The Great GM Debate

News from David Biello in Scientific American this week (May 24^th 2007) is that Genetically Modified Crops Survive Weed-Whacking Herbicide. Crops genetically altered to resist herbicides have become so prevalent that resistant weeds are beginning to appear, necessitating new forms of genetic modification.

Everyone must be aware of the growth of technology in all spheres of our lives, even where we least expected technology to have any say at all. But surely the fastest growing in the past decade must have been in agriculture, where growth in GM food has been faster than in any other since the inception of the earliest of farming tools, the plow.

Nearly 250 million acres were put under GM crops in 2006 and 173 million of those were GM altered to resist the herbicide Roundup™. Farmers are able to apply it without restraint, so cutting costs and dropping the need for cultivation between crops.

But the giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida) has now evolved into varieties which have an inborn resistance to the herbicide and so researchers move on to more successfully modified crops to resist yet another herbicide.

Where will it all end?

Image source=www.internationalpheromone.co.uk

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