June 9, 2006

 

Brazil's soy farmers use GM seeds against pests, rust

 

 

Brazil's soy farmers are increasingly turning to genetically modified soy to combat insect disease and soybean rust, farmers and seed manufacturers said Wednesday (Jun 7) during a soy conference in Parana.

 

"The tendency is for Brazil to rely more on GM soy going forward. There's a psychological factor at play here--farmers think that GM soy helps them control Asian soy rust," said Odilio Balbinotti, president of Sementes Adriana, the largest soybean seed producer in Mato Grosso.

 

Mato Grosso is the leading soy producer in Brazil. Roughly 26 percent of the 2006/07 soy crop will likely be GM soy, compared with 10 percent in the 2005/06 crop, according to Balbinotti's calculations. Others put the number much higher.

 

GM seeds are produced in laboratories by crop scientists manipulating the DNA material of plants, often including DNA proteins from other plants and introducing them to soybean seeds.

 

There is no GM soy that is totally resistant to Asian soybean rust, an airborne fungus that that can be far more damaging to Brazilian soy crops than dry weather. Soy rust, which attacks the foliage of soy plants effectively starving them, has expanded over the last two crop seasons.

 

Many farmers in Mato Grosso lost yields in the 2005/06 crop because of soy rust. Balbinotti expects yields around 31 60-kilogramme bags per hectare, one of the lowest yields ever for Mato Grosso. The state usually produces 40 bags per hectare on the low end. Low yields means farmers need to harvest more soy to fill a bag than they needed to harvest in the past.

 

GM soy helps control weeds, which in turn opens up space between soy plants and thus reduces the humidity levels that the fungus requires to spread. Soybean rust  can worsen drastically in a period of a week, making it difficult to control, according to researchers at Embrapa, Brazil's official crop science institute.

 

Jose Tadashi Yorinori, an Embrapa researcher in Parana, estimated that Brazil farmers lost 6.6 million metric tonnes of soy in the 2005/06 crop to soy rust. Brazil should harvest 53.8 million tonnes of soy, according to official estimates released Monday. Estimates earlier in the year had the crop at roughly 58 million tonnes.

 

"My entire soy crop next year will be GMO," said Paulo Pinto, a farmer at Coprossel in Parana. Parana is the no. 2 soy producing state. Pinto grows soy for the local seed market. In 2005/06, 50 percent of his crop was GM soy.

 

"Everyone I know will double their GMO plantings next year," Pinto said about the 2006-07 soy season.

 

Brazil is the world's second largest soy producer and exporter. GM soy was permitted in Brazil only recently due to farmer demand, but the topic remains controversial as some states like Parana have tried to ban GMO from its port in Paranagua.