school with alternative approaches, in which preference is giving to organic food, there was a lesser prevalence of allergies (Cleeton, 2004).

Risks due to transgenic foods. There are many concerns about the possible effects of transgenic foods, which are prohibited in organic or agroecological foods. The potential health effects of GMOs on humans are unknown, but there are ever greater concerns because more than half of the studies that do not find negative effects on organs of laboratory animals have been done in collaboration with the industry. Other studies, done independently, relate health risks mainly in the intestinal walls, due to the transfer of transgenes to intestinal bacteria; the scientists suggest that until they are adequately researched it is best not to consume them (Cleeton, 2004).

     According to statistics provided by the transgenics industry, in 2006 these crops (herbicide tolerant and insect resistant) were planted on 100.8 million ha, 12% more than in 2005 (90 million ha); global sales of these seeds reached US$6.050 billion (a 14% increase with respect to the previous year) (CropLife, 2007). Argentina was in second place in area planted after the United States, followed by Brazil in third place. Another five Latin American countries are among the 22 countries that planted transgenics in 2006, according to CropLife (2007): Paraguay (7th place), Uruguay (9th), México (13th), Colombia (15th) and Honduras (18th). The top eight countries saw growth of more than one million ha each from 2005 to 2006; geographic expansion occurred mainly in Latin America and Asia. Participation by crop in the transgenic seed market in 2006 was as follows: soybean 43.9%; maize 41%; cotton 11.9%; canola 3%; and others, 0.2% (CropLife, 2007).

1.7.4.4 Economic impacts
It is very difficult to evaluate the social and environmental costs of conventional/productivist agriculture because it is not easy to assign many values when ethical considerations come into play. For example, what value should be assigned to human life? Nonetheless, efforts have been made to try to evaluate these environmental and health costs, such as those of David Pimentel and his team of researchers at Cornell University in the United States, who have valued the costs of the public health impact of intoxications and deaths, contamination of domestic animals and cattle, loss of natural enemies and costs due to resistance to pesticides, losses of honeybees and pollination of crops, losses in fishing, crops, wild birds and contamination of groundwater.

     Based on Pimentel’s studies (2004), in 2004 the Pesticide Action Network—Latin America (RAP-AL) made an initial approximation of the social and environmental costs in LAC. The RAP-AL study used same methodology and data applied in the United States, yet considering that in Latin America many costs may be greater, due for example to the environmental costs stemming from the destruction of biodiversity, as the region includes some of the most biodiversity- rich countries in the world (Nivia, 2005).

       To evaluate the health impacts, general approaches of the World Health Organization were used that indicate that 15% of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean lives in rural areas, with 5% poisoned, 2% hospitalized and 1% mortality (Table 1-12). With respect to the cost of human life, the 3.7 million dollar figure used by the United States EPA was based on the notion that the life of a Latin American is no less valuable than the life of a person from the United States. In this initial calculation it was estimated that there is a social and ecological debt of US$130 billion annually; as in the case of the U.S. study, the impacts on soil, loss of fertility, hormonal effects, sterility, malformations and others have yet to be calculated. In addition, although the calculations are for one year, the impact has accumulated for more than 50 years of industrial/productivist agriculture, therefore adequate economic projections remain to be done to estimate the cumulative economic impact of this type of agriculture in the region.

     Historically, agriculture has been one of the largest and most important sectors receiving World Bank loans. The trend has been to capital-intensive agriculture, with growing use of chemical inputs and now genetic engineering, for export. The aggressive promotion of structural adjustment policies and rural development by the Bank favoring agricultural intensification and production for export, at the cost of smaller-scale agricultural with fewer external inputs, is the main barrier to the significant adoption of pest management plans and ecological and cultural production systems, which are called for by the Bank’s new policies.

     In response to the demands of civil society organizations, in December 1998 the World Bank adopted an operational policy on pesticides and pest management that requires Bank-supported projects to reduce farmers’ reliance on pesticides and promote alternative integrated pest-management methods that have a sound ecological foundation. It also prohibits the use of Bank funds for the purchase of hazardous pesticides.

     The Pesticide Action Network (North America) analyzed the impact on pesticide use in 107 Bank projects approved from 1999 to 2003. It showed that the Bank’s policy is just on paper, because more than 90% of those projects continue to promote the use of pesticides; although they don’t mention them directly, they invoke them using a different vocabulary. The Bank considers the private sector a key ally in global development, yet this collaboration tends to benefit the large corporations more than poor farmers. For example, the Bank financed more than US$250 million in pesticide sales from 1988 to 1995; from 1993 to 1995 all the contracts signed went directly to the largest pesticide companies in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan. While the farmers who participated in these projects suffered the negative health effects and detrimental impact on the ecological stability of their production systems that result from pesticide use, the Bank recognized that only 1% of the projects had a complete environmental evaluation (Karen, 2004).