This is from GMwatch. Of course, plants that are already resistant to
Roundup survive to pass on that resistance to following generations of plants;
they don't "develop" resistance after being sprayed, as the article
implies.--Tom
===========================================================================
===
NOTE: As this article notes, Grist are currently running a Villains of
Food poll.
http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-10-14-vote-for-your-favorite-villains
-of-food/
Unsurprisingly, Monsanto are the run away winners, so you might want to
consider voting for other of the GM promoters on the list, eg the
Monsanto-loving, organic-hating Roger Beachy.
http://www.gr
ist.org/article/food-2010-10-14-vote-for-your-favorite-villains-of-food/p13
---
---
Why Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals' herbicides
Tom Philpott
Grist, 20 October 2010
http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-10-20-why-monsanto-paying-farmers-to-
spray-rival-herbicides
Monsanto's ongoing humiliation proceeds apace. No, I'm not referring to
the company's triumph in our recent "Villains of Food" poll. Instead, I'm
talking about a Tuesday item from the Des Moines Register's Philip Brasher,
reporting that Monsanto has been forced into the unenviable position of
having to pay farmers to spray the herbicides of rival companies.
If you tend large plantings of Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" soy or cotton,
genetically engineered to withstand application of the company's Roundup
herbicide (which will kill the weeds -- supposedly -- but not the crops),
Monsanto will cut you a $6 check for every acre on which you apply at least
two other herbicides. One imagines farmers counting their cash as literally
millions of acres across the South and Midwest get doused with
Monsanto-subsidized poison cocktails.
The move is the latest step in the abject reversal of Monsanto's longtime
claim: that Roundup Ready technology solved the age-old problem of weeds in
an ecologically benign way. The company had developed a novel trait that
would allow crops to survive unlimited lashings of glyphosate, Monsanto's
then-patent-protected, broad-spectrum herbicide. It was kind of a miracle
technology. Farmers would no longer have to think about weeds; glyphosate,
which killed everything but the trait-endowed crop, would do all the work.
Moreover, Monsanto promised, Roundup was less toxic to humans and wildlife
than the herbicides then in use; and it allowed farmers to decrease erosion by
dramatically reducing tillage -- a common method of weed control.
There was just one problem, which the Union of Concerned Scientists
pointed out as early as 1993, New York University nutritionist and food-politics
author Marion Nestle recently reminded us. When farmers douse the same
field year after year with the same herbicide, certain weeds will develop
resistance. When they do, it will take ever-larger doses of that herbicide to
kill them -- making the survivors even hardier. Eventually, it will be time
to bring in in the older, harsher herbicides to do the trick, UCS predicted.
At the time and for years after, Monsanto dismissed the concerns as
"hypothetical," Nestle reports. Today, Roundup Ready seeds have conquered prime
U.S. farmland from the deep South to the northern prairies -- 90 percent of
soybean acres and 70 percent of corn and cotton acres are planted in
Roundup Ready seeds. Monsanto successfully conquered a fourth crop, sugar beets,
gaining a stunning 95 percent market share after the USDA approved Roundup
Ready beet seeds in 2008. But recently, as I reported here, a federal judge
halted future plantings of Roundup Ready beets until the USDA completes an
environmental impact study of their effects.
Given what happened to other Roundup Ready crops, it's hard to imagine
that the USDA can come up with an environmental impact study that will
exonerate Monsanto's sugar beet seeds. Today, there are no fewer than 10 weed
species resistant to Roundup, thriving "in at least 22 states infesting
millions of acres," The New York Times recently reported. And the ways farmers are
responding to them are hardly ecologically sound: jacked-up application
rates of Roundup, supplemented by other, harsher poisons.
And as Monsanto's once-celebrated Roundup Ready traits come under fire,
there's another Roundup problem no one's talking about: Roundup itself, once
hailed as a an ecologically benign herbicide, is looking increasingly
problematic. A study by France's University of Caen last year found that the
herbicide's allegedly "inert" ingredients magnify glyphosate's toxic effects.
According to the study, "the proprietary mixtures available on the market
could cause cell damage and even death" at levels commonly used on farm
fields.
Moreover, the annual cascade of Roundup on vast swaths of prime farmland
also appears to be undermining soil health and productivity, as this
startling recent report shows.
Meanwhile, the endlessly repeated claim that Roundup Ready technology
saves "millions of tons" of soil from erosion, by allowing farmers to avoid
tilling to kill weeds, appears to be wildly trumped up. According to
Environmental Working Group's reading of the USDA's 2007 National Resource
Inventory, "there has been no progress in reducing soil erosion in the Corn Belt
since 1997." (The Corn Belt is the section of the Midwest where the great bulk
of Roundup Ready corn and soy are planted.) "The NRI shows that an
average-sized Iowa farm loses five tons of high quality topsoil per acre each
year," EWG writes.
In short, Monsanto's Roundup Ready technology is emerging as an
environmental disaster. The question isn't why a judge demanded an environmental
impact study of Roundup Ready sugar beets in 2010; it's that no one did so in
1996 before the technology was rolled out. After all, the Union of Concerned
Scientists was already quite, well, concerned back then.
As I wrote in June, rather than spark a reassessment of the wisdom of
relying on toxic chemicals, the failure of Roundup Ready has the U.S.
agricultural establishment scrambling to intensify chemical use. Companies like Dow
Agriscience are dusting off old, highly toxic poisons like 2, 4-D and
promoting them as the "answer" to Roundup's problems.
In a better world, farmers would be looking to non-chemical methods for
controlling weeds: crop rotations, mulching, cover crops, etc. Instead,
they're being paid by Monsanto to ramp up application of poisons. Perhaps the
USDA's main research arm, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture,
will rise to the occasion by funding research in non-chemical weed-control
methods? Not likely, since the Obama administration tapped a staunch Monsanto
man to lead that crucial agency.
But instead of true innovation, we have the spectacle of Monsanto paying
farmers to dump vast chemical cocktails onto land that not only feeds us,
but also drains into our streams and rivers.
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