1.Resistant Weeds According to Monsanto-Less than Half the Story
2.How NPR Got It Wrong on Monsanto's Superweeds
NOTE: Here are two responses – the first by Doug Gurian-Sherman and the second by Tom Philpott – to the recent Dan Charles piece for NPR: 'Why Monsanto thought weeds would never defeat Round-up'.
http://www.gmwatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13761
Dan Charles based his piece on interviews with Monsanto scientists and, surprise, ended up with some revisionist history about the rise of glyphosate resistant weeds.
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1.Resistant Weeds According to Monsanto-Less than Half the Story
Doug Gurian-Sherman, senior scientist
UCS, March 14 2012
http://blog.ucsusa.org/resistant-weeds-according-to-monsantoless-than-half-the-story-2?
The harm to agriculture from pests that have developed resistance to the premier products of the biotech industry-crops containing Bt insect toxins or immune to the herbicide Roundup (containing glyphosate)-has been receiving well justified attention recently. The problems resulting from this rising tide of resistance are serious, from loss of conservation tillage that preserves soil fertility, to increased use of older, more toxic herbicides, and greater use of insecticides. Herbicide resistant weeds in particular, now infesting millions of acres and spreading like a rash, are having real impact on farmers.
But pest resistance also raises important questions about the harmful influence of the biotech industry over regulators. It is not incidental that resistance is rapidly increasing to pesticides used on GE crops. It is due in large part to the unprecedented use of the herbicide glyphosate on these crops, and the high use of Bt, which drives pest resistance. But resistance is is also due to bad policies that are the result, in part, of regulators listening too closely to industry.
In a post about increasing insect resistance to Bt, Dan Charles covers some of this important back story about these crops. But a recent NPR post by Charles on herbicide resistant weeds leaves out some of the important reasons why we are facing these problems. That post briefly revisits the history of weed resistance to glyphosate herbicide. Unfortunately it gives a one-sided version of what has occurred, relying solely on Monsanto sources to explain why the company got it so wrong when they predicted that weeds were highly unlikely to develop resistance to glyphosate.
So let’s fill in a few of the blanks.
First, to hear Monsanto interviewees tell it, one would think that there was unanimity among scientists at the time that resistance was as unlikely as the sun failing to shine.
To the contrary, weed scientists like Stephen Powles and colleagues noted back in 1998-two years before the first resistant weeds appeared in glyphosate-tolerant crops-that precautions should be taken to prevent glyphosate resistance. Powles and his colleagues wrote that "It would be prudent to accept that resistance can occur to this highly valuable herbicide and to encourage glyphosate use patterns within integrated strategies that do not impose a strong selection pressure for resistance."
Industry Roadblocks
The reasons why Powles' recommendations were not enacted are complicated. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been hesitant about requiring resistance management. But it did so for Bt crops with considerable success, because it considered Bt to be a special social good. Weed scientists, though, have a similar view of glyphosate, with some calling it a once in a century chemical.
EPA's reticence does not prevent the industry from proactively preserving useful chemicals, and it could be argued that it would be in their interest to maintain sales of these products as long as possible. But all means for reducing resistance in weeds involve using less of a herbicide now, and more of other types of weed control, and to sacrifice some short-term profit for longer-term sustainability. And that is something companies such as Monsanto or DuPont don’t like to do. Companies discount the future value of products compared to current value and profits. For example, future sales are often reduced by competitors coming into the market with their own products. So companies view this as a “bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” situation. Using sustainable practices also does not consider the pressure for high short-term profits by publicly held companies.
Monsanto's efforts over the years have actually been just the opposite of good stewardship and the sustainable use of glyphosate. It has actively argued, for example through advertisements to farmers, to keep the herbicide spray nozzles wide open rather than advocating practices that could have forestalled or reduced the rise of resistant weeds. Because of this, the company was taken to task by numerous weed scientists.
This is a crucial piece of the story, because it demonstrates one more reason why we need effective and strong regulatory policies to protect the public good. And why we need to listen less to companies and more to independent scientists.
Charles' story ends by quoting his Monsanto sources saying that even if resistance may have been predictable (it was!), perhaps nothing could have been done about it. This ignores the largely successful resistance management of Bt under the direction of U.S. EPA, which could have served, very broadly, as a model for glyphosate-resistant crops. EPA even had an internal process to develop a voluntary resistance management system for pesticides that was ultimately scuttled by industry. It also ignores the pleadings of weed scientists over the years to take actions, which were well known, to slow resistance. Although there have been some serious failings with the program for Bt, such as poor compliance or EPA caving in to industry requests for a watered-down program, scientists credit it with delaying or preventing resistance of several insect pests.
Protecting Sales Instead of the Public Good
The best resistance management involves using long crop rotations, cover crops, mulches, and similar practices, along with minimal use of pesticides where needed. This greatly reduces pest numbers, is highly productive, and can be economically successful. These practices are being advocated more and more by mainstream scientists.
But you won’t hear this discussed by the Monsanto employees interviewed by Charles. These ecologically sound practices would, by design, drastically reduce amount of pesticides used. So these practices would work directly against the narrow interests of companies like Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, or Bayer, that dominate the pesticide and GE seed industries, and wield undue influence over regulators.
Agroecological farming might also threaten the economic viability of genetic engineering. Development of an engineered crop trait is very expensive, about $136 million on average according to a recent industry report. That is one reason why most GE crops so far are big-acreage row crops like corn, soybeans, and cotton. But the value of many of these traits would be greatly reduced when used in truly sustainable agroecological systems, because pest infestations would be much lower and cause much less damage. It would be hard for companies to charge farmers the very high prices for seed they do now, because they would have less value where pests are less of a problem. And without those high prices, it is unclear whether the companies could afford to develop these seeds.
About the author: Doug Gurian-Sherman is a widely-cited expert on biotechnology and sustainable agriculture. He holds a Ph.D. in plant pathology.
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2.How NPR Got It Wrong on Monsanto's Superweeds
Tom Philpott
Mother Jones, March 14 2012
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/03/monsanto-scientists-superweeds-NPR?
Last week, NPR food and agriculture correspondent Dan Charles delivered an interesting report on a topic I've been following for a while: "superweeds." As farmers planted millions of acres with crops engineered to withstand Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, Roundup-resistant weeds have cropped upprompting farmers to apply toxic herbicide cocktails in a desperate, and losing, battle to keep up with weed evolution.
And Sunday, Charles followed up with a blog item asking just what Monsanto scientists were thinking when they proposed Roundup Ready technology as a blanket solution to industrial agriculture's weed problem.
In its 1993 petition to the USDA to deregulate Roundup Ready soybeans, Charles reports, Monsanto insisted that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is "considered to be a herbicide with low risk for weed resistance." Citing agreement from university scientists, the company declared it "highly unlikely" that widespread use of Roundup Ready technology would lead to resistant weeds.
Well, the company won the regulatory battle. Starting in 1996, farmers began to plant Roundup Ready corn, soy, and cotton across millions of acres of farmland without restriction. And the USDA continues to deregulate new Roundup Ready crops, unleashing alfalfa and Kentucky bluegrass into the mix last year. Meanwhile, Roundup-resistant weeds have been galloping through the south's cotton fields and Midwest's corn and soy fields. No fewer than 20 different weed species, Charles reports, now thrive despite dousings of the poison.
For his blog post, Charles asked scientists who worked for Monsanto in the '90s how they got it so wrong. "They all told a similar story," Charles reports. Here it is:
First, the company had been selling Roundup for years without any problems. Second, and perhaps most important, the company's scientists had just spent more than a decade, and many millions of dollars, trying to create the Roundup-resistant plants that they desperately wanted – soybeans and cotton and corn. It had been incredibly difficult. When I interviewed former Monsanto scientists for my book on biotech crops, one of them called it the company's "Manhattan Project."
Considering how hard it had been to create those crops, "the thinking was, it would be really difficult for weeds to become tolerant" to Roundup, says Rick Cole, who is now responsible for Monsanto's efforts to deal with the problem of resistant weeds.
Charles lets this explanation stand unchallenged. That surprised me, because he is one of the nation's reporters most steeped in the history of GM crop commercialization. His 2001 book Lords of the Harvest remains, to my knowledge, the best account of GM crop technology's gestation and birth.
And it includes an account of the discovery of the Roundup Ready gene that, I think, makes the accepted explanation sound absurd. For much of the 1980s, Charles reports in Lords of the Harvest, scientists in Monsanto's budding agriculture-biotechnology wing struggled mightily to find a gene that would effectively confer Roundup resistance and also allow plants modified with it to grow robustly. After years of near misses and tantalizing failures in the lab, they "discovered that nature had trumped all of their efforts."
Their eureka moment involved a vast Luling, Louisiana, chemical factory where Monsanto manufactured Roundup. The plant "covers 1500 acres along the Mississippi River," Charles reported. Outside of the Luling plant, he continues, an uncontrolled experiment in glyphosate exposure had been taking place for years:
There are glyphosate residues in the ponds, in the mud at the bottom pf the ponds, and in the soil alongside. Those residues exert a steady pressure on the population of microorganisms in the water and the soil, eliminating those that are sensitive to glyphosate and selecting for those that are less vulnerable.
People from the company's cleanup team collected sludge samples from affected ponds for analysis in the early 1980s. The samples sat idle for years in a company lab, until the GMO team thought to look there. When they did, they found the gene they were looking for in that glyphosate-laced sludge from Luling a gene that "proved to tolerate Roundup far better than any gene the scientists had created in the laboratory," and didn't interfere with plant growth.
In other words, the scientists found that landscapes subjected to regular Roundup exposure develop organisms that evolve to resist Roundup. Or, to put it another way, while they themselves failed to identify the perfect Roundup Ready gene, wild organisms had done so as a matter of course. How could this information not have raised for them the possibility that weeds might develop resistance in farm fields?
Meanwhile, even as Monsanto publicly denied the likelihood of resistant weeds as it pushed to get Roundup Ready seeds deregulated, at least some people were raising concerns. Margaret "Mardi" Mellon, senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientist's food and environment program, pointed me to a long report from 1990 called "Biotechnology's Bitter Harvest," authored by activist researchers from prominent environmental groups like World Wildlife Fund and Environmental Defense. The report doesn't appear to be online, but its introduction warns explicitly of at least one pathway to weed resistance: "Once [Roundup Ready technology is] in widespread use, the exchange of herbicide-tolerance genes between the domesticated crops and weedy relatives could ultimately result in the need for more herbicides to control herbicide-resistant weeds." The report was prominent enough that Charles mentions it in his book.
And by 1998-just two years after Roundup Ready crops first hit fields in the United States-the assertion that weeds somehow couldn't develop resistance to glyphosate had already crumbled in Australia, where resistant ryegrass had developed in an orchard where glyphosate had been "used three times a year for 15 years" to control weeds, as this 1998 paper from the peer-reviewed journal Weed Science shows.
Reckoning directly with the problem of weed resistance would have meant regulations stipulating that farmers not plant Roundup Ready crops years after year on the same linea requirement that would have cut into Monsanto's bottom line.
And today, as Roundup Ready technology crumbles under the weight of superweeds, Monsanto and other agrichemical industry heavyweights are now colluding to engineer new crops to be resistant to both Roundup and other, more toxic herbicides. As I reported a while back, they are claiming once again that these so-called "stacked-trait" crops are unlikely to generate resistant weeds. This time, prominent mainstream scientists from Penn State are bluntly predicting the technology will generate weeds resistant to multiple herbicides.
All in all, I think Charles is being too generous to Monsanto scientists in uncritically reporting their claims that they were shocked, shocked by the emergence of superweeds. Their explanation reminds me of a famous quote from the writer who could be thought of as industrial agriculture's first prominent critic, The Jungle author Upton Sinclair: "It's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding."