Bugs resistant to Monsanto Bug-resistant Corn? This cannot be!

An article in the Wall Street Journal on Monday August 29th affirms that “Monsanto Corn Plant Losing Bug Resistance”. 

Corn genetically modified to be resistant to insects which feed on it is no longer resistant. The insects are apparently more clever than the scientists, and have evolved a way of still being able to eat their preferred food, despite our best efforts to thwart them. What I found most interesting in the whole series of articles I downloaded from the Illinois University Bulletin is the recommendation to go back to crop rotation – which farmers have been doing for millennia – to avoid creating a breeding ground for resistant insects. That way, the insects get some, but the population does not get out of control, and the people get some, and the farmers are not forced to spend excessive amounts of money on “insect-resistant” seeds which are, as it works out, not insect resistant at all. Everybody wins except the producer of the genetically modified seeds. 

And this fall farmers will have the opportunity to purchase a genetically modified sweet corn, according to an article I just downloaded from the Monstanto website. So I hope everyone had all the sweet corn they could eat this summer, because our protection from GM corn has just disappeared.

We do appear to be breeding insects that can survive in extremely harsh climates – climates which are actually intended to kill them. One can only hope that we human beings can evolve the same resistance to chemicals which our insect brothers are developing, since we are all being exposed to the same lethal mixtures in the food we are consuming. So far, with the prediction for a cancer diagnosis in 1 of every 2 men and 1 of every 3 women within the next decade, I’m afraid that the chemicals are winning.