Why Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals’ herbicides

[Earth_First]

If you tend large plantings of Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" soy or cotton, genetically engineered to withstand application of the company's Roundup herbicide (which will kill the weeds -- supposedly -- but not the crops), Monsanto will cut you a $6 check for every acre on which you apply at least two other herbicides. One imagines farmers counting their cash as literally millions of acres across the South and Midwest get doused with Monsanto-subsidized poison cocktails.

The move is the latest step in the abject reversal of Monsanto's longtime claim: that Roundup Ready technology solved the age-old problem of weeds in an ecologically benign way. The company had developed a novel trait that would allow crops to survive unlimited lashings of glyphosate, Monsanto's then-patent-protected, broad-spectrum herbicide. It was kind of a miracle technology. Farmers would no longer have to think about weeds; glyphosate, which killed everything but the trait-endowed crop, would do all the work. Moreover, Monsanto promised, Roundup was less toxic to humans and wildlife than the herbicides then in use; and it allowed farmers to decrease erosion by dramatically reducing tillage -- a common method of weed control.

There was just one problem, which the Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out as early as 1993, New York University nutritionist and food-politics author Marion Nestle recently reminded us. When farmers douse the same field year after year with the same herbicide, certain weeds will develop resistance. When they do, it will take ever-larger doses of that herbicide to kill them -- making the survivors even hardier. Eventually, it will be time to bring in in the older, harsher herbicides to do the trick, UCS predicted.

At the time and for years after, Monsanto dismissed the concerns as "hypothetical," Nestle reports. Today, Roundup Ready seeds have conquered prime U.S. farmland from the deep South to the northern prairies -- 90 percent of soybean acres and 70 percent of corn and cotton acres are planted in Roundup Ready seeds. Monsanto successfully conquered a fourth crop, sugar beets, gaining a stunning 95 percent market share after the USDA approved Roundup Ready beet seeds in 2008. But recently, as I reported here, a federal judge halted future plantings of Roundup Ready beets until the USDA completes an environmental impact study of their effects.

more: http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-10-20-why-monsanto-paying-farmers-to-spray-rival-herbicides

[druidity33]

1. K&R, nt.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. More importantly, Monsanto has wiped out the seed competition to sugar beets.

As reported in a side article on the site, if farmers do not use Monsanto seeds, there are now few alternatives.
Big companies have bought up almost all the seed packers.

http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-10-19-food-monsantos-losing-bet-on-GM-sugar-beets

One of our watermelon farmers told me in July, "they" wanted 92.00 a pound for watermelon seeds.
He was very indignant, says he saves and uses his seeds. Which explains why locally we have very delicious
"old timey" melons.

[era veteran]

3. Monsanto, mostly under radar of the public ken,

the evilest company on earth.