GMO Arms Race, GMO War

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In the latest example of how the herbicide tolerance genre of GMOs is a failure, by now turning into a horrific hoax, Texas cotton contractors are applying for permission to use propazine on Roundup Ready pigweed.

 

Pigweed, AKA palmer amaranth, is one of the most aggressive agricultural weeds, and has been one of the most successful superweeds which have become resistant to Roundup (glyphosate).

 

Propazine is acknowledged even by the government to be so toxic and cancer-causing that it’s on a restricted-use list, and special EPA permission will be needed for this proposed use.

 

Monsanto and the US government originally promised that the Roundup Ready (RR) system would render a wide array of extremely toxic herbicides like propazine, 2,4-D, and dicamba obsolete. This was in fact a monumental lie, as weeds predictably became resistant to glyphosate. By now there are several dozen documented superweeds spreading rapidly across the US. Large swaths of arable land have been all but taken over by these weeds. As we see here, corporatized “farmers” are helpless to deal with the crisis, having lost all real farmer skills. By now they’re little more than corporate overseers who understand nothing but poison, poison, and more poison. Just like corporatism in general understands nothing but force and more force.

 

Herbicide tolerance, one of the two genres of GMOs which effectively exist (the other genre endemically produces its own Bt poison vs. insects), is a complete failure from any rational point of view or any point of view concerned with human well-being. Any decent, rational human being agrees that the HT genre needs to be discontinued.

 

But HT GMOs were never developed in the first place to help humanity. They were developed for the standard sociopathic corporate goals – selling more poison, eliminating labor costs, expanding enclosure via intellectual property, and imposing greater control. (The same is true of the Bt genre.)

 

GMO proponents are evolution deniers who continue to deny this ever-escalating biological arms race which the weeds and insects are guaranteed to win.

 

But for the corporations themselves, this arms race is simple planned obsolescence. Each iteration of the product line is supposed to fail even more quickly than the last so that the next, even more profitable and coercive generation can be deployed. Thus Agent Orange ingredient 2,4-D, one of the viciously toxic herbicides the government promised would be rendered permanently obsolete by the RR system, is now the centerpiece of the so-called “second generation” HT GMOs. Agent Orange GMOs are set to be planted in the US in 2015. The only result of this will be a massive escalation of 2,4-D use which will be monstrously destructive to other crops and the environment (2,4-D is far less controllable than glyphosate, which itself often drifts from the intended application site), will leave vast stretches of soil laced with dioxin (picture a large portion of America’s farmland as one big Times Beach), and generate 2,4-D resistant pigweed and other superweeds even more quickly than the glyphosate resistant ones evolved.

 

Of course glyphosate, itself vastly more toxic than the propaganda claimed, is not being retired or anything. 2,4-D and other retrograde poisons like propazine will just be slathered on top of the ever escalating amount of glyphosate which has to be sprayed to get any effect at all.

 

Eventually all existing herbicides will be massively sprayed everywhere in sight with no effect. This is the clear logic of poison-based agriculture. The earth and humanity will be tortured to death by this insane poisoning, which will never stop for as long as the system can prop itself up and humanity allows the attack to continue. As I wrote the other day, under corporate control the “agriculture and food” sector is really the poison sector, with food production being merely the pretext to sell and apply poison, toward no goal at all but profit, power, and control.

 

That’s what this war is about. 

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