It's very hard for me to condemn GMO crops because they are the obvious answer to the pest problems of monoculture. I don't think it's possible to turn our backs on 10,000 years of single-crop farming, unless we're talking about test-tube food. Like it or not, this is how it is.
Monoculture is responsible for the pest problems to begin with! GMO is not the answer! In fact the root worms that BT was built into corn to kill are building resistance, and its only a matter of time before the pest are able to overcome the current generation of pesticide measures, which will lead to ever more abominable practices of higher levels of strong pesticides.
This horticultural arms race reminds me of the folk tale of the" old lady who swallowed a fly", every remedy she ingest only leads to further calamity, and at the end of each verse where she swallows another animal, is the line "I don't know why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she will die".
I don't know why mono-culture cannot be reformed? like I was expressing earlier if the trillions of dollars that are wasted on building death machines were properly invested in integrated and sustainable agriculture projects, new methods of feeding the world without the use of poison could indeed make the problems of mono-culture a thing of the dark ages.
If you take a really close look at the history of mono-culture you will learn about how it is being practiced now is nothing like how it was first practiced 10,000 years ago( its apples to radiated oranges) regarding the original farmers of the Nile compared to what is going on in Iowa)
During the early days it became apparent in many cultures that mono-cropping would ruin the land within a few generations. Pestilence, and sickness would set in if the land was not allowed to rest, replenish and renew. This emergence of pest is mother earth revolting against the imposition of unbalanced systems. The pest are an immune reaction of the earth which serve a vital function in maintaining a healthy and diverse ecosystem. If one life form overgrows its ecosystems ability to keep it in balance , then it is just a mater of time before Gaia unleashes the worms, locust, etc. A vibrant ecology with a balance of plant eating insects living in a diverse herbosphere, actually stimulate the health and promote the development of strong immunity in the plants that share that environment. To systematicly poison all herbivorous insects in an environment, remove all other symbiotic life forms, and grow one single crop sprayed with herbicides and fed with chemical fertilizers is ecologically insane, and although it may yield short term gains, the long term effects will be disastrous to the subsequent generations forced to subsist such an unholy substrate.
The systems of crop rotation where developed and enabled mono-culture grain to be planted one year then legumes the next, then left to the Pasteur animals on the third year. If the agricultural sciences were truly unleashed from the bondage of corporate slavery then researches and innovators working side by side with growers of food on the grass roots level could develop the kind of integrated and highly efferent poly-cultural systems which would make mono-culture, obsolete.
