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Title: Attack of the Monsanto Superinsects
Source:
Mother Jones
URL Source: http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott ... 1/08/monsanto-gm-super-insects
Published: Aug 30, 2011
Author: Tom Philpott
Post Date: 2011-09-06 14:05:49 by lucysmom
Keywords: None
Views: 2836
Comments: 2
Over the past decade and a half, as Monsanto built up its globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar genetically modified seed empire, it made two major pitches to farmers. The first involved weeds. Leave the weed management to us, Monsanto insisted. We've engineered plants that can survive our very own herbicide. Just pay up for our patented, premium-priced seeds, spray your fields with our Roundup herbicide whenever the fancy strikes, and—voilà!—no more weeds. The second involved crop-eating insects. We've isolated the toxic gene of a commonly used bacterial pesticide called Bt, Monsanto announced, and spliced it directly into crops. Along with corn and soy, you will literally be growing the pesticide that protects them. Plant our seeds, and watch your crops thrive while their pests shrivel and die. Monsanto focused its technology on three widely planted, highly subsidized crops: corn, soy, and cotton. Large-scale farmers of these commodities, always operating on razor-thin profit margins, lunged at the chance to streamline their operations by essentially outsourcing their pest management to Monsanto. And so Monsanto's high-tech crops essentially took over the corn/soy- and cotton-growing regions of the country. But now the pitches are wearing thin. Dumping a single herbicide onto millions of acres of farmland has, predictably enough, given rise to weeds resistant to that herbicide. Such "superweeds" are now galloping through cotton and corn country, forcing farmers to resort to highly toxic herbicide cocktails and even hand-weeding. More than 11 million acres are infested with Roundup-resistant weeds, up from 2.4 million acres in 2007, reckons Penn State University weed expert David Mortensen. And now insects are developing resistance to Monsanto's insecticide-infused crops...
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#1. To: A K A Stone, Fred Mertz, Godwinson, go65, war, no gnu taxes, Skip Intro, ferret mike, jwpegler, mininggold, brian s, mcgowanjm (#0)
Science and engineering can put a man on the moon and farmers back in their fields hand-weeding.
"...all of the equations in neoclassical economics are rubbish. The differential equations describe nothing. Economics is not about mathematics, it is about the human being." Sandeep Jaitly
Monsanto super-insects are attack hObama, because he's black..... Obama's watch stopped on 24 May 2008, but he's been too busy smoking crack to notice.
..."superweeds" are now galloping through cotton and corn country, forcing farmers to resort to highly toxic herbicide cocktails and even hand-weeding.
#2. To: lucysmom (#0)
Bt-resistant superinsects may be just getting started. Colleen Scherer, managing editor of the industrial-ag trade magazine Ag Professional, put it like this: "There is no 'putting the genie back in the bottle,' and resistance in these areas is a problem that won't go away."
"We (government) need to do a lot less, a lot sooner" ~Ron Paul
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