SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION
terms), Argentine farmland was bought up by large foreign companies such as Cargill-the world's largest grain and commodity trading company-by international investment funds such as George Soros's Quantum Fund, by foreign insurance companies, and corporate interests such as Seaboard Corporation. This was a hugely profitable operation for foreign investors, for which GMO Monsanto seeds were ultimately the basis for a giant new soy agribusiness industrial farming. Argentina's land was to be converted into a vast industrial seed production unit. For the foreign investors, the beauty of the scheme was that compared with traditional agriculture, GMO soybean needed little human labor. In effect, as a consequence of the economic crisis, millions of acres of prime farmland were put up for auction by the banks. Typically, the only buyers with dollars to invest were foreign corporations or private persons. Small peasant farmers were offered pennies for their lands. Sometimes, when they refused to sell, they were forced off their properties by terrorist militia or by the state police. Tens of thousands more farmers had to give up their lands when they were driven to bankruptcy by market flooding of cheap food imports brought in under the free market reforms imposed by the IMF. Additionally, fields planted with the GMO "Roundup Ready" soybean seeds and their special Roundup herbicide required no ordinary turning over of the soil through plowing. In order to maximize profitability, the sponsors of the GMO soybean revolution created huge Kansas-style expanses of land where large mechanized equipment could operate around the clock, often remote-controlled by GPS satellite navigation, without even a farmer needed for driving the tractor. Monsanto's GMO soybean was sold to Argentine farmers as an ecological plus, utilizing "no-till" farming. In reality they were anything but environmentally friendly. The GMO soybean and Roundup herbicide were planted with a technique called "direct drilling," pioneered in the USA and with the purpose of saving time and money. 12