When I did field research to understand the reasons why rural workers preferred to plant GM soy (year 2003), the answer was absolutely and fairly obvious. As there would no longer be the need to apply several herbicides, but only one (glyphosate), a less toxic product than the others, there was a reduction in the cost of production and, above all, a reduction in working time. This last aspect was crucial especially for rural women.

While I was scrutinizing the impact of adopting this technology in Brazilian corners, the NGOs that acted (and still act) against the modernization of Brazilian agriculture practiced political lobbying, using the rhetoric that transgenic soy would be rejected by small producers, as they preferred to produce agroecological soy.

In other words, they said that workers preferred to control weeds with the hoe, a traditional technology developed over millennia and little improved. It was the proposal of a surrealist world, even suggesting that rural families would opt for backwardness and the archaism represented in the use of hoes to eliminate weeds, a symbolic tool of the exhausting rural work of other times.

…

By resisting critical reflection they collaborate strongly for false image of legitimacy of a word that has been turned magic – agroecology.

[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Portuguese and has been translated and edited for clarity.]

This is an excerpt. Read the original article here.