Here's a Surprise

Remember those GMO herbicide resistant crops?

You know, the ones that would allow for more productivity because you could spray them with weed killer, and only the weeds would die?

Well, not so much:

The authors of the report, entitled “Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use,” used US Department of Agriculture data to look at America’s three largest genetically engineered crops – soybeans, corn, and cotton. They found that the amount of herbicides used on them has increased from 1996 to 2008 by approximately 7 or 8 percent, with a particularly sharp increase from 2005 on.

In particular, the amount of Roundup that is used on genetically engineered crops has multiplied several times during the time period, says the report’s main author, Charles Benbrook, who's the chief scientist at the Organic Center.

“This big increase in herbicide is driven largely by the emergence of Roundup-resistant weeds,” Dr. Benbrook says. But “industry is still saying to the public that genetic engineering [has] reduced herbicide use.

So, you have a new technology, one that rewards the over-use of herbicides in the short term, and in the long term, you end up creating resistant weeds.

<snark>Hoocoodanode? After all, when hospitals massively overused antibiotics, and farmers started putting in their feed, there was no similar incident of antibiotic resistant pathogens. </snark>