Herbicide tolerant GM soya is insecticidal too

June 2022

Glyphosate-tolerant GM crops aren't something that usually bring insecticides to mind.  Indeed, historically, US soyabeans were only sporadically challenged by insect pests.  Things changed around 2000 with the arrival of the soybean aphid which can only be controlled by foliar spraying.  Hot on the heels of this pest invasion came dramatic increases in bean leaf beetle which prompted the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue an emergency exemption for neonicotinoid insecticidal seed treatments. 

Breeding Bt crops breeds healthy pests

May 2022

In the first decade of 'Bt' insecticidal GM maize growing, it was noted that aphids unexpectedly thrived on them. Aphids are sap-sucking insects which can reproduce prodigiously under the right conditions, but don't usually cause economic damage to maize crops. It was suggested that these overwhelmingly 'right conditions' in the Bt maize plants might be their slight, but significantly, increased levels of amino acids*, dismissed by regulators as of 'no biological significance'.

Unhealthy healthy soya oil

December 2021

In a curious chain of reductionist science, assumption, generalisation, extrapolation and failure to investigate ambiguous data, the western diet shifted from traditional, saturated animal fats to novel unsaturated vegetable oils in the space of a very few decades. Studies in the 1950s and 1960s linked the saturated fats in a typical American animal-based diet to increased risk of cardiovascular disease. This led to a dogma that all saturated fats are unhealthy and so, conversely, all unsaturated fats are healthy. Similarly, this logic extended to whatever is healthy for the heart is healthy for the rest of the body too.

As a result, soyabean oil has moved from having a negligible presence in the diet to constituting more than 60% of the edible vegetable oil which people are now eating instead of animal fats. Key to this shift, were US government subsidies to soya growers which helped soya to become a leading commodity crop. These subsidies later enabled the adoption of GM Roundup Ready soya in American agriculture too.

Soya oil is now ubiquitous in modern processed foods, margarines, salad dressings and snack foods, and is the oil of choice in many restaurants and fast food establishments.

Nasty GM surprises

March 2020

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.

Impossible, incredible, awesome, beyond...

January 2020

'... common sense?

The 'Impossible' bleeding plant burger started out back in 2017 as textured wheat protein with fake soyabean 'blood' from GM yeast and some other stuff collectively described by its manufacturer, Impossible Foods, as "simple, all-natural ingredients" [1]. By 2019, Impossible Foods had realised their Impossible burgers weren't sufficiently beef-like and were unpopular with the gluten-intolerant sector of the population. The non-meat burgers were accordingly re-formulated with soya protein.

It seems, however, that sourcing sufficient quantities of affordable non-GM soya to suit its clean, green image and marketing aspirations proved impossible: Impossible Foods' answer was to switch to cheap and plentiful GM soya and hype its way out of the image problem [2].

Bogus bleeding beef

August 2019

Remember the bleeding GM veggie-burgers rolled out across America in 2017? That's the fake meat produced by a similar method to the way Belgian beer's been made for nearly a thousand years? [1]

The Impossible Burger arrived courtesy of $80 million worth of research plus $300 million worth of promotion from foodie celebrities, and a heap of hype. Breathless write-ups name the Impossible Burger this year's 'It' food craze taking America by storm, and a wake-up call to the meat industry.

Indeed, the long-term goal of the bogus burger's manufacturer, Impossible Foods Inc., is to disrupt the meat industry and convert meat eaters to their products. Impossible Burgers are set to be followed by Impossible Sausages for pizzas and Impossible Steak.

USA missing the main markets

October 2018

America has been gung-ho about declaring gene-edited plants somehow not really GM, paving the way for the new-GM crops now lining up for entry to the US food market [1,2].

The back-drop to this is interesting.

No Bt soya for US farmers

July 2018

After spending more than a decade testing the performance of its GM 'Intacta 2 Xtend' soya in preparation for US commercialisation in 2021, Monsanto has pulled the plug.

A soya model NOT to follow

April 2018

Argentina's 'modelo sojero', once promoted as a shining economic example for others to follow, seems instead to have led straight to the social disaster many predicted.

The 'modelo sojero' [1] is based on a move to high-tech monocultures of a few commodity crops (in this case mainly GM soya, a lot of wheat and GM maize) produced for export markets and for growing the country's GDP. Boosted by extreme free-trade, light-touch regulations and privatisation, the model channels the cash flowing in from far-off lands into state hand-outs to reduce poverty.

Innovation chaos

March 2018

America, it seems, created a whole regulatory headache for itself in the pre-dawn days of GM crops when it determined that GMOs weren't different from their natural counterparts "in any meaningful or uniform way".

This decision wasn't based on science but on a perceived need to resist the spread of unnecessary regulation so as to promote America as the world leader in biotechnology. The result has been that GM crops have been shoe-horned into existing US regulations on drugs, pesticides, invasive species, and control of plant disease where they sit very uneasily in different government agencies, or sometimes nowhere at all.

By far the biggest player in this game is the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) which exists to promote farmers' and agricultural interests, but which seems to have evolved into a machine to do the biotech industry's bidding.

The dicamba tsunami

October 2017

Much in the agri-news in June were reports from US farmers whose crops had been damaged by their neighbours' use of dicamba herbicide on the latest GM crops [1].

It seems Monsanto was over-eager to sell its new decamba-tolerant soya technology so that the GM seed hit the fields before the technical details for using it had been sufficiently developed. The result has been widespread injury not only to non-dicamba-tolerant soya, but to fruit and nut crops, specialty crops, and home gardens. Damage has been progressing so fast that as soon as the statistics were compiled they were out of date. As at 15th August 2017, complaints had been made in 21 States, affecting 3.1 million acres of soyabeans alone and inciting 2,242 official investigations.

Dicamba and dust

October 2017

The major herbicidal chemicals used by US farmers haven't really changed very much over the decades. Various forms of 'dicamba', first introduced in 1967, and 'glyphosate', first introduced in 1974 , feature in America's agricultural landscape as much today as they did a quarter of a century ago.

Both these herbicides have a low acute toxicity to animals (you'd need to eat an awful lot before you'd drop dead). However, their properties, modes of action and applications are very different.

Dicamba selectively kills broad-leafed weeds, but not grasses. In 1994, 90% of the 27.6 million pounds of dicamba formulation used in US fields was applied to maize.

Glyphosate kills all plant life. Until the late 1990s, glyphosate was used to clear the ground before a crop was planted, and in 1995 27.6 million pounds of glyphosate-based weedkiller was used in US fields. Since then, usage has increased some fifteen-fold due to widespread planting of GM glyphosate-tolerant soya and later several other similarly-engineered major crops.

In a bizarre twist of fate, glyphosate's popularity has led to a "battle between farmers" and even a farmer's murder, caused by dicamba.

Impossible bleeding burgers

September 2017

'Synbio', a.k.a. synthetic biology or synthia, began to look like becoming a reality in our food in 2014. Natural artificial additives such as stevia, vanilla and saffron look-alikes produced in vats of GM yeast were set to hit our plates [1].

The following year, 'Muufri' cowless milk emerged. Muufri has six key natural artificial cow's milk proteins produced in vats of GM yeast [2].

One year on, 'Soylent' meal alternatives became the must-have for the modern man who doesn't have time to shop, cook or sit down to eat. Soylent is "proudly made with GMOs" and doesn't even pretend to have any natural ingredients [3].

GM sugarcane

July 2017

Brazil has been a major supplier of non-GM soya to Europe. While huge tracts are planted with GM soya, the country has a very large land area and is confident it can keep GM and non-GM separate.

Last year, saw reductions in several GM-growing areas around the world: two countries (Romania and Burkino Faso) discontinued GM agriculture, India dropped GM cotton cultivation due to pest problems, one of China's biggest provinces implemented a 5-year ban on growing, processing and selling GM crops, Chinese GM cotton planting dropped 24%, while Argentina moved to crop diversification and away from GM. However, globally, the hectares planted to GM crops continue to edge upwards because the reductions have been offset by continuing increases in North and South America where 90% of GM plantings take place.

In Brazil there has been a rise in GM crop area, most of which will be soya, accompanied by reports of the deforestation of nearly 2 million acres of the Brazilian Amazon, the first in a decade.

This renewed environmental destruction may portend something more ominous than just more GM soya.

Regulators in Brazil have approved the commercial use of GM sugarcane.

Science-free wildlife death traps

May 2017

Documents from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in early 2017 show that almost 100% of GM corn is pre-treated with neonicotinoid insecticides. In addition, although the EPA has concluded that neonicotinoid seed treatments have no economic benefit to soya growers, incomplete data indicate that over 50% of soya beans are also coated with the insecticide.

Neonicotinoids, of which there are several brands and classes on the market, are used as seed coatings. They end up throughout the mature plant, its flowers, pollen and nectar, and 95% of the coatings spread through the wider environment including soil water and dust in the air. UK trials have found that at least one neonictinoid accumulates in the soil with increasing toxicity over several years.

Across America, tens of millions of acres of land are planted with corn or soya (often year about), each producing its own fresh wave of neonicotinoids.

Inacta soya concerns

April 2017

EU soya consumers now face the fun prospect of another novel additive in their food. 'Intacta' soya is the first to incorporate a gene for a 'Bt' insecticide in addition to the usual GM ability to accumulate glyphosate herbicide.

The Bt toxin in Intacta is 'Cry1Ac' protein already widely deployed in other commercial GM crops. Besides the existing doubts about the safety assessment of Cry1Ac (such as the use of the bacterial version in tests instead of the structurally, functionally and environmentally different plant-generated version), Intacta presents additional serious concerns.

As all trained kitchen staff know, soya is a recognised human allergen. Cry1Ac is, not only a potential allergen, but is an adjuvant, able to boost immune reactions. Putting two allergens together in one food, or in the dust from animal feed, doesn't sound sensible.

Feeding disease

December 2016

Photo: Creative Commons

In 1973, the US Farm Bill was passed to assure a plentiful supply of staple foods at reasonable prices. The 'staples' are corn, soya, wheat, rice and sorghum, all subsidised by the US tax-payer.

Forty years on, US farmers planted maize over an area almost as big as California, and the area growing soya isn't far behind.

Prices for these commodities have been low in recent years, perilously close to their costs of production. Yet, courtesy of the government, they have been the safest bet for the growers of the vast fields of American monocultures.

How these subsidised 'staple food' crops are streamed into the market is a lesson in itself .

Well done Waitrose!

December 2016

Photo: Creative Commons

Three years ago, when major supermarkets, such as Tesco, Mark & Spencer, Sainsbury's and the Co-op, collectively moved to allowing GM-fed animal produce on their shelves, whether their customers wanted it or not, Waitrose went out on a limb.

Feed me the truth

November 2016

Photo Creative Commons

Most people in the UK don't eat food made from GM ingredients, but supermarkets across the UK are selling products from GM-fed livestock with not a GM label in sight.  

This means that, unwittingly, people are eating eggs, milk, dairy products, poultry, red meat and farmed fish from animals that have been fed GM soya and/or maize.

On the subject of the absent labels, one professor of food marketing told farmers "we find it convenient not to make a big noise about it".

TAKE ACTION

It's time YOU made a big noise whether food marketers find it convenient or not.  

Check out GM Freeze campaign at www.gmfreeze.org/feedmethetruth/ and demand to be FED THE TRUTH on GM animal feed in your food-chain.

Glyphosate infusion into the world

October 2016

Photo Creative Commons

Glyphosate herbicide usage has got so out of control, it seems to have taken on a life of its own.

Most of the livestock which provide us with our meat, dairy and eggs are fed maize, soya and cotton seed. Most of these three crops are liberally sprayed with glyphosate because they've been genetically transformed to accumulate this weedkiller.

Livestock aren't the only animals eating GM crops. Bees can forage over several miles, and monocultures of GM maize, soya, cotton, and oilseed rape in flower provide a bees' banquet. Hardly surprising then that American honey is ubiquitously contaminated with the herbicide.