Note On Herbicide Resistance: Chris Preston

'Bashing corporations' is made considerably easier by the behaviour of the corporations themselves:

'Monsanto fined $1.5 million for bribery'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4153635.stm

'Roundup Ready® canola is like other canola. It’s nutritional qualities and food safety are equivalent to conventional canola.
In a paddock, it looks the same as other canola. With the exception of glyphosate based herbicides (such as Roundup®) unwanted plants can be effectively controlled with the same herbicides as conventional canola.'

http://www.monsanto.com.au/layout/canola/rr_canola/default.asp

So to sum up the only benefit to Roundup Ready® canola is that it is glyphosate resistant but since persistant use of the same pesticide causes 'weeds' to develop resistance, this is not a benefit either.

Monsanto somehow forgot to mention that the yields from their GM product are lower than conventional canola.

'The success of RR soybeans is remarkable in light of the magnitude of the so-called Roundup Ready "yield drag." Under most conditions extensive evidence shows that RR soybeans produce lower yields than possible if farmers planted comparable but non-engineered varieties.'

http://www.mindfully.org/GE/RRS-Yield-Drag.htm

So bearing all this in mind why the rush to use GM products by famers? Simple, at the current time intensive agricultural processes are the only way for agricultural suppliers to meet the demands of ever lower prices by corporations like WalMart.

Farmers are increasingly unable to afford more agriculturally sustainable practises like proper crop rotations and varied chemicals because the drive for ever cheaper food is destroying normal farm economics and intensive farming methods are the only way of delivering the necessary economies of scale.

If farmers can use the agricultural equivalent of 'Agent Orange' (another chemical Monsanto used to produce) then they do not have to apply it as often (initially) and this saves money (initially) although these benefits are rapidly eroded.

'Food is now cheaper in relative terms than it has ever been' -

It certainly is in the developed world, because the consumer is not being informed of the real cost of all that 'cheap' food in biosphere degredation or the way the farming community is being impoverished by the corporations supplying food to consumers at bargain basement prices.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4742949.stm

There is no such thing as a free lunch and there never will be.

Some may wonder why Monsanto has remained in the struggling agribusiness:

'Monsanto made $4.9 billion in sales in the fiscal year ended 31st August 2003.
Of that, $1.9 billion came from biotech seeds, such as corn and soybeans genetically modified to resist certain insects and withstand applications of Roundup or generic glyphosate weed-killer.

Sales of Roundup were $1.8 billion. And the company made $1.2 billion in revenue from other agricultural productivity products, primarily its Posilac growth hormone for dairy cows.'

'For the full fiscal year, the company made a profit of $68 million' after taking a one time hit to pay '$396 million to help settle a liability lawsuit over decades-old contamination of Anniston, Ala., with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.'
- St Louis Post

Perhaps by encouraging international government investment in R&D through educational channels, Monsanto will weather the storm.

North Dakota State University and biotechnology company Monsanto have agreed to work together on ways to improve oilseed crops for biodiesel fuel and other products.

School officials say the partnership makes sense because the state leads the nation in the production of canola, a preferred ingredient in biodiesel.

"This is a great big deal for us," said Ken Grafton, dean of agriculture at NDSU. "In talking to my colleagues across the country, we don't see this level of partnership with private industry."

http://www.northerncanola.com/

Certainly biotech R&D has an added benefit for Monsanto, through its patent on the 35S promoter, a genetic mechanism used extensively in the biotech industry.
'All biotech companies using the promoter must pay Monsanto a technology use fee. By 2004, the company had a 29.82 percent share of all research and development in the biotech industry.'
- Center for Food Safety, 2005

'BXN cotton had a slightly bigger impact, but is now virtually defunct. Again this is because farmers chose not to grow it.' -

Are you sure Chris? Wouldn't the fact that BXN cotton was produced by Calgene, a company that Monsanto bought in 1997 be a fairly direct cause of its replacement by Roundup Ready product?

Would Monsanto's spending $8 billion acquiring, or establishing relationships with, US and foreign seed companies have anything to do with the popularity of its products and farmers 'choice'?

Certainly the 2005 report by the Center for Food Safety stated that one of the factors contributing to Monsanto’s cornering of the GM market is its control of these seed companies.
“These companies (often owned or indirectly controlled by Monsanto) had to agree that 90 percent of the sales of herbicide-tolerant soybeans would contain Monsanto’s patented technology.
This requirement was later dropped to 70 percent after Monsanto came under scrutiny from government regulators. Through this sort of ownership and control of seed companies, Monsanto has been able to ensure that competition [will] remain small and that its patented genetically engineered crop varieties [will] be the ones most readily available".

http://cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=seeds_tmln&startpos=0#gm-3

The UK Soil Association’s 2003 report, Seeds of Doubt, shows that virtually every benefit claimed for GE crops since 1996 has not occurred.

'Instead farmers using GE seeds are reporting lower yields, continuing dependency on herbicides and pesticides, loss of access to international markets and a loss of profitability.

The Soil Association estimates that GE soya, maize and oilseed rape could have cost the US economy US$12 billion since 1999 in farm subsidies, lower crop prices, loss of major export orders and product recalls.'

'One of the stranger findings of the report is that rats may be fussier than humans when it comes to eating these products.

“A student placed two bales of maize in a rodent infested barn. One was Roundup Ready and the other was conventional. Apparently the rodents would not touch the Roundup Ready crop"
- Greenpeace

http://www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/ed0930aa86103d8380256aa70054918d/a72f34ecca9b64e880256cd70037de0a!OpenDocument

Lamna, it is easy enough to take on bashing corporations, but at the end of the day it is how we use the products they deliver that really matters. If a corporation produces a product that nobody wants it quickly disappears from sight. Yes advertisers have been quite good at convincing people to buy products that they don’t really need, but as is the case elsewhere in our society the onus is on the individual to make their own choices. Farmers do and most have a pretty low tolerance for products that don’t perform.

There is no doubt that pesticides have played a major role in allowing increased food production. The major beneficiaries have not been the agrichemical corporations, but consumers. Food is now cheaper in relative terms than it has ever been. If there was a successful way of managing weeds and staying profitable without the use of herbicides you can bet that Australian farmers would be doing it. One of the constant complaints I hear from farmers is of the amount of money they have to spend on chemicals. The fact that they continue to use herbicides every year is testament to the failure of current alternatives to deliver effective weed control at a comparative price.

The evolution of chemical companies into ‘life-science’ companies owes a lot to the relatively slim pickings to be made in the agrichemical industry. Once these were chemical companies manufacturing pharmaceuticals, agrichemicals and industrial chemicals. About a decade ago, the chemical companies spun off the agrichemical divisions because they perform much worse than the pharmaceutical divisions.

While the GM corporations might like to lock their customers into exclusive relationships, it does not work that way. Farmers have a choice about whether they grow one cultivar of a crop or another. It just turns out that in the US, the majority of soybean growers have opted to use Roundup Ready soybeans. Other varieties are available, but are not grown by the majority of farmers, because they offer lower value. The same is true of canola growers in North Dakota. Cotton growers in Australia have done the same with Bt cotton. In contrast, Navigator canola (a GM product) never really got off the ground in Canada because it was not as good as its competitors on the market. Formers simply chose not to use it. BXN cotton had a slightly bigger impact, but is now virtually defunct. Again this is because farmers chose not to grow it.

Hi Ann,

I apologise if my standpoint was unclear, my comment - 'we might just make some progress in understanding how everything is interconnected because until that is taken into account, technology will hinder not help.' - was supposed to articulate exactly the sentiments you have expressed. Nuclear power is an example of flawed technology, renewables are an example of technology designed to work with nature, not against it.

I am not hostile to all technology, merely technology designed around unsustainable practises and technology that is disingenuosly promoted as some kind of 'magic wand' that will solve a global problem at a stroke, but in reality does nothing of the sort.

GE technology is promoted on its own terms to fulfill very narrow requirements and no legal responsibility is taken by GE or GM corporations if anything goes wrong, these issues are classed as 'externalities'.
Indeed most GE, GM and chemical corporations go to great lengths to ensure they cannot be held legally accountable for 'accidents'; just ask the citizens of Bhopal (Methyl isocyanate the chemical that was produced at Union Carbide's facility in Bhopal is used in pesticides).

Rachel Carson in 'Silent Spring' was concerned not just with the quantities of chemicals being used by the intensive agriculture industry but that corporations do not test the effects of combinations of chemicals, merely the regulationary 'safety' requirements for their own individual products.

People are now exposed to a vast number of man-made chemicals in all aspects of their daily lives and the fact is very little study is dedicated to how combinations of those chemicals effect us long term.

Tobacco corporations spent decades and millions on 'scientific' propaganda that there was no link between their products and cancer.

The concept that no winds or fauna occur around GM farms is another classic example of corporate propaganda.
The suggestion that it is impossible to have cross pollination between GM and non-GM crops is a scientific fallacy.
This of course is of no concern to GM corporations since it expands their market share by covertly destroying their competition, while at the same time those corporations claim that they are happy to compete with non-GM products on 'merit' alone. However they also consistently campaign against labelling that allows consumers to make an informed choice.

If GM corporations achieve sufficient market share in a farming community, they quite simply win by contamination.
Any suggestion that GM corporations are unaware of this, would require a level of stupidity amongst their scientific experts which would prevent them from identifying the significant difference between their a*** and their elbow.

All GM products are designed to lock customers (and by extention the consumer) into an exclusive commercial relationship with the supplying corporation.

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlebusiness.aspx?type=tnBusinessNews&storyID=nN10436446&from=business

“What you’re seeing,” he explained, “is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it’s really a consolidation of the entire food chain.”
- Monsanto representative, Robert Fraley, describing his company’s corporate strategy in the magazine 'Farm Journal' in 1996.

Roundup (glyphosate) and genetically engineered 'Roundup Ready' crops are simply a revenue stream, Monsanto's patent on Roundup ran out in 2000 so to protect revenue before that happened, Monsanto patented genetically modified crops that were resistant to glyphosate, thus perpetuating their patent by other means.

In 1997 the New York attorney-geneneral’s office forced Monsanto to withdraw adverts claiming that Roundup is “biodegradable” and “environmentally friendly”.

According to the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, glyphosate is the third most commonly-reported cause of pesticide illness among farm workers and the commonest cause among landscape maintenance workers.

'Scientists' funded by Monsanto to produce a study of their growth hormone 'Posilac' reported that cows treated with the hormone suffered only a minor increase in udder infections. But when the results were re-examined by independent researchers, they found to their astonishment that only part of the data had been processed. A complete analysis revealed that the “somatic cell count” (that is pus, to you and me) increased by 20 per cent in the udders of cows treated with Posilac.

http://www.unsafescience.com/bgh.html

There is also scientific evidence that cows given growth hormone injections pass elevated hormone levels on in their milk and that this is linked to breast cancer and prostate cancer.

'among pre-menopausal women increasing levels of IGF-1 in blood were strongly associated with increasing risk of breast cancer in a consistent dose-response relationship. Adjusting for other known breast cancer factors (age at which menstruation began; age at birth of first child; number of children; family history of breast cancer; and weight in relation to height) did not change the results'
- The Lancet (May 1998)

Science (January 1998) reported a four-fold increased risk of prostate cancer "a strong positive association" among 152 men who had elevated, but still "normal," levels of IGF- 1. The study found that men, aged 60 and older, with high levels of IGF-1 (300-500 nanograms/milliliter) were eight times more likely to develop prostate cancer than men with the lowest levels (100-185 ng/ml).

According to the researchers, these re-sults "raise concern" that an intake of rBGH or IGF-l, over time (and especially so for the elderly), "may increase the risk of prostate cancer." Researchers suggested that IGF-1 levels in the blood might be a useful predictor of prostate cancer risk.

http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:2VJnU8RJSo0J:www.corporations.org/cancer/r598.doc+posilac+study+Samuel+S.+Epstein&hl=en&gl=uk&ct=clnk&cd=10

http://www.ejnet.org/rachel/rhwn382.htm

Viruses will always be ahead of humans because they are driven by the laws of evolutionary survival not commercial profit and neatly demonstrate mankinds' supreme folly and arrogance in believing we can become immune to and seperate from the natural world.

'there is no way we could feed the current World population.' -

We aren't feeding the current world population and the agro-chemical industry is not interested in feeding the world, regardless of politics.
It exists to sell products, if third world countries struggle to afford them, tough.
If the WTO is weighted in favour of the developed world, tough.
The developed world does not have a superior culture merely superior fire power, that's why neoconservatives place so much importance on technology.

The agro-chemical industry is unconcerned by plants developing resistance to herbicides because it is not in the business of solving any problem permanently, merely in developing and selling patented products to meet the next 'problem' and the next, ad nauseam.
It's like the 'war on terror' conveniently unwinnable but a lot of corporations are going to make a huge amount of money out of it.

Cynical? Absolutely.

'Nature isn't friendly....we've got to be smarter than bloody mother nature' -

Last time I checked 'mother nature' was our only life support system in an otherwise genuinely hostile universe and has been since long before Homo sapiens evolved.

This planet will continue to evolve regardless of whether it is capable of supporting civilisation as we currently enjoy it or indeed mankind at all.
Once we stop deluding ourselves that we are 'special' and can therefore safely ignore or 'beat' nature; we might just make some progress in understanding how everything is interconnected because until that is taken into account, technology will hinder not help.

Thanks Chris,
So what about "superweeds" that we hear so much about in GM crops?

What to do?

How to eliminate those superweeds, do we need to go back to old more toxic herbicides to get rid of them?