On March 7th – International Women’s Day – dozens of Brazilian women occupied a research site of the U.S.-based agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, destroying the greenhouse and experimental plots of genetically-modified (GM) corn. Participants, members of the international farmers’ organization La Via Campesina, stated in a note that the act was to protest the “Brazilian government’s decision in February to legalize Monsanto’s GM Guardian® corn, which came just weeks after the French government prohibited the corn due to environment and human health risks.”
La Via Campesina also held passive protests in several Brazilian cities against the Swiss corporation Syngenta Seeds for its ongoing impunity for the murder of Valmir Mota de Oliveira. Mota was a member of the Movement of the Landless Rural Workers (MST) — the largest of the seven Brazilian movements in La Via Campesina — who was assassinated last October in the state of Paran during these organizations’ third occupation of the company’s illegal experimental site for GM soybeans. While Brazil already has a high number of land activist murders, “Mota’s was significant because it was the first to occur during an occupation organized by La Via Campesina, and the first assassination in Brazil to occur on the property of a multinational agribusiness.”
The expansion of agricultural biotechnology into Brazil is increasing agrarian conflicts and exacerbating historic tensions over land. The movements in La VÃa Campesina reject seed patenting, claiming the practice traps poor farmers in a cycle of debt to corporations that own the seed patents, and undermines small farmers’ autonomy to save and share seeds. They claim that “GM technology threatens biodiversity and native seed varieties, and violates the rights of consumers and small farmers by contaminating conventional and organic crops.”