Posted on 20-2-2003
Roundup
Unready
by Alan Marston from OpEd in NYT, 19 Feb03
One of the most pervasive chemicals in modern agriculture is
a herbicide
called glyphosate, which is better known by its trade name,
Roundup. When
it was first introduced in 1974, by Monsanto, no one could have
predicted
its current ubiquity or the way it would change farming. Roundup
was safe,
effective and relatively benign, environmentally speaking. It
became one of
the essential tools that made no-till farming — a conservation
practice in
which farmers spray weeds rather than plowing the ground — increasingly
popular. But what really made Roundup pervasive was the development
of
genetically modified crops, especially soybeans, cotton and
corn, that
could tolerate having Roundup sprayed directly on them. The
weeds died but
these crops, designated Roundup Ready, thrived. Seventy-five
percent of the
soybean crop planted in this country last year was Roundup Ready,
as was 65
percent of the cotton and 10 percent of the corn. On soybeans
alone last
year, farmers sprayed about 33 million pounds of glyphosate.
But nature, in turn, has been developing some Roundup Ready
plants of her
own, weeds that can tolerate being sprayed with Roundup. Two
weeds,
mare's-tail and water hemp, have already begun to show resistance,
and
others will certainly follow. This is simply natural adaptation
at work.
No one is saying that Roundup will lose its overall effectiveness
any time
soon. But while Monsanto executives and scientists are doing
their best to
protect the herbicide, nature is also throwing all her resources
at
defeating it. In a very real sense, nature has been given an
enormous
advantage by the sheer ubiquity of Roundup, just as some bacteria
are given
an edge by the ubiquity of agricultural antibiotics. The logic
of
industrial farming is to use your best tools until they're worthless,
and
to hasten their worthlessness by using them as much as you can.
This is precisely why there has been so much opposition to marketing
a
variety of corn that includes a BT gene, which creates a toxin
that kills
an insect called the corn-borer. BT is a safe, natural and effective
weapon
for gardeners and farmers, and to lessen its effectiveness by
overusing it,
like Roundup, would be a terrible waste. Industrial agriculture
is always
searching for a silver bullet, forgetting that eventually a
silver bullet
misfires.
Meanwhile a New Zealand government agency and by implication
the Government
continues on a path of of spraying Bt over large areas of metroplitan
Auckland and races into release of GE organisms into the wild.
Unfortunately the fatal flaw in politics and business of the
mdern era is
that those who sow the wind are not around to reap the whirlwind,
leaving
that to Jo Public to deal with ... or not.
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