On the trails of soy

In recent years, on the wave of the growing global consumption of oils, vegetable flours and biodiesel, the agro-food industry has encouraged the diffusion of genetically modified soy in developing areas of the world. The devastating effects of monoculture are today visible in countries of the southern cone in Latin America, mostly in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, where the surface of land cultivated with soy has been growing unrelentingly in the past ten years to the detriment of biodiversity and of the basic rights of the local populations, menacing their own food sovereignty and the possibility of acceding to natural resources.

The potent herbicide “Round-Up” produced by Monsanto, pollutes water and poisons the rural population while indigenous and peasants, sent off their lands, flow into the great cities’ suburbs. Poverty and malnutrition grow while massive loads of soy are shipped off ploughing the waters of the Paranà river, heading towards Europe.

In a phase in which the pressure of great multinational corporations is particularly strong, an aware approach to food consumption reveals itself more and more necessary. The majority of the soy produced in South America is, in fact, sold to the EU as animal food. Once it is “transformed” in meat, it reaches our tables and it turns us, in spite of us, in great consumers of GMO imported forage and co-responsible of the south American ecocide.