Des alliances internationales pour préserver la production de soja non génétiquement modifié au Brésil : enjeux et perspectives

Catellanet Christian, Armengaud Agathe, Griot Jean-Yves, Apoteker Arnaud. Des alliances internationales pour préserver la production de soja non génétiquement modifié au Brésil : enjeux et perspectives. In: Tiers-Monde, tome 47, n°188, 2006. Biotechnologies et développement agricole, sous la direction de Marc Dufumier. pp. 755-772

Des alliances internationales pour préserver la production de soja non génétiquement modifié au Brésil : enjeux et perspectives

Following a long period of Brazilian government opposition to the use of transgenic soya, the cultivation of this latter has finally been authorized in Brazil. The consequences of this authorization may not be minor whereas it is well known that within the European Union, the principal export opportunity, numerous consumer associations and environmental movements are fighting the imports of all genetically modified soya. The article recounts the conditions in which some peasant organisations in Southern Brazil and european non governmental organisations are trying to establish export links for non transgenic soya to France. The overhead costs for the consumer, mainly incurred from ensuring tracers, remain low. However the global agro business companies are not doing nothing about this ; they are committed to the creation of a « responsible soya » label that would take into account the risks of deforestation linked to the inconsiderate extension of soya in the Amazon basin, but which would still involve GMOs. This appears to be a smart way of dividing civil society through mobilising a part of the environmentalists around the « responsible » label and of finally making GMO acceptable to the European public opinion.

Des alliances internationales pour préserver la production de soja non génétiquement modifié au Brésil : enjeux et perspectives

[fre] Après une longue période au cours de laquelle le gouvernement brésilien s’est opposé à l’emploi de soja transgénique, la culture de celui-ci a finalement été autorisée au Brésil. Les conséquences de cette autorisation peuvent ne pas être mineures, quand on sait qu’au sein de l’Union Européenne, principal débouché à l’exportation, de nombreuses associations de consommateurs et mouvements environnementalistes militent contre les importations de tout produit issu de soja génétiquement modifié. L’article relate les conditions dans lesquelles certaines organisations paysannes du Sud-Brésil et des organisations non gouvernementales européennes tentent de mettre en place des filières d’exportation de soja non transgénique vers la France. Le surcoût pour le consommateur, largement lié au coût de la traçabilité, resterait modeste. Mais les compagnies transnationales de l’agrobusiness ne restent pas sans réagir, comme en témoigne leur proposition de s’engager sur la création d’un label « soja responsable » qui prendrait en compte les risques de déforestation liés à l’extension inconsidérée du soja dans le bassin amazonien, mais accepterait les OGM . Cela paraît une manière habile de diviser la société civile en cooptant une partie des ONG environnementalistes autour de ce label « responsable », et de faire accepter finalement les OGM par l’opinion publique européenne. [eng] Following a long period of Brazilian government opposition to the use of transgenic soya, the cultivation of this latter has finally been authorized in Brazil. The consequences of this authorization may not be minor whereas it is well known that within the European Union, the principal export opportunity, numerous consumer associations and environmental movements are fighting the imports of all genetically modified soya. The article recounts the conditions in which some peasant organisations in Southern Brazil and european non governmental organisations are trying to establish export links for non transgenic soya to France. The overhead costs for the consumer, mainly incurred from ensuring tracers, remain low. However the global agro business companies are not doing nothing about this; they are committed to the creation of a « responsible soya » label that would take into account the risks of deforestation linked to the inconsiderate extension of soya in the Amazon basin, but which would still involve GMOs. This appears to be a smart way of dividing civil society through mobilising a part of the environmentalists around the « responsible » label and of finally making GMO acceptable to the European public opinion.

Mayotte seismic crisis: building knowledge in near real-time by combining land and ocean-bottom seismometers, first results

International audienceSummary The brutal onset of seismicity offshore Mayotte island North of the Mozambique Channel, Indian Ocean, that occurred in May 2018 caught the population, authorities, and scientific community off guard. Around 20 potentially felt earthquakes were recorded in the first 5 days, up to magnitude Mw 5.9. The scientific community had little pre-existing knowledge of the seismic activity in the region due to poor seismic network coverage. During 2018 and 2019, the MAYOBS/REVOSIMA seismology group was progressively built between four French research institutions to improve instrumentation and data sets to monitor what we know now as an on-going exceptional sub-marine basaltic eruption. After the addition of 3 medium-band stations on Mayotte island and 1 on Grande Glorieuse island in early 2019, the data recovered from the Ocean Bottom Seismometers were regularly processed by the group to improve the location of the earthquakes detected daily by the land network. We first built a new local 1D velocity model and established specific data processing procedures. The local 1.66 low VP/VS ratio we estimated is compatible with a volcanic island context. We manually picked about 125,000 P and S phases on land and sea bottom stations to locate more than 5,000 events between February 2019 and May 2020. The earthquakes outline two separate seismic clusters offshore that we named Proximal and Distal. The Proximal cluster, located 10km offshore Mayotte eastern coastlines, is 20 to 50 km deep and has a cylindrical shape. The Distal cluster start 5 km to the east of the Proximal cluster and extends below Mayotte's new volcanic edifice, from 50 km up to 25 km depth. The two clusters appear seismically separated, however our dataset is insufficient to firmly demonstrate this