Paraguay’s soy bonanza leaves small farmers in the cold

President Santiago Peña joined farmers earlier this month in southern Paraguay to kick off the soy season. 

“We want Paraguay to continue to develop,” he told followers in an Instagram video from the event. “And our land and the productive sector is one of the great bases of our development.” 

Soy is a big business in Paraguay. The country is the sixth-largest producer in the world and the third-largest exporter, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Most of the commodity is sold to Argentina on its way to Asia.

“Soy is the backbone of the Paraguayan economy,” said Lis Garcia, a researcher at the social sciences think tank BASE-IS in Asuncion. “Historically, it represents roughly 40% of exports.”

Paraguay jumped on the soy bus in the 1970s. Large producers brought the crop from Brazil. Dictator Alfredo Stroessner pushed it as a major road toward the country’s development.

But all that development has come at a cost. The soy grown in Paraguay is largely genetically modified and mono-cropped. It needs huge tracts of land to grow and huge amounts of fertilizers and pesticides. And that’s a problem for the country’s small farmers.

“Paraguay, today, is a country that is poisoned … in its air and water,” said Tomas Zayas, a longtime leader of the Alto Parana Small Farmers Association, ASAGRAPA. “This is a serious problem that threatens human rights as a result of the use and abuse of chemicals and pesticides for soy production.”

Campesino Ricardo Rojas walked through his fields in the Alto Parana community of El Triunfo with his young son beside him. Rojas has been farming here for decades. 

He grows kale, cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage. Everything is irrigated from his local well. Rojas’ crops are mostly organic — he doesn’t use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides — except for what blows onto his land from his neighbor, a massive soy plantation.

“We’ve been totally impacted by the pesticides,” Rojas said in a mixture of Spanish and Guarani, the local Indigenous language.

He said that eight days ago, the soy farmers fumigated. The smell was unbearable and it hit the community and their fields.

Rojas said that this type of thing has happened again and again.

Eight months ago, he said, the soy farmers sprayed their fields with a chemical to dry the crop ahead of the harvest. He said it blew onto his land and destroyed most of his production, costing him thousands of dollars in damage.

Researcher Lis Garcia explained that cases like this have led roughly 40% of Paraguay’s campesinos, or small farmers, to leave their land over the last 15 years. Some were forced off by the pesticides. Others were convinced to cash in on the soy bonanza, but fell short. 

Genaro Acosta González works at the Paraguayan Ministry of Agriculture. He grew up in a small farming community in what is now soy country.

“I want to show you something,” he said, pulling out his phone and flipping to an image. It’s a map of the community where he grew up. Most of it has been taken over by soy plantations, including half of his father’s land.

“Soy companies give you loans,” he explained. “They give you seeds. But after three years, people failed. Nothing grew because of the drought. So, when the three years of loans were up, in the fourth year, they lost their land.”

Land is what small farmers are now demanding.

In the capital city of Asuncion, a group of them have been camping out in front of Paraguay’s National Land Institute. A decade ago, the government promised to provide them with roughly 2,000 acres of land that they would share, but it still hasn’t happened.

“We expect the government to fulfill its promise,” said Trifido Ayala, one of the group’s leaders. “So, we can farm and produce for our families. Without this land, we have no future for our children.” 

Ayala said that soy is good for big business — “But not for the poor. Not for us.”