Hope Not Hype - Third World Network

Pesticides
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Chapter Six
Pesticides
Key messages
1. Pesticides include both herbicides and insecticides.
2. GM crops are mainly herbicide-tolerant, insecticidal, or both.
3. There is insufficient evidence to conclude that GM crops have led to consistent
or sustainable decreases in pesticide use.
4. The way in which pesticides are used in GM crops is changing agriculture and
taking away options for both future conventional and existing GM crop users.
UNTIL this point, we have been considering the economic decisions of individual farmers
and not the larger social and environmental implications between different farming
philosophies and approaches. A case has been made that the use of insecticidal or pestresistant
(IR/PR) and/or herbicide-tolerant/resistant (HT/HR) crops has human health and
environmental benefits that are not easily quantified at the level of the individual farmer.
Equally, the use of GM cropping can have negative effects that are only detected at the
landscape level, that is, when monitoring districts, countries and regions (Graef et al.,
2007).
The 12 years of commercial production of GM crops has resulted in mostly just two
products (Delmer, 2005; Wenzel, 2006).
Thus far, 99% of the global GM crop acreage relates to insect-resistance and herbicide-tolerance
traits (Qaim and Zilberman, 2003, p. 900).
The majority of these are herbicide-tolerant, mainly to the herbicide glyphosate in
the formulation called Roundup (Benachour and Séralini, 2009). While there is much talk
of other traits, including drought and salt tolerance and nutritional enhancement, there are
few or no commercial examples 1 (Figure 6.1). For instance:
1
For an exception in animal feed, see Chapter Four. However, this crop was not developed to address a need
in human nutrition nor does it provide a nutrient that is not already available from other sources (FSANZ,
2004; Terry, 2007).