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With glyphosate-cancer legal battles poised to escalate, what are the ramifications for agriculture
With glyphosate-cancer legal battles poised to escalate, what are the ramifications for agriculture if the herbicide is restricted?What might be the impact on farming and farmers if glyphosate is restricted or banned?
These gains in crop yields and the resulting lower food prices could be easily undone, however. If restrictions on glyphosate prevented farmers from planting herbicide-tolerant crops. “There would be an annual loss of global farm income gains of $6.76 billion,” Brookes and his team wrote, “and lower levels of global soybean, corn and canola production equal to the gains achieved since 1996.”
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Resurgence of more toxic herbicides
The use of glyphosate has soared by more than 15-times since its pairing with GE crops in 1996. But overall herbicide use has remained fairly constant and the per acre toxicity of herbicide use has actually gone down over the past 22 years, noted Brookes and his colleagues:
Since 1996, the total use of herbicides on GMO crops was reduced by 259.3 million kg of active ingredient (a 4.1% reduction) …” But once a glyphosate ban took effect, “there would be …. a net increase in the use of herbicides of 8.2 million kg …
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Acceleration of climate change
Finally, the potential impact of a glyphosate ban on climate change would be considerable. Because the herbicide so effectively controls weeds, farmers began to practice no-till farming en masse in 1974 when glyphosate was first introduced, well before the debut of the first genetically engineered herbicide tolerant crops in the late 1990s.
Before the introduction of glyphosate and other herbicides, farmers had to till their fields with ploughs to eliminate weeds in early spring before planting a new crop. This process, though necessary at the time, “doesn’t do much good for the soil structure,“ Walton said. “It speeds up the decomposition of crop residue and soil organic matter. That leads to increases in carbon release from the soil via CO2.” Plant scientist Steve Savage added that the widespread adoption of glyphosate was part of a broader effort to make farming more sustainable:
With the introduction of herbicides in the 1960s, farmers, equipment companies and chemical companies began to develop ways to grow crops without tillage (no-till). Herbicide tolerant crops greatly enhanced the farmer’s ability to adopt these methods in the mid 1990s.
There are other implications in the battle to control carbon release, Brookes and his colleagues have written:
There would be additional carbon emissions arising from increased fuel usage and decreased soil carbon [storage], equal to the equivalent of adding 11.77 million cars to the roads …. Land use changes will arise, with an additional cropping area of 762,000 hectares, of which 53% derives from new land brought into cropping agriculture, including 167,000 of deforestation. These land use changes are likely to induce the generation of an additional 234,000 million kg of carbon dioxide emissions.
4 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
that in order for people to not get cancer from working with it - we should allow those deaths so Monsanto can continue to grow. There is no other solution - workers are just cogs in the machine anyway - screw 'em.
I can't imagine how the earth managed to make if without glyphosate in every yard and on every farm. The end is near 
