Caterpillars resistant to Monsanto BT Corn

[sbannister]

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott ... rn-country

The above discusses a topic of considerable controversy in past forums, genetically engineered crops, and how the insects seem to be getting ahead of the bioengineers. Which may or may not relate to monarchs directly - but I thought y'all might be interested.

[Paul Cherubini]

motherjones.com is a non-profit, but it's CEO probably makes around $100,000 a year from website ad money and donations https://secure.motherjones.com/fnp/?act ... xtra_don=1

Who is motherjones.com's target audience? The farmers alledgedly suffering from the caterpillar resistance problem? No. Montherjones.com's target audience are city folks that know little about farming, but who harbor deep fears and prejudices about frankenfoods and frankenplants. So the motherjones CEO knows an effective way to get into the wallets and purses of these GMO fearing city folks is via writing scare articles that will get their attention and cater to their fears like: "Monsanto causes severe weed and insect pest problems for farmers."

If city folks want to learn the truth about whether Monsanto is causing severe problems for farmers they need to read farmer trade association and news magazine articles like this one: http://tinyurl.com/9kthnkr

According to the article only around 1% of the planted corn acres are being damaged by corn rootworm and the resistance problem is largely limited to "corn-on-corn acres planted to corn for more than three years.

And the article points out farmers facing the problem have other biotech corn seed products available they can plant like the Monsanto & Dow AgroSiences's dual-mode-of-action corn hybrid called SmartStax.

And the article points out "a third option for affected farmers is to stick with a single-mode-of-action hybrid and add a soil-applied insecticide and other products like a foliar spray to reduce next year’s crop of beetles."

Then in 2014 Syngenta (a competitor of Monsanto's) is expected to introduce a next generation and highly effective corn rootworm trait called Duracide http://tinyurl.com/7ndfq22

And far from facing financial armageddon due to insect and weed resistance problems, business has actually been good in recent years at the biotech companies like Monsanto: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=MON&t=2 ... z=l&q=l&c=

The CEO of motherjones would be doing pretty good financially if he had purchased Monsanto stock earlier this year or last year using some of the $100,000 he makes from writing Monsanto scare articles.

[blazing star]

Thanks for posting this, Sbannister. This confirms what we all already know. Broad application of any insecticide (whether it be by spraying or splicing genes into foods), and herbicides, will yield insects & plants that, over time, become immune to the toxin. It's no different than the super bacteria that now defy overused antibiotics.

Monsanto is immune to requests to amend their ways (try to e mail them a concern and watch it fall into the black hole), has no concern for the long term ill effects of their product, and is trying to continually legislate to weaken food labeling requirements so that they can force their product on consumers that wouldn't be able to then make choices as to avoiding GMO crop.

The only thing we, as a collective society, can do is to purchase our food from small family farms that don't grow GMO crops and that grow animals the good old fashioned way.

[sbannister]

I agree, blazingstar.