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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (132002)	11/4/2012 10:52:25 PM
From: Oblivious	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

I support you in our food supply. Go get em!

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (132002)	11/4/2012 11:44:23 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

As for whether pesticide use is reduced see below. More importantly GM crops in general increase yields and allow the people of the earth to be fed. Also whether or not the net total effect is more or less pesticide use, a number of types of genetic modification clearly reduce pesticide use, yet you attack all GM crops, not just specific modifications. ---------- On a global basis GM technology has reduced pesticide use, with the size of the reduction varying between crops and the introduced trait. It is estimated that the use of GM soyabean, oil seed rape, cotton and maize varieties modified for herbicide tolerance and insect protected GM varieties of cotton reduced pesticide use by a total of22.3 million kg of formulated product in the year 2000. Estimates indicate that if 50% of the maize, oil seed rape, sugar beet, and cotton grown in the EU were GM varieties, pesticide used in the EU/annum would decrease by 14.5 million kg of formulated product (4.4 million kg active ingredient). In addition there would be a reduction of 7.5 million ha sprayed which would save 20.5 million litres of diesel and result in a reduction of approximately 73,000 t of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. The paper also points to areas where GM technology may make further marked reductions in global pesticide use. croplife.intraspin.com The report calculates that a cumulative total of 965 million pounds of pesticide have not been used because of the adoption of GM crops. The biggest impacts are from insect-resistant cotton and herbicide-tolerant maize, both of which need fewer sprayings than their conventional equivalents… online.wsj.com healthblog.ncpa.org What are the environmental benefits of GM crops? One of the significant environmental benefits of GM crops is the dramatic reduction in pesticide use, with the size of the reduction varying between crops and introduced trait. A study assessing the global economic and environmental impacts of biotech crops for the first nine years (1996-2004) of adoption showed that the technology has reduced pesticide spraying by 172 million kg and has reduced environmental footprint associated with pesticide use by 14%. The technology has also significantly reduced the release of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture equivalent to removing five million cars from the roads.2 In the USA, adoption of GM crops resulted in pesticide use reduction of 46.4 million pounds in 2003.3 The use of Bt cotton in China resulted in pesticide use reduction of 78,000 tons of formulated pesticides in 2001. This corresponds to about a quarter of all the pesticides sprayed in China in the mid-1990s.4 Additionally, the use of Bt cotton can substantially reduce the risk and incidence of pesticide poisonings to farmers.5 Herbicide tolerant crops have facilitated the continued expansion of conservation tillage, especially no-till cultivation system, in the USA. The adoption of conservation and no-till cultivation practices saved nearly 1 billion tons of soil per year.6 Biotech cotton has been documented to have a positive effect on the number and diversity of beneficial insects in the US and Australian cotton fields.7 Adoption of Bt corn in the Philippines did not show an indication that Bt corn had negative effect on insect abundance and diversity.15 isaaa.org ... Modern crop genetic engineering has provided farmers with much better crop variety options for use in no-till farming. One of these is crops that are tolerant of the herbicide glyphosate. This is the most widely used types of GM crop. Glyphosate-tolerant crops include soya beans, canola, cotton and maize. Glyphosate has much lower environmental impact than chemicals such atrazine, which it replaces. Unlike atrazine, which is banned in the European Union, glyphosate is relatively rapidly degraded in the soil and does not easily leach into water run-off to river basins. Beating insects, saving farmers Insect pest management has been completely revolutionised by the introduction crops with built-in insect protection added using modern gene technology. These include insect-protected cotton, which constitutes almost all of the Australian cotton crop, and insect protected-maize, which is widely grown around the world. An important benefit of this development is protection of farmers and their families from accidental poisoning when spraying crops with synthetic chemicals. Another benefit is the elimination of synthetic chemical run-off into river systems, which is the big success in the switch of Australian cotton growers to genetically-manipulated cotton varieties that started fifteen years ago. In Australia, genetically engineered cotton has reduced synthetic chemical spraying by about 80%. Worldwide it’s been estimated that in the period 1996-2010, biotechnology crops have allowed pesticide spraying to be reduced by 438,000,000 kg. This saving is equivalent to the pesticide active ingredient used in all the arable crops in the European Union for one-and-a-half crop years. Ongoing scientific work being carried out in both the public sector and in biotechnology companies is generating options for further improvement of the environmental footprint of farming. New methods of insect protection, which can be stacked within one crop to give multiple layers of safeguards against insects, are now available. This reduces the chances of insects evolving resistance to the crop protection system and such methods are being used to achieve sustainable pest management for the long term. Another new development is being trialed in the field in the United Kingdom this northern summer. Scientists at Rothamsted Research station have developed varieties of wheat that have an inbuilt natural repellent for aphid pests. This is the same natural insect repellent made by hundreds of plant species, including peppermint and maize. If this system (which is giving encouraging results in the glasshouse) performs well in the field, it will allow better control of aphids and reduce the need to spray many synthetic chemicals that are currently necessary to control an attack of the insect in wheat. Aphids transmit diseases that reduce crop harvests. We have largely emphasised the environmental and human health benefits provided by crop biotechnology and outlined how the environmental footprint of pesticides is being significantly reduced using modern methods of gene technology... theconversation.edu.au