Breakfast in Amsterdam, Death and Corruption in South America - the Hidden Story of Soya.

In 2006, meat is not only animal murder. South American children are dying from pesticide poisoning, the rainforest is succumbing to monoculture, gm crops are planted on stolen land to feed European and Chinese cows and the milk that stands on your breakfast table. This breakfast interview with a European and a South American activist waking up in Amsterdam begins to tell the tale behind the label of the miraclebean that is soya.

Soya bean production in South America has been booming the past 25 years. Most of this goes to make up oil and proteins for animal feed for the meat industry in Europe and China. Protein from fish meal has become scarce, other animal sources have been forbidden because of BSE, but the demand for meat is rising rapidly world-wide. Monoculture production of soy in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay is growing even faster because the IMF and World Bank have been pushing these countries to export as much as possible so that they can pay back their debts. To make this increase in production possible, millions of hectares of forests and savanna have been destroyed, small farmers have lost their land and income and people remaining in the countryside are being made ill by exposure to wide scale pesticide spraying. As a result of the focus on monoculture export crops, millions of people in one of the world's biggest food exporting regions are now suffering from malnutrition. GM-soy is contaminating the countryside and the rising use of pesticides is polluting water and soil while wiping out biodiversity - birds, bees, butterflies. The transport of all this fodder is contributing to climate change and resulting in an extremely unsustainable nutrient balance. Economically this development is forcing the Latin American countries concerned in a neo-liberal free-trade system. We can make a long list of all the misery and misfortunes inflicted by this system, but what can we do about it? Change what's on our breakfast tables, for a start, and challenge the international financial institutions to live up to their official mission to help the poor!