http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=98230

Anti-GM smallholders in the Amazon demand justice over series of
killings

By Jan McGirk, Latin America Correspondent
The Independent (London)
08 October 2001

Ranchers allegedly arranged the murders of eight Brazilian peasant
leaders this summer to silence them or to grab their smallholdings in
Amazonia, and 45 farmers are said to be on a new hitlist in a
long-running dispute over their right to grow GM-free crops.

About 800 organic soya-bean farmers gathered in the city of Belem last
week with members of the Landless Workers' Movement and aid workers to
demand the killers be brought to justice. They say the ranchers'
political clout and military backing has led to 19 deaths in their
ranks, eight this year.

The ranchers, with outside investors, are putting pressure on the
cash-strapped federal government to drop a longstanding ban on GM crops.
The farmers also complained that large-scale cattle farming and timber
felling was ruining the drainage in the state of Para, where they farm.

At a citizens' court in the city, a jury voted unanimously before the
planting season to uphold a ban on genetically modified crops. Martin
Dickler, from the British agency ActionAid, who attended the trial,
said: "[The farmers] are insisting on sufficient laboratory research
before doing field tests, much less patenting and commercialisation of
genetically modified organisms."

The bulk of the farmers' harvests goes to the suppliers of British
supermarkets Asda and Tesco, which have policies not to sell the meat or
milk of animals fed with GM soya. The farmers fear that lifting the ban
would threaten their farming methods and increase dependence on
multinational GM seed firms such as Monsanto.