GM soya 'miracle' turns sour in Argentina (damaging soil bacteria)

[papau]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,2763,1192869,00.html

GM soya 'miracle' turns sour in Argentina

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Friday April 16, 2004
The Guardian

Seven years after GM soya was introduced to Argentina as an economic miracle for poor farmers, researchers claim it is causing an environmental crisis, damaging soil bacteria and allowing herbicide-resistant weeds to grow out of control. <snip>

However, a report in New Scientist magazine says that because of problems with the crops, farmers are now using twice as much herbicide as in conventional systems.

Soya is so successful it can be viewed as a weed itself: soya "volunteer" plants, from seed split during harvesting, appear in the wrong place and at the wrong time and need to be controlled with powerful herbicides since they are already resistant to glyphosate.

The control of rogue soya has led to a number of disasters for neighbouring small farmers who have lost their own crops and livestock to the drift of herbicide spray. <snip>

Monsanto says the crop is the victim of its own success. Colin Merritt, Monsanto's biotechnology manager in Britain, said that any problems with GM soya were to do with the crop as a monoculture, not because it was GM. "If you grow any crop to the exclusion of any other you are bound to get problems. What would be sensible would be to grow soya in rotation with corn or some other crop so the ground and the environment have time to recover," he said. <snip>

Adolfo Boy, a member of the Grupo de Reflexion Rural, a group opposed to GM, said that the bacteria needed for breaking down vegetable matter so that the soil was fertilised were being wiped out by excessive use of Roundup Ready. The soil was becoming inert, and so much so that dead weeds did not rot, he told New Scientist. <snip>


Special reports
GM food debate http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/0,2759,178400,00.html
Special report: what's wrong with our food?http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/0,2759,178225,00.html

Explained
03.06.2003: GM crops http://www.guardian.co.uk/theissues/article/0,6512,969438,00.html

May 2003 investigation
Food: the way we eat now http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/focus/0,13290,951051,00.html

Useful links
GM public debate - the official site http://www.gmpublicdebate.org.uk/
Monsanto http://www.monsanto.co.uk/
Agriculture & environment biotechnology commission (government advisory body) http://www.aebc.gov.uk/
Agricultural Biotechnology Council http://www.abcinformation.org/
Official reports
Royal Society report on GM plants (pdf) http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2002/02/04/document-165.pdf
Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology report on GM food labelling (pdf) http://www.parliament.uk/post/nfr/pn172.pdf

[NickB79]

1. Growing the same crop in the same field for seven years

And they're surprised the land is becoming unarable? People figured out crop rotation what, several thousand years ago?

[papau]

2. true - no crop rotation is stupid - but the bateria in soil death worries

me.

:-)