Back in the 1990s, Monsanto cashed in on the accidental discovery that it was possible to genetically engineer certain crop plants so that they were resistant to the Monsanto weedkiller, Roundup. The seed for these crops, mainly soy, canola, corn, and cotton, was marketed by Monsanto as “Roundup Ready”
Roundup was the weedkiller of choice for a whole variety of reasons in any case. It killed a broad spectrum of weeds, was easy and safe to work with, and broke down quickly, reducing its environmental impact (which is not to say that it had zero impact!!)
Up till then, you couldn’t use it once your crops had been planted. You needed other, more expensive and labour intensive weed control methods. Now, you could plant your cash crop, and spray the whole paddock with Roundup as much as you wanted to clear the weeds, with no harm to your cash crop!
And so began the US love affair with Roundup and genetically engineered food. Monsanto made a killing with Roundup and it also made a killing with its genetically engineered Roundup Ready seeds, which had to be bought new each year, not saved from last year’s crop.
US agricultural soil was subject to repeated exposure to Roundup in quantities previously unheard of. (As you can imagine, perhaps, there has not been a lot of money available to research the possible damage to beneficial soil organisms from Roundup residues, especially longterm.)
[Monsanto, of course is the company whose director of corporate communications, Phil Angell, famously protested:
''Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job.'' As the FDA depended for its safety assurance primarily on information supplied by Monsanto, that remark takes special pleading to a whole new level.]
In the heart of that US demographic that was perhaps most likely to deny the validity of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (sorry, California), a small Darwinian timebomb had begun ticking.
Weeds, with no assistance from genetic engineers, began evolving fast forward to be Roundup Ready themselves. Among the millions of weeds exposed to Roundup were a few each time that contained genetic variants that helped them to survive, and their seed passed this variant along to subsequent generations of weeds.
In a matter of a little over ten years or so, we are now seeing areas, in the USA and in China, Australia and Brazil, where some weed species are primarily carrying the resistant gene variants. In the same way that over-use of antibiotics as magic-bullet therapies had engendered a new race of resistant super-bacteria, over-use of Roundup was creating super-weeds. You’d think we might learn.
(This is in addition to the large number of brassica family weeds that were predicted to, and have been able to, cross-pollinate with nearby genetically-engineered canola crops to form genetically-altered Roundup Ready hybrid weeds.)
4 May 2010 a New York Times article contained the following map identifying areas most affected by the new Darwinian superweeds
Scientists have identified at least ten weed species that have become Roundup resistant.
Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive eradication techniques that they had long ago abandoned.
Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, in its resistant form, began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.
Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment.
So far, weed scientists estimate that the total amount of United States farmland afflicted by Roundup-resistant weeds is relatively small — 7-10,000,000 acres, according to Ian Heap, director of the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds, which is financed by the agricultural chemical industry. There are roughly 170 million acres planted with corn, soybeans and cotton, the crops most affected.
Watch this space…