Weekly Report - 23 February 2012 (WR-12-08)

There is never really a good time for a big landowner to describe subsistence farmers as lazy and to suggest that they should be whipped into line like an uncooperative woman. For Tranquilo Favero, the largest individual soya producer in Paraguay, the timing could scarcely have been worse. The government had declared a food emergency in the face of a serious drought in Paraguay when Favero, a Brazilian-Paraguayan, told Brazil’s Folha de São Paulo that Paraguayan landless farmers were uncooperative and lazy; “you have to treat them like a bad woman, with a stick”.