Genetically modified crops failing worldwide

Tom Lewis | Environmental News Examiner | May 17, 2010

Weeds like this pigweed, that have become immune to Roundup, are devastating American farms.

Photo by H. Zell via Wikimedia

The Green Revolution — a misleading name applied by PR firms to the onset of globalized, chemical-intensive, industrial agriculture that is anything but friendly to the environment — is coming unraveled around the world, bringing devastation to farmers from the plains of China to the plains of America.

It was revealed last week that China is dealing with an explosive infestation of the formerly inconsequential mirid bug in its orchards and cotton fields. The bug’s population exploded as a result of widespread planting of cotton that had been genetically altered to be resistant to the bollworm, formerly cotton’s worst enemy. Cotton farmers stopped spraying insecticides, since their plants shrugged off the bollworms, and thus allowed other insects, especially the mirid bug, to multiply without interference.

According to a study published last week by Kongming Wu at the State Key Laboratory for Biology of Plant Diseases and Insect Pests in Beijing (reported by Reuters), the mirid bug is now laying waste to orchards and cotton fields in at least six provinces in Northern China, affecting 10 million farmers. Controlling one pest, as chemical companies boast frequently that they have discovered how to do, inevitably unleashes others in a cascade of unintended consequences. The lesson in this case, according to Wu, is that “We have to study the whole ecosystem.” Indeed.

Similar effects are being felt by farmers in the American breadbasket as the result of their reliance on a single chemical. For decades, chemical farming was limited by the fact that pesticides were terribly persistent and toxic, and while they could kill broadleaf weeds without affecting cereal crops with narrow leaves, they could not distinguish between narrow-leafed weeds and those cereal crops, such as corn. Then Monsanto came up with Roundup, a glyphosate killer of weeds both broad- and narrow-leafed, that broke down quickly into inert compounds, and it then introduced genetically engineered seeds that produced crops that were immune to Roundup. (For more details see my book, Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age by Sustainable Living.)

Thanks to massive advertising and public-relations campaigns (that shouted down repeated studies by the US Department of Agriculture and United Nations that showed no particular advantages to GM crops) within ten years over half of all American cropland was planted with Roundup-resistant crops.

One inevitable result of drenching large areas with a chemical designed to kill all weeds is that some weeds, by accident, will be immune to that particular chemical. They will reproduce and, finding much less competition around them, will flourish. All this was known by non-chemical farmers and scientists from the beginning of the Roundup debacle. Yet the New York Times was surprised, last week, to find that what could go wrong, had gone wrong. (See Deepwater Horizon, et al.)

Throughout the American heartland, farmers who were persuaded to stop cultivating, stop spraying more toxic weed sprays and give their faith to Roundup are being overcome by resurgent weeds. One of them, pigweed, is a mutant monster that can reach seven feet in height and can ruin a combine. The high costs of the modified seed, the increasing cost of applying more and more Roundup to less and less effect, added to the need to resume tilling and the use of older chemicals, adds up to “…the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” according to Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.

In response to the rising emergencies around the world, Monsanto is desperately at work on genetically altering plants so they will be resistant to, of all things, the carcinogen 2,4-D. Perhaps they should take a cue from Mr. Wu, and “study the whole ecosystem.”