GM Crops Create Herbicide-resistant "Superweed"

An anonymous reader writes "According to this article GM crops under test in the UK have cross pollinated to weeds, giving them the same resistance to herbicide as the GM crops. The article also mentions that this has been reported as occurring in Canada, which like the US is well past the test stage and allows widespread use of GM crops. What's worse, in Canada crop rotation has conferred multi-herbicide resistance to some of the weeds!"

Comments

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[FST]

Coral Cache Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/gmdebate/S tory/0,,1535428,00.html

Re:This has nothing to do with genetic modificatio

[komodotoes]

While I agree with you that maybe this has very little to do with the actual GM process, I have to point out that GM foods aren't feeding the poor as much as they feed the pocketbooks of a few large corporations. In fact, it is becoming widespread practice in the world to force farmers to buy sterile seed from companies like Monsanto, forcing farmers to spend their profits buying GM seed and making it illegal for farmers to keep their own seeds.

Even worse, Monsanto has successfully sued farmers in Canada for growing their GM crops, even when the farmer didn't buy the seed illegally, plant the seed, or know the seed was on his property. The GM seed blew there (he lived a few kms down the road from their test farm), and before you can say frivolus lawsuit Monsanto is demanding damages, which they got. In Iraq as well, one of the first things that was passed by the Coalition interim government was a resolution making it mandatory for farmers to buy sterile seeds. In Europe there is talk of this too, although I don't know how far that has gotten.

So althought this was probably natural selection, I am against GM crops because they really haven't been a benefit to the world as far as I can see, and are misused by companies by Monsanto to milk a profit from those people starving in the world, either directly or indirectly by signing deals with the corrupt governments you mention.

Re:This has nothing to do with genetic modificatio

[dada21]

1) I can 100% trust the motives of the people carrying out the research and field tests

Why would you trust the motives of the researchers working for your supplier? If you're interested in independent research, pay for it. Consumers are free to organize research companies to look into products. We already have numerous consumer groups that do this. Many are political, so I don't support them, but there are a few that seem very independent from politics and corruption.

2) That it is not used as a way of locking poor farmers into a product supplied by a foreign owned mega-corp

Poor farmers? Myth.

3) That some SERIOUS long-term testing is done in the lab so we can be 99.99% sure that releasing GM organisms into the food chain is not going to fuck up the food chain.

Again, get involved with non-political consumer testing groups to find out if this is the case. We don't have many of these groups because the market (consumers) does not want them.

4) The industry goes along with public demand to label food as GM, leaving the ultimate deicision in the hands of the public.

Public demand is gauged by what consumers want to spend in order to get a given product feature. If the public truly wants GM food labels, they'll stop buying foods without the labels. I don't see that happening, so why should the industry provide something that less than 1/2% of the population wants to pay for?

Your ideas seem decent until you realize that the rest of the population just doesn't care -- hence the industry doesn't have to do anything. A portion of the industry IS meeting your needs, so go shop at your local co-op or Whole Foods and leave the rest of us alone to make our own decisions.

If you had it your way, you'd use government to force me to change my mind. I'm the opposite -- I prefer to convince rather than coerce.