SUSTAINABILITY & WEED RESISTANCE
The word 'sustainability' is redefined by the backers of GMOs to
mean 'not sustainable.'
To them
sustainability means creating crops that
require more
chemicals over time, higher input costs, increased reliance on fossil
fuels and a predictable consolidation of land and water resources.
But the evidence is in (You'll
have to read the IAASTD in Pdf). According to the World Bank, the
World Health Organization, and the United Nations GMOs are directly
linked to increasing weed resistance and land
and water consolidation.
Now glyphosate* tolerant¹ GMO systems are being threatened by increasing
weed resistance.
Twenty glyphosate resistant weeds have been
documented in the United States already.
Thousands of acres of
croplands have been abandoned to Johnsongrass, one of the worst weeds
in the world.
As weed resistance grows farmers pour more and more glyphosate based
herbicides on the land, and, predictably, return to more dangerous,
older chemicals like diquat and atrazine². Chemicals the
glyphosate system was supposed to replace forever.
The plants and animals the engineers create have extremely short usable
lives, less than a human generation in some cases.
The biotech corporations have essentially come up with a living form of
planned
obsolecence.
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GMO researchers jump on the same cliff-bound train that the Green
Revolution started and throw more coal on the fire.
Using
readily available math³, we can surmise that the Green Revolution,
with
its ever increasing costs to the farmer and consolidation of
resournces into fewer and fewer corporate hands, has actually caused
greater starvation and death thrughout the world, both as a percentage
of population and as a total number.
Researchers
will tout GMOs as the answer to the world's hunger problems when it is
quite solidly established that food production is not the problem, food
distribution, poverty, access to water and land and the predatory
practices of multinational corporations and governments is the problem.
Most of the world's starving children live in countries that are net
exporters of food. Right now the world produces more food than needed
by the whole of humanity. It's a side note, but there are more obese
people on earth than hungry people.
Herbicide resistant weeds threaten the viability of the glyphosate
systems. They've also, consequentially, led to research into
genetically modifying plants so that they are resistant to other
herbicides, sometimes the very same dangerous chemicals that GMOs were
touted as making obsolete just a few years ago.
To the GMO industry the word sustainablity seems to mean pushing issues
like weed resistance a few years down the tracks,
which actually requires us to agree that sustainability no longer means
the quality of being sustainable.
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I use the train as a metaphor because its illustrative of the green
revolution in many ways. The green revolution and its heavy reliance on
chemicals and inputs started the train. It was a major factor in the
consolidation of land, water and other resources into fewer and fewer
profit driven hands. Anyone with any common sense (Please see my essay
on common sense if the term makes you chuckle) can see that the
chemically intensive, mono-culture system will eventually come to an
end. The glyphosate system, GMOs as a whole, just make that end
faster, harder and more predictable.
--Chris
Dudley
*Glyphosate is the active ingredient in herbicides like Monsanto's
Roundup. It is important to know that glyphosate itself is not a very
effective herbicide. It needs other chemicals to work. Those chemicals
also confer toxicity. Currently, studies of the environmental and
health impacts of glyphosate are done using glyphosate alone, not with
the solutions that come in the bottle and are actually sprayed on the
land.
¹ The word 'tolerant' should be used because plants built to
withstand glyphosate are actually tolerant of the herbicide, take in
the herbicide and are literally filled with it. So tolerant is a better
word.
² Atrazine is banned in almost all industrialized countries except
the United States.
³The math is done comparing pre green revolution numbers of
starvation
and death to today, but excluding Communist China, which has a
communist food distribution system that makes actual death from food
deprivation rare in that country.
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