Bill: Well put. Genetic engineering is a genetic solution for a management
problem, and a doubly costly one. Not only does GE seed cost more, but it
exacerbates the problem it is intended to resolve - sort of like chemicals,
eh?.
It is the wrong answer to the wrong question.
As noted below, crop rotation can control rootworms, but I'm not clear that
this would help for cornborer or Colorado potato beetle - the current fave of
Bt-afficionados - because they are mobile. Ann
Bill Liebhardt wrote:
> In the mid 1980's I was a speaker at a conference at Purdue. At this
> conference a speaker made a presentation about all the chemical treatments
> that could be used to control root worms in corn and how effective they
> were. At the end of his talk he said almost as an after thought that if
> you had a rotation of other crops with corn that root worms were not a
> factor in the production of corn. In other words crop diversity would solve
> the the problem. So if corn was grown in a rotation we would not need the
> chemicals or the Bt corn in the first place. Seems to me like a common
> contemporary problem-ignoring ecological principals. How do we deal with
> this? We create chemicals and plants that can get around the problem that
> was created by mismanagement in the first place and we call this new
> technology. Maybe we should approach the problem as a management problem
> but we always seems to want the next silver bullet to bail us out of a
> problem that could be dealt with in a much easier fashion.
>
> Bill Liebhardt
>
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