salaries are feeble and the trees grow in a flash.

Everything indicates that our small country will not be able to withstand the asphyxiating embrace of these big boys. As usually occurs, a gift of nature has become a curses of history. Our eucalyptus trees grow ten times faster than in Finland and this is translated like this: the industrial plantations will be ten times more devastating. To the rhythm of the foreseen exploitation, a greater part of the national territory will be squeezed to the last drop of water. Those great thirsty ones will dry our soil and subsoil.

Tragic paradox: this has been the only place on earth where a referendum was submitted about water as property. By an overwhelming majority, Uruguayans decided in 2004 that water would be a public good. Will there be a way to avoid this end run around the popular will?

***

Cellulose, we must recognize, has been converted into something like a patriotic cause, while the defense of nature does not awaken enthusiasm. Worse still, in our country, sick with cellulitis, some words which were not bad words, like ecologist and environmentalist, are being converted into insults that crucify the enemies of progress and the saboteurs of work.

Misfortune is celebrated as if it were good news. It is better to die of contamination than of hunger: many unemployed believe that there is no solution except to choose between two calamities, and the salesmen of illusions come ashore offering thousands and thousands of jobs. But one thing is publicity and another reality. The MST, the movement of landless rural workers, have disseminated eloquent facts, that are not true only in Brazil: cellulose production generates one job for each 185 hectares and family farming creates five jobs for each 10 hectares.

The companies promise the best. A flood of work, multi-million dollar investments, strict controls, pure air, pure water, intact land. And one wonders: Why not install these wonders in Punta del Este, to improve the quality of life and stimulate tourism in our principal bathing resort?

(Text send by Eduardo Galeano to Via Campesina Brazil, in homage to the women farmers in a solidarity commemoration on August 16 in the Federaral University of Rio Grande do Sul, UFRGS, Porto Alegre)
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