GMO corn is failing; pesticides only exacerbate the problem, scientists say
by: Ethan A. Huff
NaturalNews.com
Thursday, May 05, 2016
The chickens are coming home to roost for American farmers who adopted the chemical agriculture model. Reports indicate that genetically modified (GM) Bt corn, which is currently grown on millions of U.S. acres, is no longer working. And farmers who grow the crop are having to throw everything in the chemical arsenal at it just to produce workable yields.
This includes applying all sorts of insecticides to soil, something that the chemical industry promised during the early days of GM technologies would not be necessary. But because pests are now growing resistant to the Bt insecticide produced inside GM corn kernels, farmers are desperate to find a solution, which in the case of crop chemicals is actually making the situation worse.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, soil insecticide use dropped initially by some 90 percent through 2010 as a result of Bt corn being introduced. But in the past several years, the emergence of resistant superbugs — in this case, resistant western corn rootworms — has created a massive problem for which there does not seem to be a workable solution.
“Farmers say they need to do whatever it takes now to control the western corn rootworm, the most damaging U.S. corn pest,” wrote Jack Kaskey. “Although Monsanto Co. designed its corn to kill the worms, resistant bugs have been found in four states and growers say pesticides are needed again to protect their crops.”
In other words, all those promises made by Monsanto and other chemical companies about GM crops requiring less or no chemical applications were false. And now farmers who adopted the proprietary technology are suffering with no workable options other than to continue increasing the chemical load, or abandon GM crops altogether.
“It’s pretty clear where the science and the scientific community is on this point,” stated Michael Gray, an entomologist at the University of Illinois, to Businessweek. Gray published a paper earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Entomology which found that long-term pesticide use on Bt corn crops is useless and will only exacerbate the situation. “It really does not add much.”
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