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  • Superweeds cripple Roundup Ready farms
    GM protesters demonstrate near the French town of Toulouse in March 2008.

    How has this happened? Farmers over-relied on Monsanto’s revolutionary and controversial combination of a single “round up” herbicide and a high-tech seed with a built-in resistance to glyphosate, scientists say. 

    Today, 100,000 acres in Georgia are severely infested with pigweed and 29 counties have now confirmed resistance to glyphosate, according to weed specialist Stanley Culpepper from the University of Georgia.

    “Farmers are taking this threat very seriously. It took us two years to make them understand how serious it was. But once they understood, they started taking a very aggressive approach to the weed,” Culpepper told FRANCE 24.

    “Just to illustrate how aggressive we are, last year we hand-weeded 45% of our severely infested fields,” said Culpepper, adding that the fight involved “spending a lot of money.”

    In 2007, 10,000 acres of land were abandoned in Macon country, the epicentre of the superweed explosion, North Carolina State University’s Alan York told local media.

    The perfect weed

    Had Monsanto wanted to design a deadlier weed, they probably could not have done better. Resistant pigweed is the most feared superweed, alongside horseweed, ragweed and waterhemp.

    “Palmer pigweed is the one pest you don’t want, it is so dominating,” says Culpepper. Pigweed can produce 10,000 seeds at a time, is drought-resistant, and has very diverse genetics. It can grow to three metres high and easily smother young cotton plants.

    Today, farmers are struggling to find an effective herbicide they can safely use over cotton plants

     
    Controversial solutions

    In an interview with FRANCE 24, Monsanto’s technical development manager, Rick Cole, said he believed superweeds were manageable. “The problem of weeds that have developed a resistance to Roundup crops is real and [Monsanto] doesn’t deny that, however the problem is manageable,” he said.

    Cole encourages farmers to alternate crops and use different makes of herbicides.

    Indeed, according to Monsanto press releases, company sales representatives are encouraging farmers to mix glyphosate and older herbicides such as 2,4-D, a herbicide which was banned in Sweden, Denmark and Norway over its links to cancer, reproductive harm and mental impairment. 2,4-D is also well-known for being a component of Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide which was used in chemical warfare in Vietnam in the 1960s.

    FRANCE 24 report: French scientist Eric Seralini says research shows Roundup herbicide is highly toxic to human beings.   

    Questioned on the environmental impact and toxicity of such mixtures, Monsanto’s public affairs director, Janice Person, said that “they didn’t recommend any mixtures that were not approved by the EPA,” she said, referring to the US federal Environmental Protection Agency.

    According to the UK-based Soil Association, which campaigns for and certifies organic food, Monsanto was well aware of the risk of superweeds as early as 2001 and took out a patent on mixtures of glyphosate and herbicide targeting glyphosate-resistant weeds.

    “The patent will enable the company to profit from a problem that its products had created in the first place,” says a 2002 Soil Association report.

    Returning to conventional crops

    In the face of the weed explosion in cotton and soybean crops, some farmers are even considering moving back to non-GM seeds. “It’s good for us to go back, people have overdone the Roundup seeds,” Alan Rowland, a soybean seed producer based in Dudley, Missouri, told FRANCE 24. He used to sell 80% Monsanto “Roundup Ready” soybeans and now has gone back to traditional crops, in a market overwhelmingly dominated by Monsanto.

    According to a number of agricultural specialists, farmers are considering moving back to conventional crops. But it’s all down to economics, they say. GM crops are becoming expensive, growers say.

    While farmers and specialists are reluctant to blame Monsanto, Rowland says he’s started to “see people rebelling against the higher costs.”

  • GM crops suffer from super weeds

    How has this happened? Farmers over-relied on Monsanto’s revolutionary and controversial combination of a single “round up” herbicide and a high-tech seed with a built-in resistance to glyphosate, scientists say.

    Today, 100,000 acres in Georgia are severely infested with pigweed and 29 counties have now confirmed resistance to glyphosate, according to weed specialist Stanley Culpepper from the University of Georgia.

    “Farmers are taking this threat very seriously. It took us two years to make them understand how serious it was. But once they understood, they started taking a very aggressive approach to the weed,” Culpepper told FRANCE 24.

    “Just to illustrate how aggressive we are, last year we hand-weeded 45% of our severely infested fields,” said Culpepper, adding that the fight involved “spending a lot of money.”

    In 2007, 10,000 acres of land were abandoned in Macon country, the epicentre of the superweed explosion, North Carolina State University’s Alan York told local media.

     
    The perfect weed

    Had Monsanto wanted to design a deadlier weed, they probably could not have done better. Resistant pigweed is the most feared superweed, alongside horseweed, ragweed and waterhemp.

    “Palmer pigweed is the one pest you don’t want, it is so dominating,” says Culpepper. Pigweed can produce 10,000 seeds at a time, is drought-resistant, and has very diverse genetics. It can grow to three metres high and easily smother young cotton plants.

    Today, farmers are struggling to find an effective herbicide they can safely use over cotton plants.

    Controversial solutions

    In an interview with FRANCE 24, Monsanto’s technical development manager, Rick Cole, said he believed superweeds were manageable. “The problem of weeds that have developed a resistance to Roundup crops is real and [Monsanto] doesn’t deny that, however the problem is manageable,” he said.

    Cole encourages farmers to alternate crops and use different makes of herbicides.

    Indeed, according to Monsanto press releases, company sales representatives are encouraging farmers to mix glyphosate and older herbicides such as 2,4-D, a herbicide which was banned in Sweden, Denmark and Norway over its links to cancer, reproductive harm and mental impairment. 2,4-D is also well-known for being a component of Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide which was used in chemical warfare in Vietnam in the 1960s.

    FRANCE 24 report: French scientist Eric Seralini says research shows Roundup herbicide is highly toxic to human beings.   

    Questioned on the environmental impact and toxicity of such mixtures, Monsanto’s public affairs director, Janice Person, said that “they didn’t recommend any mixtures that were not approved by the EPA,” she said, referring to the US federal Environmental Protection Agency.

    According to the UK-based Soil Association, which campaigns for and certifies organic food, Monsanto was well aware of the risk of superweeds as early as 2001 and took out a patent on mixtures of glyphosate and herbicide targeting glyphosate-resistant weeds.

    “The patent will enable the company to profit from a problem that its products had created in the first place,” says a 2002 Soil Association report.

    Returning to conventional crops

    In the face of the weed explosion in cotton and soybean crops, some farmers are even considering moving back to non-GM seeds. “It’s good for us to go back, people have overdone the Roundup seeds,” Alan Rowland, a soybean seed producer based in Dudley, Missouri, told FRANCE 24. He used to sell 80% Monsanto “Roundup Ready” soybeans and now has gone back to traditional crops, in a market overwhelmingly dominated by Monsanto.

    According to a number of agricultural specialists, farmers are considering moving back to conventional crops. But it’s all down to economics, they say. GM crops are becoming expensive, growers say.

    While farmers and specialists are reluctant to blame Monsanto, Rowland says he’s started to “see people rebelling against the higher costs.”

  • NFF bets the farm on fossil lobby

    Despite having been discredited a number of times, geologist Ian Plimer is making media waves and lots of money from his dogged opposition of the basic facts on climate change. With no qualifications in meteorology, climatology or hydrology, Plimer trots out the regular arguments used by the fossil fuel lobby. They are that most carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from geological events, that on a geological time frame we are due for a period of cooling rather than warming, and that on short term time frame trends in the last decade do not show consistent warming. In fact, until last year they showed distinct cooling, but the hottest summer on record in 2009 has blown that furphy and reduced its prominence in the denier’s standard spiel.

    Read the NFF press release

    Read a complete debunking of Ian Plimer’s positions

     

    All these facts are true, but they have absolutely nothing to do with the evidence on global warming. The impact of human output of carbon dioxide is not significant compared to the swings in atomospheric concentrations of the gas over geological epochs, but it is remarkably significant over a time frame measured in centuries. Similarly, the galactic cycles that affect solar influence on the earth’s climate and the geological cycles that are measured in hundreds of thousands of years, may far outweigh the puny influence that living organisms have on the earth, but our life span and our influence is limited to the scale of individual centuries not thousands of them.

    To jump from a scale of hundreds of thousands of years to a scale of individual years and then say, the long term picture and the short term picture, both show that climate science is wrong, is not only bad statistics, it is invalid science. The weather in individual years is almost useless in predicting trends and merely highlight the difference between the weather and the climate. Plimer has simply hunted for any evidence that runs counter to the overwhelming weight of evidence showing that human greenhouse emissions are damaging the earth.

    It is always difficult, and dangerous, to attribute motives, but Plimer is not only receiving money and publicity directly from his denial of climate change, he is allied with the Canadian group, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project which refuses to confirm or deny whether its funding comes substantially from energy companies, but which has three directors who are executives of the High Park Advocacy Group, a lobby group working on behalf of energy companies. He is also an Associate of the Institute of Public Affairs, a right wing policy group with connections to the extreme dries in the Liberal Party that has published policy positions advocating privatisation, deregulation, reduction in the power of unions and denial of most significant environmental problems, including climate change.

    The entire notion of balance in reporting has been abused by lobby groups from tobacco in the sixties, through star wars in the eighties to climate deniers now. If every extremist was given equal time to put their opinion on every item in the news, news bulletins would take hours and would be dominated by the rantings of extremists all demanding equal time. It is up to editors to decide what is fair on the basis of the evidence and community values, rather than let well backed publicists promote extreme views simply by demanding balance.

    For the National Farmers Federation to promote Plimer’s contribution to the debate as a blow for balance is disingenuous at best and will be judged by most as deliberately misleading. Either way, it paints the organisation into a corner which is not in the best interests of its broadest membership base, farmers, from which it will be almost impossible to escape. Accepting the facts on global warming and working on new pasture and land management techniques to reduce methane production and biosequester carbon are what the world and the traditional membership of the NFF needs. To come out backing a lobbyist for the fossil fuel sector indicates the extreme positions that the current NFF leadership is prepared to adopt to court the agribusiness companies from which it hopes to get most of its money in the future. The fact that two state organisations have already deserted the once powerful lobby group on the basis of its support for agribusiness at the expense of the farmer on the land, indicates how thoroughly it has lost its way.

    To back a discredited gun for hire who has been publicly shamed so many times indicates that it has lost its media savvy as well. The NFF could well lose the vote at next month’s national conference to alllow agribusiness companies in as paid up members. If it does, the current leadership will also be on the line. Backing Plimer is a high risk bid to polarise the membership. It might well backfire.

  • Farmers back climate denier

    NFF President David Crombie added: “We’ve heard ad nauseam from those scientists convinced that climate change will ruin us all and, seemingly, hell-bent on making grim doomsday predictions. But we’ve heard precious little from those experts for whom the jury is still out, or, in the case of Professor Plimer, say their research shows extreme climate change predictions are over-stated.

    “Now, before I’m carted to a stake for public torching, I’m not saying Professor Plimer is right, nor that his colleagues with differing views are wrong. Just that it’s about time we had a balanced, informed discussion and debate… free from vilification of those who dare to question conventional wisdom.

    “We know that not all scientists agree on climate change or the cause and effect theories that underpin it. In his book, Prof Plimer claims that every scientific argument ever used to show that humans change climate is wrong and cites over 2,300 scientific references in support of his claims.

    “It’s food for thought. That’s why Prof Plimer will be a key speaker at our upcoming National Congress in Brisbane this June – so Australian farmers, agribusiness leaders, government officials and other delegates can make up their own minds.

    “You would be hard pressed to find any organisation that has been more proactive on the need to mitigate the potential risks of climate change than the NFF. We’ve been on the front foot in doing so for all my three years as President.

    “But, as Prof Plimer says: “If Government decisions, taxation and emissions trading are to be based on science that is demonstrably wrong, then primary industry in Australia will be destroyed”, then we must consider all possibilities, alternate information and counter-views so we can make informed decisions and choices.

    “As farmers, we have no way of knowing who is right, wrong or kind-of-in-the-ballpark on the scientific research and the judgements therein, but no-one was ever hurt by being exposed to all the facts on any given topic. Rigour underpins getting the science right… Prof Plimer is part of the mix.”

    More information the NFF’s 2009 National Congress, including all speakers and topics, is available from the National Congress website at: http://congress.nff.org.au.

     

  • 1500 Indian farmers commit suicide

    MORE than 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure.

    The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.

    “Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well,” Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine.

    Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.

    In another village nearby, Beturam Sahu, who owned two acres of land was among those who committed suicide. His crop is yet to be harvested, but his son Lakhnu left to take up a job as a manual labourer. His family must repay a debt of £400 and the crop this year is poor.

    “The crop is so bad this year that we will not even be able to save any seeds,” said Lakhnu’s friend Santosh. “There were no rains at all. That’s why Lakhnu left even before harvesting the crop. There is nothing left to harvest in his land this time. He is worried how he will repay these loans.”

    Bharatendu Prakash, from the Organic Farming Association of India, said: “Farmers’ suicides are increasing due to a vicious circle created by money lenders. They lure farmers to take money but when the crops fail, they are left with no option other than death.”

    Mr Prakash added that the government ought to take up the cause of the poor farmers just as they fight for a strong economy.

    “Development should be for all. The government blames us for being against development. Forest area is depleting and dams are constructed without proper planning. All this contributes to dipping water levels.

    “Farmers should be taken into consideration when planning policies,” he said.

     

  • World’s poor polluters too

    The conversation around climate largely focuses on carbon dioxide, the invisible greenhouse gas building in the atmosphere mainly from the burning of fuels and forests. But there’s another emission from human activities that would be easier to curb in the short run – and that also contributes to enormous conventional pollution problems as well as the warming of the climate.

    From the New York Times

    It’s good old fashioned black carbon soot – a visible pollutant with measurable effects on human health both in poor places, where it comes from cooking or heating using coal, firewood or dung, and rich countries, where it is produced mainly through the combustion of diesel and similar fuels and from some industries.

    James E. Hansen of NASA first drew attention to soot as a climate influence in 2000. He and others have also proposed that soot, by darkening Arctic ice and snow, could be accelerating the boreal melt well beyond what would happen only under natural climate variability or the growing warming influence from greenhouse gases.

    Now a new study by V. Ramanathan of the University of California, San Diego, published online this week in Nature Geoscience, finds that soot may be more than twice as potent a warming influence as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated last year. The study, co-authored by Greg Carmichael of the University of Iowa, also proposes that regional emissions of dark carbon particulates in south Asia could be contributing to the melting of the ice locked in the Himalayas.

    One reason for black carbon’s potent warming effect, according to the paper, is that most of it is forming vast “brown clouds” around the tropics where the sun is also at its strongest.

    Dr. Ramanathan, like Dr. Hansen, has said that carbon dioxide remains the dominant concern because it can persist in the atmosphere for centuries once emitted. But cutting sooty pollution can have an immediate payoff, both in limiting climate risks and improving public health, the new study said.

    One way or the other, it’s pretty clear that cooking on dried dung and firewood, the norm for about 2 billion people, will be hard to sustain as populations in south Asia and Africa climb.

    The climate impact of these energy sources pales beside the direct impact on the lives of the people — mainly women and their children — who spend a significant portion of the day gathering the fuels or breathing the smoke. International development agencies estimate that more than 1.5 million people die young each year from avoidable respiratory ailments associated with cooking.

    cooking fire
    Soot from cooking fires is a health threat and warming the climate. Gita Devi cooked dinner on a small wood-fueled fire by the light of a small can of kerosene in the courtyard of her home in the village of Chakai Haat in the state of Bihar. (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)

    Still, the climate benefits from shifting away from such energy options count, too, Dr. Hansen said in an email. “And we need every bit of help we can get,” he said.

    There’s more here on black carbon and climate, and how the issue roiled politics and environmental campaigns and science in 2000.