Farmers' knowledge about the cycles of nature, their land, their crops and livestock, their soil, and all the life that shares their estates seem to have been swept aside by reductionist 'solutions' sold to them by corporations with $-lined technological tunnel vision.
Simple, GM 'solutions' have a habit of leading to complex
outcomes and nasty surprises.
When South Africa embraced GM maize with a 'Bt' insecticide
to beat corn-boring pests, the 'solution' lasted only six years before the
insects adapted and took up where they had left off.
The next 'solution' replaced the single Bt insecticide with
two versions of Bt in the same plant, but signs that this belts-and-braces
technology was beginning to break down emerged after only three years.
When China embraced GM cotton with Bt insecticide to control
bollworm, the pests were obliterated not only in the cotton crop but in other
surrounding crops. This would have been
a success story had it not been for the mirid bugs which moved in to infect
both the GM cotton crops and the surrounding crops.
When GM crops tolerant to glyphosate herbicide became widely
planted in much of America, many non-target weeds were wiped out along with the
wildlife which lived on them. For the
monarch butterfly, whose migratory life-cycle depends on the wide availability
of a single weed type, glyphosate spelled starvation and reproductive collapse,
contributing significantly to the 80% drop in the population in the 13 years to
2018.
The sheer, crippling, scale of superweeds has been one of
the nastiest surprises yet to emerge from Roundup Ready GM crops [1,2].
It's not just plant and animal wildlife which are being
changed by GM fixes.
In some areas of Argentina, the GM soya 'solution' to the
country's economic woes has led to the ground itself, its rivers, plants and
soil shifting abruptly and unpredictably.
Replacing huge tracts of permanent deep-rooted,
water-absorbing forest with soya crops, which have short roots and only grow
for a few months of the year with nothing in-between times, has raised the soil
water level and increased its subterranean flow. New water courses can appear overnight,
carving canyons tens of metres wide and deep, and miles long through what was
once productive farmland. The rivers
carry mounds of earth, grass and trees as they flow, and can bury a field
downstream deep under mud. Because all
the ground around is unstable, the rivers keep changing course.
OUR COMMENT
Conveniently for the biotech industry, these nasty surprises
only emerge at the landscape level when the complexities of the ecosystem kick
in: they can't be studied in a laboratory.
There's nothing here that can't be fixed using traditional
farming know-how (if there's any remaining) and modern crop breeding for
locally-optimised plants (if there's the will to put the resources into it),
ditching the chemical addiction (in favour of agro-ecological methods) and
re-thinking the soya-obsession (in favour of diversification).
None of these are quick-fixes, but neither will they lead to
nasty surprises, so the sooner we start the better.
Background
SOURCES:
- Thomas
Bøhn and Gabor
L. Lövel,
2107, Complex Outcomes from Insect and Weed Control with Transgenic
Plants: Ecological Surprises?
Frontiers in Environmental Science
- E.
Strydom, et al., 2018, Resistance Status of Busseola Fusca
(Lepidoptera:Noctuidae) Populations to Single- and Stacked-Gene Bt Maize
in South Africa, Journal of Economic Entomology
- Pest
becoming resistant to stacked-trait Bt maize in South Africa, GM Watch
10.11.18
- Nasty
"surprises" from insect and weed control with GM plants, GM
Watch 9.10.17
- Florida
monarch butterfly populations have dropped 80 percent since 2005,
https://scienceblog.com/, 8.11.18
- Uki Goňi, When nature says 'Enough!': the river that appeared overnight in Argentina, Guardian, 1.04.18
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