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.grist.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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