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Thursday, September 15th, 2011

Monsanto Denies Superinsect Science

Author:     TOM PHILPOTT
Source:     Mother Jones
Publication Date:     Thu Sep. 8, 2011 3:25 PM PDT
 Link: Monsanto Denies Superinsect Science
Stephan:   The Obama administration has been helping Monsanto spread the gospel of GMO, to the corporation's considerable profit. And doing this even as countervailing research keeps emerging. This story for instance strikes me as self-evident. Nature has been maneuvering around obstacles for billions of years, how could anyone imagine that superinsects would not emerge, particularly given the history of superbugs emerging to bypass all known antibiotics. That Monsanto purports to believe otherwise strikes me as an almost surreal level of hubris. However I don't think they have any illusions. Smart people, they are just buying time until they can develop the next round. Its is the side-effects that are occurring as the result of this ill-conceived hopscotch that are doing the damage. All life is interconnected and interdependent, so there are always unintended consequences. We don't know enough yet to manipulate whole species like this.

As the summer growing season draws to a close, 2011 is emerging as the year of the superinsect-the year pests officially developed resistance to Monsanto’s genetically engineered (ostensibly) bug-killing corn.

While the revelation has given rise to alarming headlines, neither Monsanto nor the EPA, which regulates pesticides and pesticide-infused crops, can credibly claim surprise. Scientists have been warning that the EPA’s rules for planting the crop were too lax to prevent resistance since before the agency approved the crop in 2003. And in 2008, research funded by Monsanto itself showed that resistance was an obvious danger.

And now those unheeded warnings are proving prescient. In late July, as I reported recently, scientists in Iowa documented the existence of corn rootworms (a ravenous pest that attacks the roots of corn plants) that can happily devour corn plants that were genetically tweaked specifically to kill them. Monsanto’s corn, engineered to express a toxic gene from a bacterial insecticide called Bt, now accounts for 65 percent of the corn planted in the US.

The superinsect scourge has also arisen in Illinois and Minnesota. ‘Monsanto Co. (MON)’s insect-killing corn is toppling over in northwestern Illinois fields, a sign that rootworms outside of Iowa may have developed resistance […]

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