Originally published June 11 2015
The EPA's 'weed resistance management plan' does nothing to stop the cycle of herbicide overuse and superweeds
by Daniel Barker
(NaturalNews) The Environmental Protection Agency has recently confirmed that it will require the GM agriculture industry to conform to a "weed resistance management plan" regarding glyphosate, the main ingredient in the Monsanto-produced herbicide called Roundup.
The plan will include "weed monitoring, farmer education, and remediation plans."
However, some observers have note that this is a case of "too little, too late."
Monsanto scientists and others who support the planting of genetically-modified crops have painted themselves into a corner while endangering the future of every single living organism on the planet, not to mention the generations to come.
An insanely vicious cycle has arisen from the hare-brained "scientific" notion that it makes sense to engineer GM crops that are tolerant of a poisonous herbicide (i.e. Roundup) that will theoretically kill all the weeds in the fields where the crops are planted.
One of the biggest problems with this scheme is that it encourages weeds to develop resistance to the herbicide. In fact, it has been reported that more than 60 million acres of U.S. farmland are now plagued with herbicide-resistant weeds.
This has prompted an even more widespread application of herbicides in the U.S., including an increase in the use of 2,4-D, a chemical that was one of the ingredients in the notoriously poisonous defoliant known as Agent Orange.
More than a dozen states have now received EPA approval to begin using the latest GM herbicide-resistant crop system. This one was developed by Dow AgroSciences and is called "Enlist Duo." It uses a combination of glyphosate and 2,4-D in its herbicide component of the system.
Now, many experts are predicting an increase in a phenomenon known as the "pesticide treadmill."
In the words of Bill Freese, an analyst with the Centre for Food Safety:
It's advertised as a solution to the problem of glyphosate-resistant weeds, but in fact the weeds will rapidly evolve resistance and become more difficult to control - leading to what we call the pesticide treadmill. As we've seen with Roundup Ready, these systems are extremely good at fostering resistant weeds.
Hence the vicious cycle mentioned above: the more herbicide-tolerant systems we allow to be incorporated, the more resistant weeds emerge from the process. There is basically no solution within the paradigm other than to dump more and more poisons into the environment, endangering entire ecosystems along with the humans and other living things that depend on them for survival.
Glyphosate has been in the news a lot lately. First, the World Health Organization labeled the chemical as "probably carcinogenic." Then, in a video of an interview that has recently gone viral, Monsanto lobbyist Patrick Moore refused to drink a glass of glyphosate after claiming that it was safe to ingest.
The EPA's "weed resistance management plan" is a half-hearted attempt to convince the public that it is actually doing something about the problems associated with these GM agriculture systems, while in reality it has been giving the green light to Monsanto, Dow and other biotech firms to continue with their increasingly destructive agendas.
A public letter released last year by a group of nearly 150 "farm, food, health, public interest, consumer, fisheries, and environmental organizations" warned that U.S. agriculture is now at a "crossroads."
An excerpt from the letter:
One path leads to more intensive use of old and toxic pesticides, litigious disputes in farm country over drift-related crop injury, still less crop diversity, increasingly intractable weeds, and sharply rising farmer production costs. This is the path American agriculture will take with approval of Dow's 2,4-D corn, soybeans and the host of other new herbicide-resistant crops in the pipeline."
This is a path we can no longer afford to pursue.
Sources:
http://www.gmwatch.org
http://www.ipsnews.net
http://www.agriculture.com
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