Friday, December 30, 2011

Insects Rapidly Becoming Resistant To GM Corn

Organic gardeners saw this coming from the get-go - I remember a Mike McGrath (then editor in chief of Organic Gardening) editorial predicting it. Heck, we'd already seen this happen with badly managed organic farms - back in the 1990s, resistance had been seen in Diamondback moths on Hawaiian farms that sprayed B.t kurstaki repeatedly rather than just when monitoring indicated a need for spraying.

The continued usefulness of organic/botanical pesticides has, in large part, been due to their lack of persistence in the environment. Inserting those genes into plants is basically making the pesticides persistent, which (obviously) leads to much quicker development of resistance on the part of the pests.

The part of me that's a cynic wonders if this is what Monsanto had in mind all along... one less organic competitor to their stable of proprietary chemicals.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/nxcGDCV6VxI/insects-rapidly-becoming-resistant-to-gm-corn

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