BRAZIL: King of soya: environmental vandal or saviour of the world's poor? by Rory Carroll and Tom Phillips, Guardian (UK) March 3rd, 2008

Erai Maggi does not look like a villain who is destroying the planet; nor does he look like a hero who is saving the world's poor. Wearing jeans and work boots, he can be found on a typical day driving a battered Fiat car on one of his farms south of the Amazon rainforest. For someone who excites extreme views he seems miscast, neither Darth Vader nor Indiana Jones. But the 48-year-old Brazilian farmer is protagonist in a drama about climate change, globalisation, poverty and hunger. Maggi owns more than 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of soyabean plantations in Mato Grosso state. It is reckoned to be the biggest such holding in the world making him the king of soya. "What really makes me feel happy is seeing the beans in the fields," Maggi said last week, shading his eyes from a tropical sun while gazing over yellowing fields ready for harvest. "Growing crops is the only thing I know how to do." According to environmentalists Maggi also knows how to accelerate deforestation of the Amazon, at least indirectly. By buying up the savannah for soya cultivation, he forces cattle ranchers north into the rainforest where they slash and burn, releasing millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, said Paulo Adario, the Amazon director of Greenpeace in Brazil. "It is an indirect but fundamental impact." There is another version of Maggi: a pioneer who helped turn a sea of barren scrub fit only for some cattle into highly productive farmland - and in the process turned Brazil into an agricultural superpower which is expected to overtake the US as the world's leading food exporter while the global population surges towards 9 billion people. http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14957