Monsanto Spraying Itself

Tom Philpott asks in Grist about Why Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals’ herbicides
…Monsanto has been forced into the unenviable position of having to pay farmers to spray the herbicides of rival companies.

If you tend large plantings of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” soy or cotton, genetically engineered to withstand application of the company’s Roundup herbicide (which will kill the weeds — supposedly — but not the crops), Monsanto will cut you a $6 check for every acre on which you apply at least two other herbicides. One imagines farmers counting their cash as literally millions of acres across the South and Midwest get doused with Monsanto-subsidized poison cocktails.

The move is the latest step in the abject reversal of Monsanto’s longtime claim: that Roundup Ready technology solved the age-old problem of weeds in an ecologically benign way.

Roundup, trade name for glysophate, doesn’t work anymore because the weeds mutated: Continue reading →

Forbes admits it was wrong about Monsanto

Robert Langreth writes in Forbes that Forbes Was Wrong On Monsanto. Really Wrong.
Forbes made Monsanto the company of the year last year in The Planet Versus Monsanto. I know because I wrote the article. Since then everything that could have gone wrong for the genetically engineered seed company….has gone wrong. Super-weeds that are resistant to its RoundUp weed killer are emerging, even as weed killer sales are being hit by cheap Chinese generics. An expensive new bioengineered corn seed with eight new genes does not look impressive in its first harvest. And the Justice Department is invesigating over antitrust issues. All this has led to massive share declines. Other publications are making fun of our cover story.
Maybe Forbes should improve its “invesigating” [sic] skills.

-jsq

Monsanto Downturn

Andrew Pollack writes in the New York Times that After Growth, Fortunes Turn for Monsanto:
As recently as late December, Monsanto was named “company of the year” by Forbes magazine. Last week, the company earned a different accolade from Jim Cramer, the television stock market commentator. “This may be the worst stock of 2010,” he proclaimed.
I remember that! The month after Forbes did that, Covalence did a survey that ranked Monsanto the least ethical company in the world. Worse than Philip Morris, Chevron, or Halliburton!

About that time we discovered Monsanto Corn Causes Liver and Kidney Damage in Rats, and that Monsanto’s GM soy causes sterility and five times higher infant mortality in hamsters.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating Monsanto’s seed business. At least seven U.S. states started their own investigations, and later the U.S. EPA fined Monsanto $2.5 million for selling seeds illegally in Texas counties where they were banned.

Since then we’ve learned that Pesticides Linked to ADHD. Specifically organophosphate pesticides. Like Glysophate (RoundUp). And that indicators of pesticides, including organophosphates, are found in the urine of 95% of school children. We already knew that Glysophoate causes birth defects in humans.

Anyway, could all this bad news have some effect on Monsanto’s share price? Continue reading →

Got cotton in your pigweed?

Observed driving along the road:

Mutant pigweed, Amaranthus palmeri, caused by repeated application of Roundup to cotton. Pictures by Gretchen Quarterman, Coffee County, Georgia, 2 October 2010. More in the flickr set.

Corn most profitable: not GM

Steve Connor writes in the Independent that It pays not to cultivate GM crops, survey finds,
The first economic analysis of growing genetically modified crops on a wide scale has found that the biggest winners were the farmers who decided not to grow them.

The study, which looked at maize yields in the corn belt of the United States, found that farmers who continued to grow conventional crops actually earned more money over a 14-year period than those who cultivated GM varieties.

The article then tries to say they nonetheless benefited from genetic modification:
All farmers benefited from the significantly lower level of pests that came about after the introduction of GM maize to the US in 1996, but the conventional farmers who continued to cultivate non-GM varieties also benefited financially from not having to pay the extra costs of purchasing GM seeds.
Um, what about not having to pay for the pesticides that go with the GM seeds? The study’s author admits they didn’t study that sort of thing:
“Additionally, environmental benefits from corn borer suppression are likely occurring, such as less insecticide use, but these benefits have yet to be documented,” Dr Hutchinson said.
The Telegraph spelled his name wrong. This appears to be the actual report:
Areawide Suppression of European Corn Borer with Bt Maize Reaps Savings to Non-Bt Maize Growers
W. D. Hutchison, E. C. Burkness, P. D. Mitchell, R. D. Moon, T. W. Leslie, S. J. Fleischer, M. Abrahamson, K. L. Hamilton, K. L. Steffey, M. E. Gray, R. L. Hellmich, L. V. Kaster, T. E. Hunt, R. J. Wright, K. Pecinovsky, T. L. Rabaey, B. R. Flood, and E. S. Raun (8 October 2010)
Science 330 (6001), 222. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1190242]
The full text is behind a paywall, but the abstract concludes with:
…and highlight economic incentives for growers to maintain non-Bt maize refugia for sustainable insect resistance management.
So growing 98% of crops from GM seeds, as is the case in Georgia, is a bad idea.