Monsanto versus the Beetle

Posted by Ecofilms on Sep 1, 2011 in Environment | 0 comments

This story is almost a parable of two worlds, a battle between the natural and the man-made.

Like a boxing match, in the one corner we have Monsanto – a large company aided by big money and big investment, tinkering away in the science labs, discovering even more devious ways to develop the perfect pest resistant strain of GM corn that can be easily marketed and harvested to a massively large over-subsidized monoculture industry.

The one aim is to develop the perfect food stuff that can’t be attacked by pests or disease. Sounds good.

One the other side we have Nature in the form of a humble beetle – The Corn Rootworm Beetle eying off all those wonderful acres of unblemished genetically modified corn, the silk corn heads waving gently in the breeze signally “c’mon over here little guy – come on over and eat me!”

The system is out of whack and out of balance. But pesky nature likes a balanced system.

So let the battle begin.

Recently Iowa State University researches have discovered that Monsanto’s new improved genetically modified corn that was previously thought to be resistant to all the nasty little bugs out there has struck a problem.

It seems nature has not been idle, the western corn rootworms has developed resistance to the insect-killing protein a natural insecticide found in Monsanto’s genetically modified corn.

Researches have found that the new generation of beetles are now able to munch quite happily on Monsanto’s bug resistant corn.

The stakes have been raised now for Monsanto to go back to their labs and develop even more lethal GM corn to fight the army of Rootworm beetles munching their way through their profits.

So how dangerous is the Corn Rootworm Beetle?

Should millions of dollars in research be conducted developing more toxic chemicals to get rid of a greater threat to humanity?

Its like the old cold war arms race between the US and the Soviets. Millions of dollars spent in a battle to suppress Nature?
Is that at all possible?
As Geoff Lawton says in his permaculture video’s, “We are Nature.” The war against nature is a battle we are fighting within our-selves.

The old definition perhaps rings true that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

So how do you fight a pest like the rootworm beetle?

Can it be fought in a monoculture system at all? Should new ways of crop diversity and predator habitats be encouraged?

Well, here’s University of Illinois horticulturalist Jeff Rugg with a small solution that unfortunately Monsanto may have slightly overlooked.

Perhaps the last word should be given to Joel Salatin, a renegade farmer and the crazy war against nature by agri-business.

“Well we can start with the philosophical difference that we think that food is fundamentally biological and most of the culture thinks that food is primarily mechanical.” says Salatin, “And that’s why we can pull DNA structure and genes from a pig and put some in a pepper plant and some in a salmon and have a brand new life form, that’s a parts-oriented thing, like pieces of an engine.”

“But some of us believe that life is fundamentally biological not mechanical; the difference being that biological systems can heal, they have resiliency, and they have a reason to be, a reason to exist that demands respect, I call it the “pigness of the pig” and the “cowness of the cow”. And when you disrespect that – for example when the USDA took farmers like me to free dinners for 30 years to teach us the new science based feeding of cattle with dead cows, we did not do it because we didn’t like the USDA or because we were luddites or not progressive or hated science, we didn’t do it because there was no pattern or template in nature in which herbivores eat carrion!”

“And so, 30 years later, there is this big collective “Oops, maybe we shouldn’t otta done that.” You know, as this mechanical approach toward life has caught up to us with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. And in fact, that’s exactly what has created, you know the E.coli, salmonella, all these things are modern mutations and toxic proliferations that have become mainstream with a mechanical view towards life.”

“We’ve even got research now going to try to isolate the porcine stress gene so we can take that stress gene out of the pig and abuse him a little more aggressively but at least he won’t be stressed about it. A culture that views its life with that kind of conquistador, mechanical, disrespectful, manipulative mentality will soon view its citizens the same way and other cultures the same way.”

But back to the rootworm beetle. Will this alter the way Agri-business approach their war against nature? Apparently not. It seems the new outbreak of superbugs that have grown resistant to their GM Food only spurs them on to greater heights. New Agri-business rivals have entered the market and the race amongst crop biotechnology rivals to locate the next generation of genes that can protect plants from insects is storming ahead.

Scientists at Monsanto and Syngenta AG of Basel, Switzerland, are already researching how to use a medical breakthrough called RNA interference to, among other things, make crops deadly for insects to eat.

If this works, a bug munching on such a plant could ingest genetic code that turns off one of its essential genes.

Wonderful stuff…until the next outbreak overtakes them.