This post was commissioned as part of a Pulitzer Center/Global Voices Onlineseries on Food Insecurity. These reports draw on multimedia reporting featured on the Pulitzer Gateway to Food Insecurity and bloggers discussing the issues worldwide. Share your own story on food insecurity here. As the global demand for soy rises, Paraguay has become the world's fastest-growing producer of the crop. But with resulting riches have also come battles over land rights and environmental concerns. Soybeans are used in the production of food, edible oils and animal feed, as well as biofuels. The industry has grown exponentially in recent years, in part because of increased demand for meat and cattle feed in China and a rising biofuel industry in Europe. Many South American countries, including Paraguay, have responded to this demand by boosting soybean production. Photo by Olmo Calvo Rodríguez from a series on soybeans and campesino rights in Paraguay (see slideshow below). Paraguay is the now world's fourth largest exporter of the crop, trailing the U.S., Brazil and Argentina, and the sixth biggest producer of soybeans. Earlier this year the country saw a record soybean crop. This growth has come at a price though, creating social disputes and land rights issues for the country's small-scale farmers, known also as campesinos, as well as environmental and health concerns. In the blog of the Brussels office of the German Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Edgardo Lander in Venezuela argues that the recent growth in Latin American trade and agriculture is “predatory” and that leftist governments must seek sustainable alternatives: “Given a rapidly growing international demand and high levels of profit, agribusiness has responded with a rapid increase of the extensions of crops in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. In addition to the negative impacts of monoculture and transgenic crops, the tremendous expansion of the soybeans has led to a greater concentration in land tenure and the displacement of peasants, affecting the production of other crops such as rice, maize, sunflower and wheat. This has also led to a strengthening of the economic and political power of the business groups that participate in the different stages of production and marketing of the soybeans. This is what Syngenta, (one of the main agribusiness corporations), cynically and arrogantly, referred to as the United Soya Republic.” The industry has had particularly adverse effects on Paraguay's small farmers and indigenous people, many of whom have been forced off their lands. New York City-based photographer Evan Abramson documented the social conflicts generated by industrial soy production in some of Paraguay's rural communities. In a photo essay for NACLA Report on the Americas, he says: “The soy boom has been disastrous for small farmers, who, after living for years on government-allotted forestland, have begun to be uprooted. In the last decade, the Paraguayan government has given away or illegally sold this public land to political friends in the soybean business, pushing the peasants out. Today, about 77 percent of Paraguayan land is owned by 1 percent of the population… Since the first soy boom in 1990, almost 100,000 small-scale farmers have been forced to migrate to urban slums; about 9,000 rural families are evicted by soy production each year.” In 2009, photographer Olmo Calvo Rodríguez, a member of the Latin American photographer's collective SUB, took the photos featured in the slideshow below. He wrote that the campesinos in the photos form part of a community of 40 families who were evicted from their land by the soybean industry 17 times in the past six years, but still have not lost hope of building their lives there. (The photos are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.) Journalist Charles Lane, in a series supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, calls this scenario “the soybean wars.” But landless farmers are fighting back, he says, protesting and even staging armed invasions on the land of soybean producers, who have themselves also been accused of resorting to violence. Many of these farmers had hoped Paraguay's president Lugo would bring them some relief. Lugo received nearly unanimous support from the campensinos when elected in 2008, but in March of this year thousands of farmers protested in Asunción to demand Lugo follow through on campaign promises.