Glyphosate and AMPA in the air

May 2018

GM crops are still hanging on to their 'environmentally-friendly' image.

Resistance to glyphosate-based herbicides is a feature of most GM crops. This GM trait enables soil-preserving no-till farming, and provides easy weed control with a single chemical reputed to be toxic only to weeds and to disappear readily from the environment. All this, plus glyphosate's early 'safe-as-salt' tag for humans [1] provided little incentive for scientific study of side-effects of the herbicide during the past decades of increasing use.

However, things are changing since the International Agency for Research on Cancer came to the conclusion that glyphosate is 'probably carcinogenic to humans' [2]. Questions are gradually surfacing about where glyphosate actually goes when it 'disappears' from the environment.

The emerging answers don't paint a comforting picture.

Glyphosate global perspective

March 2016

A paper which puts the whole world-wide glyphosate situation into perspective has been published.  This summarises and graphically illustrates the trends in use of the herbicide since it was first commercialised in 1974 to the latest figures available, 2014.

Climate-smart crops or profit-smart?

March 2016

Biotech industry claims that GM crops are climate-smart are not new.

Herbicide-tolerant crops have been successfully hyped as enabling no-till farming to promote carbon storage in the soil and saving carbon release from fossil fuels.  It's a good story, but doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny: even without tillage, little carbon actually stays in the soil long enough to be considered sequestered [1], and all commercial-scale GM crops are inherently dependent on fossil-fuels to supply the necessary agri-chemicals and run all the machines.

Echoing GMO-friendly propaganda

November 2014

CC photo Wiki Commons

 

An interesting revelation on how GM 'solutions' are spun to the public, governments, retailers and industry bodies is worth taking note of.

A spike in commodity food prices in 2007-8 led to a 'food crisis' and hunger-fuelled riots in many areas.

Crises are known to be transformative of perceptions and actions: they can also, it seems, be harnessed to manipulate those perceptions and actions.

The 'GM helps climate change' myth unravels

September 2014



Fertiliser applied to no-till field in US.
CC photo By Lynn Betts [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In contrast with the traditional ploughing-under of weeds before the sowing of seeds, no-till agriculture involves destruction of weeds on the surface then planting of seeds in grooves or holes with minimal disturbance to the soil.

There are several recognised benefits of no-till. In particular, valuable soil structure is preserved, reducing erosion and increasing important biological activity, plus the retained plant-matter holds more water. For the farmer, no-till means reduced labour and fuel costs.

Also, because breaking up the soil by ploughing triggers a loss of the carbon locked up by soil organisms, no-till has become part of the solution to climate change (see below).

Argentina's Modelo Sojero

February 2014

CC photo of ripe soya beans by amicor on Flickr

In Argentina, soya has been a goose that lays golden eggs. 

Soya was introduced into Argentinean agriculture in the early 1970s.  It has been expanding steadily ever since, with a boost in the late 1970s due to the green revolution, and another one after 1996 due to the advent of Roundup Ready GM soya. 

By 2001, after an institutional, political and economic crisis in the country, half of Argentineans were living in poverty.  The government turned to GM soya as a basis for economic growth in the belief that it would create social well-being. 

Roundup Ready decline

April 2011

What's going on in the real world of Roundup Ready farming?

Crop spraying by TaminaMiller on Flickr

An article in Ag Journal gives some useful, at times poetically vivid, insights into what's really happening in GM Roundup-based agriculture in the USA.

The problems described are much the same as we've been hearing elsewhere. Roundup Ready seeds genetically transformed to resist Roundup herbicide are being mis-used and over-used, and farmers don't seem to know how to stop.

Carbon-reducing myths

March 2011

Image Wiki Commons

Policy-makers and corporate executives have been scrambling to find a way to ditch our current dependency on fossil-fuels. Not only is oil becoming increasingly scarce and costly, but we're releasing so much carbon dioxide gas that we're cooking ourselves.

The fashionable answer to the problem is a transition to a 'bioeconomy'. This 'clean', 'green', 'renewable', 'sustainable' economy of the future will be based on biomass from agricultural crops, forests and algae.

Even to those unversed in science, this alternative to fossil fuels is quite clearly no more sustainable than our current energy source. It's simply dependent on other finite natural resources which are already limiting: suitable land area, soil nutrients, and fresh water.