Sorry folks, no Good Stuff today. Just the stuff that really worries me. Read on…

Bad Stuff

Industrial Agriculture

Wasington Post – Special Report: Are regulators dropping the ball on biocrops?

This is a pretty good article on some of the issues around Genetically Modified (GM) agriculture. The main thrust of things is that scientists inside and outside of US regulatory bodies are raising concerns about GM crop’s, their potential impacts, and the fact that the corporations are limiting access to testing.

Kremer, who works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS), is among a group of scientists who are turning up potential problems with glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup and the most widely used weed-killer in the world.

“This could be something quite big. We might be setting up a huge problem,” said Kremer, who expressed alarm that regulators were not paying enough attention to the potential risks from biotechnology on the farm, including his own research.

But at the same time, the author uses an old defense for the use of such technology.

With a growing world population and a need to increase food production in poor nations, confidence in the regulatory system in the leading biotech crop country is considered critical.

I really don’t buy this. Lack of food in poorer nations is not an issue of agricultural technology. It is about distribution and politics–but that’s a topic for another time.

Meanwhile, companies like Monsanto continue to make billions of dollars in revenue with little or no scientific or regulatory oversight:

A common complaint is that the U.S. government conducts no independent testing of these biotech crops before they are approved, and does little to track their consequences after.

Concerns about genetically altered crops and the lack of broad testing hit a boiling point last year. In February 2009, 26 leading academic entomologists — scientists specializing in insects — issued a public statement to the Environmental Protection Agency complaining that they were restricted from doing independent research by technology agreements Monsanto and other companies attach to every bag of biotech seed they sell. The agreements disallow any research that is not first approved by the companies.

“No truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions regarding the technology,” the scientists said in their statement.

The New York Times – Resistance to Weedkillers a Growing Problem for Engineered Crops, NAS Report Says

Monsanto is in the news again here and it links nicely to the previous article.

Farmers’ dependence on the weedkiller Roundup and its generic alternatives threatens to undermine environmental gains that have accompanied widespread use of genetically engineered crops, the National Academy of Sciences said in a report today.
More than 80 percent of the corn, soy and cotton grown in the United States has been engineered with bacterial genes to resist insect pests or the Roundup herbicide, also known as glyphosate. The glyphosate-resistance trait has become so prevalent that many farmers now have a “nearly exclusive reliance on glyphosate for weed control,” the report says.

Cool! If I was Monstano I’d be pretty happy about that – “nearly exclusive reliance on glyphosate [Round-Up] for weed control”.

Habitat Destruction and Biodiversity

examiner.com Pew and Academy of Natural Sciences Highlight Protecting Species and Ecosystems

This is a report on the proceedings of a public forum of academics held in Philadelphia.  From the reporters perspective, much of the discussion was on the importance of biodiversity in our own continued existence on this planet. They also discussed the value that various creatures and systems provide to us at no charge.  This is one of the points that I wish to communicate in this blog. It’s not just about driving our car less to reduce CO2 emissions, but about how we live in general and the relationship we have with our home–the earth. Getting of my soapbox now and back to the article, according to Dr. Thomas Lovejoy:

“There is no more important issue for humanity than conserving the biological infrastructure of the planet”

Now, I’ve gotta agree with that.

. . . the organic compounds found in plants and animals are used to develop hundreds of medicines that treat conditions including cancer, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and infectious diseases. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that current extinction rates could eliminate at least one prescription drug from entering the market every two years.

While this quote does not thrill me hugely–mainly because it reeks of self-interest and exploitation–it does illustrate the fact that we may have no idea of the value in ecological life we are destroying in the name of current economic growth. Interesting when you think about it; because of our current economic growth we may limit the extent of our future economic growth. To continue to illustrate this point:

An analysis by David Pimentel at Cornell University concludes that wild species such as birds and insects provide $100 billion worth of pest control services to world agriculture every year. And according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, healthy coral reefs reduce the impact of large storms on coastal populations, a protective function valued at $9 billion a year.

We are already experiencing some of these issues with recent reports of bee colony collapse. Consider how our fruit trees would be pollinated if there were no bee’s. This has been a largely free service that has been provided for, I would hazard to guess, millions of years.