Roundup Resistant Weeds
For 25 years I worked for a food processing company. When I retired I had been the General Manager of our European Division for 15 years. One of the products we made was Mexican Food items like taco shells and tortilla chips. These are manufactured largely from corn which has been cooked into a form where it will make a dough, like wheat flour. In American English we use the same word as in Mexico to describe this, Masa. Normal corn meal is like sand – you can mix it endlessly in water, but it won't ever turn into dough. The masa is baked and then fried in hot oil to make taco shells or tortilla chips.
Even though the corn used to make our masa was supposed to not be genetically modified, the DNA of the Monsanto Roundup-ready corn has contaminated much of the corn in America. The same cross contamination has happened to soy beans.
With this Roundup-ready corn the farmer can spray large amounts of the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) on his fields to kill the weeds, but his main crop is not affected. The overall Roundup-ready line of herbicides and GMO seeds accounts for roughly half of Monsanto's sales of $12 billion. Monsanto's annual earnings (EBIT) are in the range of $3 billion, resulting in a net income (profit) of about $2 billion per year.
Even though I am a life long environmentalist, on this issue I found myself at times sitting across the table from anti-GMO groups like Greenpeace Europe. Once I was talking with an old man who was at the end of a long career with Cargill. I knew him well, and he was close to retirement. He also was concerned about the unknown effects of this genetically modified corn, and he told me that one of the earlier products had to be killed just before it went on the market due to it being toxic/poisonous to certain people.
Now it seems that farmers in America, Australia, China, and Brazil are beginning to have a real problem with Roundup-resistant weeds. Weeds which are not killed by this herbicide. The New York Times reports that “Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.”
When we try to buck Mother Nature things seem to go wrong much of the time. This is a good article. If you've got the time you should read it.
LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
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