A sign of international campaign being waged against the social and environmental impacts of massive-scale farm business is the WSF conference titled "Amazon and Cerrado: Stopping the Soy and Cattle-Ranching Trail of Devastation" 8:30-3:00 on Thursday, Jan. 27. The initiative comes from the Coordination/Platform Soy-Brazil, a coalition of several groups, including the Brasília-based foundation CEBRAC and the Dutch organisations Doen and Cordaid.

Coalition head Maurício Galinkin says the biggest environmental problem arises from the expansion of uninterrupted fields of this monoculture crop, which already surpass 50,000 hectares, encroaching on natural systems like the Cerrado, a savannah ecosystem that serves as a transition between the arid Caatinga and Amazonian systems. "This unregulated crop generates contamination, blocks water sources, and attacks biodiversity and the micro-climate," he said.

And that's not all. There is the social question created by the expulsion of small farmers from these rural areas. They head to cities like Santarém and Óbidos, in Pará state, pressured into selling their land at low prices, which is then added to the huge soybean fields. "They end up going with their families to live in sub-human conditions in the periphery of the big cities," says Galinkin. During Thursday's WSF conference, the principal issues of the matter will be presented, discussed and then returned to the NGOs and social movements to work to ensure that society wields control over the actions of the major soybean operations. It is a discussion that is already facing sharp resistance, as soy agribusiness is being praised by big media as the cutting edge for Brazilian development.