Buenos Aires - The changes to the main street in an Argentine village on the humid Pampa is astounding. The number of shops has tripled, people consume like they rarely did in the past, and there is a constant flow of sports utility vehicles and new cars. "Soya!" people cheer in explanation.
The runway at the little village airstrip had never been so well- marked. A dense spread of intensely green crops reaches almost up to its hangar. Every free square metre is put to use, including the sides of roads.
"Soya!" people say.
Ploughs march pitilessly on the jungle of the Yungas in the north-western Argentine province of Salta. They churn under everything in their path.
"Soya," the answer now comes with a tone of regret.
Within a few years, soya has become Argentina's star crop to the point that it has taken over half the country's cultivable land, about 16.6 million of the 30.4 million hectares devoted to agriculture in the South American country and made Argentina the world's third-largest producer of soya after the United States and Brazil.
Close to 95 per cent of Argentina's crop is exported. The plant has become one of Argentina's main sources of foreign currency and a cross-border phenomenon - as well as the basis of an economic, social and ecological debate.
Export taxes on soya are one of the basic pillars of Argentina's fiscal surplus. Duties on the foreign sale of agricultural produce provide the national treasury with about 10 billion dollars a year, which should rise by 2 billion more dollars if a recently introduced tax increase that has led farmers groups to block roads in the Argentine countryside for weeks is finally applied.
The increased cultivation of soya, mostly with genetically modified seeds, has generated deep changes since the 1990s.
Its greater returns made soya the life preserver of many small farmers harassed by debt and mortgages in the Argentine economic crisis that exploded in 2001. And most of the earnings were poured into regional economies, leading to a revival of small and medium-sized villages and towns in rural Argentina.
The money-making potential of the crop also led to the emergence of sowing pools, pulling together farmers, investment funds and companies that rent large tracts of land to sow soya.
With a strong tendency toward monoculture, other farm activities - cattle breeding, milk production, regional produce - were pushed to less productive areas, especially toward the north, while the dominance of crops that require little labour started to push surplus manpower to the cities.
"Besides, the country's natural advantages, there are those acquired through technological innovation, the use of no-till farming, the application of biotechnology, the installation of very modern plants and the closeness between processing plants and ports," said Raquel Caminoa, economic studies manager of the Argentine Oil Industry Chamber.
In the past soya season, Argentina exported 11.82 billion tons of soya beans, 6.4 million tons of soya oil and 25.9 million tons of soya flour, basically to the European Union (flour) and to China and India (beans and oil).
In the face of strong criticism over the impoverishment of the soil and the risks of desertification, a broad portion of farmers turned to intensive fertilization and no-till farming.
Not only do farmers not till their fields in the no-till method, but they also leave the remains of plants after harvesting. The practice prevents plant elements from mixing in with the soil to oxidize and produce carbon dioxide and allows for a more efficient use of water because the presence of plant remains prevents greater evaporation and erosion.
However, the most effective and important way to preserve soil quality is crop rotation, which producers who own the land tend to respect more than those who simply rent out large tracts to secure the greatest turnover possible, said Daniel Peruzzi of the Association of No-Tilling Producers.
Soil degradation is only one criticism directed at soya farming, however.
"The production of soya is one of the main factors responsible for Argentine deforestation," said Hernan Giardini, who coordinates Greenpeace's biodiversity campaign in Buenos Aires.
"A million hectares of native woodland have been lost in the past eight years to a large extent due to the uncontrolled advance of the soya model," Giardini said.
He warned that those lands produce low yields and are likely to be abandoned by producers within a few years, which would turn them into barren desert.
