Published August 14, 2007

Reaction to the Guarani's presence in Asuncion is mixed. Some bring gifts and encourage their struggle. Others loath them and give me and my crew dirty looks for paying them attention.

A sectional leader for the Colorado party said the government already gave the Guarani land but they simply sold it illegally to Brazilian soy growers. "They didn't invest the land properly," he said.

True, all of the Guarani I spoke with had either no conception of private property or decidedly Marxist views in how that land should be distributed. Over and over again I heard "They have so much land and we need land. Why should we not have it."

Even the advocates for the landless put their number only at 30,000 (which is a suspiciously high number). Per capita, that's about half the number of homeless people in the US. They have no political voice and seemingly little desire for one. They want only land.

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Food insecurity can result from climate change, urban development, population growth and oil price shifts that are interconnected and rarely confined by borders. It’s an issue of global importance,...
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Soybeans, rows and rows of soybeans all around. In western Paraguay the fields that were once thick rain forests are now soybean plantations.
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