Bill Nye the Scinece Guy on GMOs

[eridani]

21. So many that it's hardd to track them all

Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.

Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.

Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.

Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.



http://www.panna.org/blog/monsantos-superweeds-superbugs

Last week brought more bad news for Monsanto: the same phenomenon is also occurring in insect pest populations that are developing resistance to transgenic “Bt corn” in the Midwest.The Wall Street Journal recently reported Iowa State University’s findings that the corn rootworm is for the first time proving resistant to the insecticidal toxin, Bt, in transgenic corn in Iowa. Four days later, Business Week reported Bt corn plants in northwestern Illinois toppling over after root damage caused by the same insect, apparently as impervious as its Iowa cousins to the engineered Bt toxin. Likewise, insect resistance to transgenic Bt crops in India (where dramatic crop failures resulted) and South Africa has been reported.

This is a classic case of the pesticide treadmill. A pesticide application (whether sprayed the old-fashioned way or applied through a crop plant engineered to contain that toxin in its cells) typically kills many – but not all – of the targeted pests. Of those that survive, some will pass on their genetic traits of pesticide resistance to their offspring, gradually leading to a more and more resistant population. Farmers get trapped on this treadmill as they are forced to use more — and increasingly toxic — chemicals to control pest populations that continue to develop resistance to each new type or class of pesticides.

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The worst part about the latest GE fiasco is that it all could have been prevented. As early as 1993, scientists were warning about the inevitable rise of superweeds and superbugs. Ten years later, EPA sought scientific advice on how to manage the likely emergence of insect resistance to Bt crops. The Center for Food Safety’s Bill Freese describes how a majority of the scientists consulted by EPA at the time urged the EPA to require farmers to set aside a refuge of non-GE corn, comprising 50% of the total crop acreage, in order to slow the development of Bt resistance.

But that would have halved Monsanto’s seed sales! So EPA quietly sided instead with the only three dissenting voices in the group, going along with Monsanto’s recommendation for a much smaller 20% refuge.


http://www.enveurope.com/content/24/1/24

Contrary to often-repeated claims that today’s genetically-engineered crops have, and are reducing pesticide use, the spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds in herbicide-resistant weed management systems has brought about substantial increases in the number and volume of herbicides applied. If new genetically engineered forms of corn and soybeans tolerant of 2,4-D are approved, the volume of 2,4-D sprayed could drive herbicide usage upward by another approximate 50%. The magnitude of increases in herbicide use on herbicide-resistant hectares has dwarfed the reduction in insecticide use on Bt crops over the past 16 years, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.