Monsanto Corn Crop Failures Prove You Can't Fool Mother Nature

Corn crops are falling over dead, succombing to stronger versions of the pests they were designed to resist. They're grown from the seeds of their own destruction.

by Heidi Stevenson

4 September 2011

In Illinois, Monsanto's insect killing corn is keeling over dead. Apparently, super insects have developed as a direct result of their Bt corn. The crops are grown from the seeds of their own destruction.

It should come as no surprise. Just as drug-resistant bacteria develop from antibiotics, pesticide-resistant insects develop from pesticides. The bottom line isn't always the money that Monsanto focuses on. Ultimately, Mother Nature dictates another bottom line, and that may be death.

By taking the easy way out, Agribusiness is creating a monster that's worse than what they started with.

The Monsanto corn crops in question were genetically engineered to make a protein that tears up the gut of rootworms that infest corn crops—especially the monoculture crops of Agribusiness. It's believed that about one-third of America's corn crops now carry this gene.

It has taken only eight years from the introduction of the first rootworm-resistant corn crops to mass die-offs of the same crops by rootworms that have developed resistance to the pesticide.

Traditionally, farmers managed rootworm, along with other concerns, largely by rotating crops. That is, they didn't plant the same crops in the same fields year after year, instead changing them to revive the soil and prevent pests from taking over. That caused die-offs of the pest-resistant bugs when their targeted crops were absent. Now, though, Agribusiness has gotten greedy, planting the same crops over and over again.

Will Monsanto Wise Up?

A rational person might think that Agribusiness would take a step back and question its approach to farming. But Agribusiness is not focused on what's best for agriculture or the earth. It's focused on profits. And most university agricultural departments support them in their goals, not in finding what's best for the earth, people, or even the future of agriculture. For the most part, they do the research that's dictated by Monsanto, and Agribusiness follows in lockstep.

A PLoS one report, "Field-Evolved Resistance to Bt Maize by Western Corn Rootworm", published on 29 July 2011 confirms and discusses the problem of newly-evolved resistance to the pesticide engineered into the Monsanto corn. The report concludes:

These results suggest that improvements in resistance management and a more integrated approach to the use of Bt crops may be necessary.

What that means is a return to old ways of managing pests. However, that isn't the primary focus of the University of Illinois Extension's publication, theBulletin. While it does suggest a return to crop rotation, that's only one of four suggestions. The others are all ones that should please Monsanto:

• Use an insecticide in the soil at the time of planting.
• Use a different genetically modified corn seed that wasn't particularly effective in the past.
• Use corn seed that is genetically modified with more than one pesticide.

This sort of approach may remind readers of another scorched earth industry's practices. Conventional medicine, backed by Big Pharma, has responded to drug resistant bacteria—which seem to be uniformly more virulent than the bacteria they've evolved from—by doing more and more of the same sort of thing. The result is disastrous. We are now seeing diseases of horrific virulence that kill by eating skin and flesh, resulting in amputations to save people's lives. And the problem keeps getting worse, with bacteria becoming ever more drug resistant and virulent.

Agribusiness is on the same track—and it's doing so for the same reason. Its goal is not the betterment of humanity or the earth. Its goal is profits. So, rather than actually stepping back to address the roots of the problems they're creating, they do the opposite. They use the same techniques to solve—albeit temporarily—the immediate problems.

In response to the failure of genetically engineered corn crops, they're planning to do more of the same:

• They'll develop more varieties of pesticide resistant crops, just like Big Pharma develops more varieties of antibiotics.
• They'll engineer combination pesticide resistance into crops, just like doctors utilize cocktails of antibiotics.

Monsanto is already producing seeds with combinations of genetically modified characteristics. They call it "Trait Stacking".

The goal of Agribusiness is profits. It isn't more crops or better crops. It's the profits that can be made. The goal of those who develop the products that Agribusiness uses is exactly the same.

Ultimately, the result can only be the destruction of agriculture, and even more devastation of the earth. Agribusiness is developing the seeds of, not only their destruction, but ours too.

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