Chile Forum

I've got a range of questions on agricultural (including livestock, fish, etc.) production in Chile and I'm not sure whether to stick with one topic here in the LOBBY or split them up. Which forum is best for this?

Some topics I liked to hear about:

GMO acceptance
Use of pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers
Mono cropping in forestry, horticulture, livestock
Traditional practices if any or biodynamic, organic, etc.
agreement on branding of Chilean ag product

I've noticed some comments scattered about the fora; one which stuck with me was Px on the use of chemicals in berries banned in other countries. I read this as I was eating Chilean blueberries.

Anyway I thought I would kick this off with this article on Monsanto and a new and potentially serious problem with GMO soy bean in the States.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-g ... ory?page=1

"....
Farmers call this "sudden death syndrome," a plant disease that has plagued the country's heartland and the nation's estimated $36.8-billion soybean industry. Scientists, who first spotted the disease in Arkansas in 1971 — more than 20 years before Monsanto introduced its Roundup Ready soybeans in the U.S. — blame damp weather and a fungus that rots the plant roots.

But, Friedrichsen said, "for years, I've wondered whether there wasn't something else."

Now, despite mountains of research to the contrary, one soil scientist is roiling the agricultural world with claims that there might be some truth to the farmer's unease.

Don M. Huber, an emeritus professor at Purdue University who has done research for Monsanto on chemical herbicides, alleges that he has found a link between genetically modified crops and crop diseases and infertility in livestock: an "unknown organism" he and other researchers claim to have discovered last summer in Midwestern fields like Friedrichsen's.

"This organism appears NEW to science!" Huber wrote in a letter in January to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack about the matter. He added, "I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen is unique and of a high-risk status. In layman's terms, it should be treated as an emergency."
....."

I'm sure that the Obumbler brought along the GMO twin CEO of the GE-jobs-aren't-US CEO on his trip to Chile. And if he was handing out nuke plant tickets, I assume there were some free GMO seed samples tumbling out of the exhaust pipe of the exempt-from-green-limo.

Does Chile just go along with the del Norte peddlers? On this I am confused. Some of them went along with the CIA in '73 and the Chicago boys after that, but on the other hand, it sounds like Chile was quite indifferent to the Yankees in earlier times.

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answering machine wrote:

no country for young men wrote:GMO acceptance

topic2027-96.html#p18414

You've read the article referred to in the above linked forum post, right? So, you do know that, in 2007, SAG authorized nearly 25,000 hectares of GMO fields (mostly for corn seed production).

~ answering machine

Thanks.

Do Chileans in general care about GMO?

How about the courts in terms of property rights for those with contaminated fields?

http://www.biotech-info.net/newly_organic.html

"....
"The Newly Organic South of Chile"

Reprinted in the Santiago Times
(originally from La Tercera)
May 30, 2001

With the aim of capitalizing on this growing trend, the government recently announced a plan to convert the entire agricultural industry in far southern Region XI to purely organic farming techniques. The initiative, which has received widespread support from both environmentalists and farmers, would change the face of Chile's tiny organic industry and put the country on the map of international organic production. The following article, based on a report in La Tercera, examines the project's economic potential and its advantages for Chile's agricultural industry).

No pesticides, no fertilizers and no genetically modified plants: just healthy, natural produce. This could soon be a reality on farms in Chile's southern Region XI following a recent government proposal to convert the region into the country's first exclusively organic zone.

The plan, drafted by the Agriculture Ministry Regional Office and the National Environmental Commission (Conama), aims to make the area's agricultural, fishing and cattle sectors chemical free within the next few years..
....."

Can anyone throw some cold water on this?

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no country for young men wrote:No pesticides, no fertilizers and no genetically modified plants: just healthy, natural produce.....The plan, drafted by the Agriculture Ministry Regional Office and the National Environmental Commission (Conama), aims to make the area's agricultural, fishing and cattle sectors chemical free within the next few years..
....."

I suspect that this was prepared by the same people who dreamed that all Chilean secondary students would be perfectly English-Spanish bilingual as of the graduating class of 2012. It's obvious that the aggie people have been smoking something, too.

There is much that is patently foolish here. We have a target-rich environment in this country for the inadvertently whimsical, the clearly chimerical, and the quixotically unachievable. Please try to take none of it seriously.

<edited>

answering machine wrote:

no country for young men wrote:proposal to convert the region into the country's first exclusively organic zone.

No one would prevent you from converting your own land in Chile into exclusively organic zone.

This was a Patagonia issue. If I remember this issue correctly, in 2001 Conama or another national government agency proposed a mandatory elimination of all chemical fertilisers, chemical pesticides, etc., for commercial production in XI región. We laughed at them then, just as we laugh at them now, all these years after that ban was supposed to have taken place here.

As to whether any official agency is going to prevent a private landowner from electing to reject such chemistry (and it should be noted that this was not a dimension of the original proposition), that remains to be seen. In fact the issue was quite the reverse -- the proposal would have deprived a grower of any choice in this area.

It is easy in Chile to pull a selection of agency reps in front of the cameras and have them say oh how wonderful and profitable and desirable and so forth would be a conversion to zero-chemistry agriculture and pisiculture. Away from the cameras, it's a different matter. Look at those talking heads of 2001 and note the outcomes of 2011. The legitimate organic ag industry of Aysén is tiny, and legitimate "organic fishery" in the region is practically nonexistent.

If ever Conama did have a serious programme to enforce a regional prohibition on the use of all chemical products in the ag industry, that does not appear to be their platform at this time. I have my doubts that anyone at Conama had any realistic expectations ten years ago about wholesale elimination of all chemical products in the ag industry in the region.

Now I have a brilliant idea (while the answering machine sleeps), listen. A chain of organic duck farms (either in the lakes region or close to it).

gato wrote:Now I have a brilliant idea (while the answering machine sleeps), listen. A chain of organic duck farms (either in the lakes region or close to it).

Quack.