Seeds of Hope by Jane Goodall

Author:Jane Goodall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nature / Environmental Conservation & Protection, Nature / Plants / General, Gardening / General
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

And Now “Superweeds”

Monsanto has also created GE crops (soy, corn, canola, alfalfa, and sugar beet) that are tolerant of its own brand of herbicide, Roundup, now the most widely used herbicide around the globe. The first of these crops was sold as Roundup Ready soybean. It now seems that this may have been one of Monsanto’s most ill-advised products to date, because, like the insects that have adapted to a diet of Bt plant material, a variety of agricultural weed species have also built up resistance as a result of frequent sprayings of Roundup.

The “superweeds” are now emerging at an alarming rate. Worldwide, twenty-four species of agricultural weeds, some of which grow two to three inches a day, are now resistant to glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup herbicide. Fourteen of these superweeds have been reported in at least twenty-two US states, infesting over ten million acres of mostly soybeans, cotton, and corn.

Farmer Mark Nelson in Kansas had terrible problems when his soybean fields were invaded by one of these new superweeds, waterhemp (Amaranthus tuberculatus [syn. rudis]). I read about him in a 2011 Reuters news story that described the superweeds towering “above his beans, sucking up the soil moisture and nutrients” that are needed by his crop.

“When we harvest this field, these waterhemp seeds will spread all over kingdom come,” he told the reporter. And one waterhemp plant can produce a million seeds. So that even if only a few plants survive spraying, this could lead to a major infestation in a couple of years. I read about another farmer, Justin Cariker, in Dundee, Mississippi, who has an infestation of glyphosate-resistant Palmer pigweed (Amaranthus palmeri) on his farm. Looming above his cotton plants, it reaches heights of seven feet or more and develops a stem as thick as a man’s wrist. An infestation of this Monsanto-created monster can even damage harvesting equipment.

The former president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts, Andrew Wargo III, described superweeds as “the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen.”

Since Monsanto’s patent expired in 2000, many other companies began marketing glyphosate, and agricultural weeds resistant to the herbicide are appearing in other parts of the world, particularly Argentina, one of the first countries outside North America to introduce GM crops.

The response of Monsanto to superweeds? It now instructs farmers to use a cocktail of other herbicides to deal with them. Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, and Bayer are all reviving sales of older herbicides, probably hoping to challenge Monsanto’s dominance in the business. And work is in progress to develop crops genetically modified to withstand the new massive spraying of the superweeds. Dow AgroSciences is, in fact, seeking the USDA’s permission to sell farmers corn, soybean, and cotton seeds that are genetically altered to tolerate heavy spraying of glyphosate as well as Dow’s 2,4-D based herbicide “Enlist.”

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