The New York Times Company
February 19, 2003
Roundup Unready
One of the most pervasive chemicals in modern agriculture
is a herbicide called glyphosate, which is better known by its
trade name, Roundup. When it was first introduced in 1974, by
Monsanto, no one could have predicted its current ubiquity or
the way it would change farming. Roundup was safe, effective and
relatively benign, environmentally speaking. It became one of
the essential tools that made no-till farming - a conservation
practice in which farmers spray weeds rather than plowing the
ground - increasingly popular. But what really made Roundup pervasive
was the development of genetically modified crops, especially
soybeans, cotton and corn, that could tolerate having Roundup
sprayed directly on them. The weeds died but these crops, designated
Roundup Ready, thrived. Seventy-five percent of the soybean crop
planted in this country last year was Roundup Ready, as was 65
percent of the cotton and 10 percent of the corn. On soybeans
alone last year, farmers sprayed about 33 million pounds of glyphosate.
But nature, in turn, has been developing some Roundup
Ready plants of her own, weeds that can tolerate being sprayed
with Roundup. Two weeds, mare's-tail and water hemp, have already
begun to show resistance, and others will certainly follow. This
is simply natural adaptation at work.
No one is saying that Roundup will lose its overall
effectiveness any time soon. But while Monsanto executives and
scientists are doing their best to protect the herbicide, nature
is also throwing all her resources at defeating it. In a very
real sense, nature has been given an enormous advantage by the
sheer ubiquity of Roundup, just as some bacteria are given an
edge by the ubiquity of agricultural antibiotics. The logic of
industrial farming is to use your best tools until they're worthless,
and to hasten their worthlessness by using them as much as you
can.
This is precisely why there has been so much opposition
to marketing a variety of corn that includes a BT gene, which
creates a toxin that kills an insect called the corn-borer. BT
is a safe, natural and effective weapon for gardeners and farmers,
and to lessen its effectiveness by overusing it, like Roundup,
would be a terrible waste. Industrial agriculture is always searching
for a silver bullet, forgetting that eventually a silver bullet
misfires.
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