‘SOYIZATION’ AND FOOD SECURITY IN SOUTH AMERICA - Food Systems Failure - page 206

for suh restrictions and requirements for certiication of foodstufs is well under-
stood, many campesinos feel that this system disadvantages them, restricting them
from selling their products on the market. For example, some communities of the
MOCASE-VC produce pikled goat meat for sale in local and regional markets. his
kind of processed food requires certification in order to be commercialized. However,
there is only one slaughterhouse that is permited to kill small farm animals (goats,
sheep, etc.), and it is located far to the south of the province - whih means trans-
portation costs are prohibitive for campesinos located elsewhere in the province.
Therefore, if campesinos want to process the meat of these animals, as they do, they
cannot possibly obtain the required certifications.
The health implications of soybean cultivation
Another important aspect of the soyization process is the intensive application of
herbicides from airplanes onto large fields of herbicide-resistant RR soybeans. In
some parts of the province, campesinos , as well as small-town residents, live in close
proximity to suh ields and are thus being afected from residues of agrohemicals
being sprayed from the air. A MOCASE-VC activist asserted that:
The expansion of the agribusiness was not only evicting people in the sense of
the violence of expulsion of the land, but daily contaminating their crops, con-
taminating their water sources, [even] poisoning the people themselves when the
airplanes are spraying.
Informant 2, MOCASE-VC, interviewed 25.2.2010
he use of agrohemicals, whih has intensiied, particularly outside the Pampa
region, with the expansion of the soybeans model, constitutes a serious threat to
campesino food production. According to another activist of the organization:
There are families who have nothing left to produce with because they have been
either sprayed by glyphosate [herbicide], or this poison was thrown into the wa-
ter sources and all the animals have died, [and then] they have to start over a life
that they have already had before, and those things have caused a setbak in the
production.
Informant 3, MOCASE-VC, interview 18.3.2010
his is not only an issue when the wind oten carries the agrohemicals onto
neighbouring campesinos ' fields and destroys crops or poisons animals: there are