Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Before 2000, we didn't know the plant of soy,” Sena told us. But by 2001, soy farmers
from Mato Grosso had started showing up. “They went with money and bought this land,”
he said emphatically. “They didn't come to live here. They came to cultivate here.”
Newly arrived from the south, the soy farmers had not integrated well, not least because
their mechanized farms offered few jobs for the people of Pará. The locals took to calling
the soy farmers
soyeros,
a play on the Portuguese word for dirty.
“Soyeros don't like it when we call them that,” Father Sena said. “But they
are
dirty.
They didn't come here to join us, but just to suck the possibilities of this land.”
Call it the Sena Doctrine. People are an indispensable part of the environment—unless
they're dirty bastards.
We trundled down BR-163 in Mango's car again, to about kilometer 45, where we met
Nestor, a small-time farmer who had survived the soy fever and kept his farm. Nestor sold
us beers and, together with his son, took us on a walking tour of his manioc fields. “There
were many people living here who owned small farms,” he said. But in the first five years
of the decade, buyers from the south had swarmed in, bidding up land prices. Most people
had taken the money. “They sold the land, and the tractors came and finished with it all.”
A nearby village called Paca had been wiped completely off the map to make way for soy-
beans. Even the Pentecostal church in the village had sold out and moved. “They sold it
all,” said Nestor's son, laughing. “They brought down the church to plant soybeans. You
can't even tell there was a church there.”
Nestor blamed the local politicians who he said had brought Cargill in: “The govern-
ment brought these people to bring progress. And maybe it did. But it also brought bad
things…People saw the money and thought it would never end. One person would sell, and
that would inspire the next person to do the same.”
It sounded like a frenzy, I said. Gil translated, using the word
locura,
for “madness.”
Nestor and his son nodded vigorously. “Era,” they said.
It was.
Along this stretch of high-
way, Nestor told us, only he and his brother had kept their plots of land intact. Everyone
else had sold at least part.
The frenzy had changed the local environment, in ways both subtle and obvious. We met
multiple farmers who complained about the chemicals that neighboring soy farms used on
their crop, and about how the soy monoculture had increased the burden of pests on small
farms nearby. “There are a lot of diseases in their fields,” one man said of the soy farm-
ers. “I plant rice and I get nothing. If I plant beans, the insects eat it all. We can't harvest
