Stories of a Wounded Land

The food that reaches our table each day seems to belong to the realm of the familiar. We buy it, cook it and consume it without giving much thought to the territories, political decisions, industrial processes and economic relationships that made its production possible. Yet behind much of what we eat lies an extraordinarily complex chain that begins thousands of miles from the consumer, connecting seeds, chemicals, vast areas of cultivated land, rural communities, logistics infrastructure, financial markets, export ports and consumption decisions made in places that may never know the territories where it all began.

Over recent decades, global agriculture has undergone a transformation on a scale that has become inseparable from our own way of life. Mechanization, fertilizers, crop protection products, genetic improvement, biotechnology and, more recently, precision agriculture have dramatically increased the productive capacity of the land. At the same time, food production and agricultural commodities have become integrated into a global market in which a decision made in Europe or Asia can alter the value of a hectare of land in Argentina or Brazil.

Argentina became one of the major arenas of this transformation. In 1996, the country authorized the production and commercialization of genetically modified soybeans engineered to tolerate herbicides. The combination of these seeds with no-till farming, mechanization and chemical weed control accelerated a process that was already reshaping the Argentine countryside. Soybean cultivation expanded across millions of hectares and eventually became one of the pillars of the country's agricultural export economy.

Around it emerged a highly efficient structure. Seed and agrochemical companies, farmers, agricultural contractors, machinery manufacturers, silos, processing plants, roads, railways, ports and major exporters became connected within the same production chain. Crops harvested in the country's interior could be processed along the Paraná River and ultimately transformed into oil, biofuel or soybean meal used to feed livestock thousands of miles away.

This model generated wealth, technology, export capacity and revenue that became crucial to the Argentine economy. It made it possible to cultivate increasingly large areas with less labor and established the country as one of the major players in international agricultural markets. Three decades after the introduction of genetically modified soybeans in Argentina, biotechnology remains an integral part of the country's agricultural development, with new genetically engineered varieties continuing to enter the production system.

But a transformation of this magnitude changes far more than productivity. As land values increased and the agricultural frontier expanded, large areas previously devoted to other crops, livestock, native forest or family farming were absorbed into an increasingly specialized production system. In some regions, farms became more concentrated, while peasant and Indigenous communities came under growing pressure on territories where land rights were not always formally recognized.

The landscape began to change. Where forests, small farms and different forms of land use had once existed, vast homogeneous areas began to appear. Roads and infrastructure followed the advance of agricultural production. The countryside ceased to respond exclusively to the needs of those who inhabited it and became part of a much larger geography, shaped by international prices, harvests, industrial demand and the global appetite for agricultural commodities.

In some provinces, that transformation reached the very doors of people's homes. Crops expanded towards towns, schools, roads and rural communities. Agricultural spraying ceased to be a distant farming operation and became part of everyday life for many of those living beside the fields. Aircraft, tractors and spraying machinery could operate close to inhabited areas, creating a difficult boundary between two equally essential rights: the right to produce and the right to live.

It was there that one of the most complex conflicts associated with the new agricultural model began to emerge. In Misiones, Chaco, Santiago del Estero, Córdoba, Santa Fe and other regions of Argentina, families and communities began linking certain illnesses to agricultural spraying, water contamination or the environmental conditions surrounding their homes. Reports emerged of respiratory problems, skin disorders, miscarriages, congenital malformations and different forms of cancer. Rural doctors, researchers and community organizations called for epidemiological studies, stricter controls and greater safety distances between spraying operations and inhabited areas.

Listening to those testimonies is essential. Automatically turning them into a scientific explanation is something different. The coincidence between an illness and a possible exposure does not in itself establish causation. Determining what caused a particular disease requires knowledge of the substances involved, the doses, the routes and duration of exposure, individual medical histories and numerous environmental and biological factors. Epidemiology requires sufficiently large populations, reliable data and comparisons capable of distinguishing a genuine relationship from coincidence.

This is precisely where one of the greatest difficulties in the debate lies. For a family living beside a field that has witnessed similar illnesses recur within its community, waiting years for scientific certainty can seem incomprehensible. For a farmer, attributing an illness to agricultural activity without sufficient evidence can turn suspicion into accusation. And institutions face an even more difficult responsibility: protecting the population without transforming a hypothesis into certainty, while at the same time refusing to use the absence of absolute certainty as a reason not to act.

Glyphosate became the global symbol of that debate. Its use expanded enormously alongside agricultural systems based on herbicide-tolerant crops, although glyphosate is not used exclusively with genetically modified crops, nor does all agricultural biotechnology depend on a single substance. For decades, it became an essential tool for many farmers because of its effectiveness in weed control and its compatibility with no-till farming systems.

In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans. Other scientific and regulatory agencies have reached different conclusions when assessing the risks associated with authorized uses and specific levels of exposure. This apparent contradiction has shaped much of the public debate, although it partly reflects two concepts that are not equivalent: hazard and risk.

A substance may have the potential to cause harm under certain circumstances without this automatically determining the probability that it will do so under every condition of exposure. Risk also depends on how much exposure occurs, how it occurs, how frequently and for how long. That distinction is essential to understanding the scientific debate, but it does not by itself resolve what happens on the ground.

Real conditions of application do not always correspond to the ideal conditions contemplated in an assessment. Workers may lack adequate protective equipment; dosage errors may occur; wind can carry spray beyond its intended area; safety distances may not be respected; waterways may lie nearby; or homes may stand directly beside cultivated fields. The question then ceases to be simply whether a substance has been authorized and becomes one of how it is used, who monitors its application and what ability surrounding communities have to ensure that regulations are enforced.

Agricultural technology does not exist independently of the social conditions in which it is applied. Something similar happened with Monsanto. For years, the company became a symbol of genetically modified agriculture and, for many of its critics, the embodiment of an industrial system capable of exerting control over seeds, chemicals and much of the agricultural supply chain. Its technological and commercial power generated profound distrust, while the industry argued for the need to increase productivity, reduce losses and develop crops capable of responding to a growing population and increasingly difficult environmental conditions.

But to make Monsanto the explanation for everything that happened in the Argentine countryside would be as simple as it would be inadequate. No single company created this agricultural model. Governments established the rules; farmers adopted new technologies; investors financed expansion; national and multinational companies, exporters, machinery manufacturers and financial institutions participated in its development; and international demand required ever greater quantities of soybeans and their derivatives. Millions of consumers who had never seen an Argentine soybean field also participated indirectly, through consumption patterns that helped determine what was profitable to grow.

The underlying issue was never simply Monsanto or genetically modified organisms. It was, and remains, the concentration of decision-making within an increasingly globalized food system and the growing distance between those who produce, those who experience the territorial consequences of production and those who ultimately consume its products. On the most technologically advanced farms, contemporary agriculture can achieve extraordinary levels of precision. Satellite-guided machinery, meteorological data, selected genetics, sensors, soil information and systems capable of adjusting the use of seeds, fertilizers and crop protection products make it possible to manage thousands of hectares with an efficiency that would have been unimaginable only a few generations ago.

Just a few miles away, communities may struggle to obtain reliable access to drinking water, adequate healthcare or the political influence needed to participate in decisions that are transforming the territory around them. Both realities belong to the same countryside. There is no simple opposition between modernity and backwardness, between farmers and rural communities, or between science and nature. Technology has made it possible to produce more, reduce certain losses and sustain entire economies. It can also create new forms of dependency, encourage economic concentration and transfer part of its costs to people and territories with less capacity to defend their interests. Land then becomes something more than a productive surface. For an agricultural company, it may represent hectares, yields, costs and investment capacity. For a peasant or Indigenous community, the same land may simultaneously mean home, memory, livelihood and belonging. Neither reality disappears because the other exists. Conflict begins when the economic value acquired by a territory gives one of them far greater power to determine its future.

This tension is particularly visible in northern Argentina and in some of Brazil's major agricultural regions. The expansion of agriculture and cattle ranching has transformed forests, savannas and rural territories on an immense scale. The Gran Chaco, one of South America's great forest ecosystems, remains under pressure from changes in land use. In Brazil, states such as Mato Grosso have become both symbols of the country's agricultural power and central arenas in the debate over how far the agricultural frontier can expand without compromising fundamental ecosystems.

There is no single cause behind deforestation. Cattle ranching, agriculture, logging, infrastructure, fires and other activities interact differently in each territory. Reducing this transformation exclusively to soybean production would once again simplify a far more complex process. But neither can the role of international demand for agricultural commodities in the reorganization of vast areas of South America be ignored.

The landscape ultimately records those decisions. Forests become fragmented. Straight lines appear where natural boundaries once existed. Vast fields replace mosaics of vegetation and smaller agricultural holdings. New roads make it possible to move harvests out of the countryside while simultaneously opening access to previously isolated territories. What may appear from a single field to be a limited transformation assumes an entirely different scale when viewed across a region.

But to truly understand this system, the harvest must be followed beyond the fields. In Argentina, millions of tonnes of soybeans travel across the country towards processing plants and port terminals. The agro-industrial complex around Rosario and the Paraná River connects the major producing regions of the interior with international markets. There, agricultural territory becomes industrial infrastructure: silos, factories, conveyor belts, storage facilities and ships capable of carrying production to the other side of the world. The chain that began with a seed eventually loses any appearance of being local. Soybeans can become oil or meal for animal feed. That meal may travel to a livestock farm in Europe or Asia. An animal raised on it may eventually reach a supermarket thousands of miles from the field where the crop was grown. The consumer buying that meat will probably never know which country produced the soybeans, what agricultural system was used to grow them or what transformation of the land was associated with their production.

That distance is one of the defining characteristics of the contemporary global food system. For much of human history, producing and consuming food were geographically close activities. Today they may be separated by continents and by a chain of intermediaries so complex that responsibility becomes fragmented. Farmers respond to prices and conditions they do not control. Companies respond to shareholders and market demand. Governments need exports and employment. Consumers seek affordable and readily available food. Each participant can find a rational explanation for individual decisions while the accumulated consequences of the system emerge somewhere else.

And yet feeding a global population of billions requires food production on an enormous scale. There is no earlier, ideal form of agriculture, free of consequences, to which humanity can simply return. Food production has always transformed nature. Agriculture itself was born from that transformation. For thousands of years it has replaced ecosystems, consumed water, modified species and reorganized territories. What distinguishes the contemporary moment is the scale and speed with which we are now capable of doing so.

Nor is the challenge to reject science or agricultural biotechnology. A world facing climate change, soil degradation, water scarcity and increasingly extreme weather will probably require more knowledge and technology, not less. Crops resistant to drought or disease, precision agriculture, genetic improvement, new irrigation systems and methods capable of using fertilizers and crop protection products more efficiently may all form part of the solutions that will be needed.

But greater agricultural efficiency does not automatically answer every other question. Producing more does not determine how wealth is distributed. A technology that is safe under specific conditions does not guarantee that those conditions will always be respected. An export that benefits the national economy does not ensure that the community living beside the place of production will receive a proportionate share of those benefits. And the fact that a transformation is legal does not necessarily mean that all of its consequences have been anticipated.

More than three decades after genetically modified soybeans were introduced in Argentina, these questions remain unresolved. Agribusiness continues to be one of the engines of the country's economy, while agricultural biotechnology advances towards new generations of crops. At the same time, deforestation, soil degradation, the use of crop protection products, land conflicts and the protection of rural communities remain part of the debate over the future of agriculture. Nor does this discussion belong only to Argentina or Brazil. What is happening there forms part of a global transformation in our relationship with food. Europe continues to debate how to reduce pesticide use without compromising productivity. Climate change is altering growing seasons and water availability. War, energy crises and disruptions to global trade have demonstrated the vulnerability of international food supply chains. Genetic research continues to advance while societies continue to debate where its limits should lie.

Beneath all of this remains a question far older than any of these technologies: what kind of relationship do we want to have with the land that feeds us? Answering it requires abandoning comfortable certainties. Not every farmer belongs to an industry indifferent to its consequences. Not every company is responsible for every harm attributed to the system. Not every allegation establishes causation. But neither is every authorized activity free of consequences, nor can every increase in productivity be considered progress when its costs remain outside the calculations by which we measure it.

It is here that we must ask who decides what is grown and how it is produced, who receives the benefits, who bears the risks and what happens when the costs emerge far from those making the decisions. It also requires acknowledging that consumers do not stand entirely outside this equation. Our demand for meat, energy, oil, inexpensive food and permanent availability helps shape a system whose scale can afterwards be difficult to comprehend. The question therefore cannot be reduced to a choice between agriculture and the environment, technology and nature, producers and consumers, or development and conservation. The real question is whether we are capable of building a model in which these realities are no longer treated as incompatible.

Producing enough food will remain one of the great responsibilities of our time. Doing so without transferring a disproportionate share of its cost to those least able to avoid it will be another. Between these two responsibilities lies a land profoundly transformed by our need to feed ourselves and by our capacity to produce on a scale that no previous generation could have imagined. A land that generates wealth and sustains millions of lives, but also bears the scars of the decisions made upon it. Understanding those scars does not require deciding in advance who is right and who is wrong. It requires something more difficult: looking at the entire system and asking what price we are prepared to pay for the way we produce the food that sustains our lives, and how much of that price we are asking others to pay.