Economics will reverse the problem?

To date, I can’t. That’s because resistance has developed only recently. The trait that protects the “pests” against Bt will take time to spread, but spread it will while farmers continue to use Bt to kill the pests. This is basic ecology. Of course, most farmers know stuff all about ecology, which is how we got to…

Speak for yourself. GM has been banned in several countries precisely because it was interfering with traditional farming. GM is linked to the push to intensification and profiteering, which is the main reason I oppose it.

There is a big difference between a chronic dose of Bt that some individual pests will survive and an acute one that will kill off all of them. This is basic. Aren’t you taught about natural selection where you come from?

If you’d read the entire thread, you’d know it was an institution whose web site ends in .ac.uk. The short version is that we are running out of soil organic carbon as a result of bad management practices inherent to intensive agriculture. Peak phosphate has been known about for years, and we are only starting to…

Just get the tourists to try to say “Cockburn Street”.

We could always eat the jobless.

Spot the Luddite!

True, but it is a reflection of a trend towards trying to cut the labour bill as far as possible. What do you think those unstaffed checkouts at supermarkets are for, where you have to scan your own shopping? They’re not there for your convenience - they exist to cut supermarket costs.

Read it more carefully. The conclusions (later reported in the media) are about the loss of soil organic carbon and other essential nutrients in soils. This has implications for yields.

No worries. A couple of weeks ago, at about 4am, I did what even I thought was quite well in a bird ID quiz for a different continent.

No, my objection is that, by its nature, some (but not all) GMOs are liable to reduce the efficacy of a pesticide in order to increase short-term profit for a few. Bt was something that could be used by other farmers, even organic ones. That is no longer the case in some areas and, given that the trait will spread…

Ediburg??

Robot waiters. Meanwhile, let’s continue to blame and persecute the unemployed for being too lazy to look for jobs.

That estimate came from a team of researchers from the University of Sheffield, not Greenpeace.

Now you buy it with refuge in the bag. The farmers don’t have to use it (which was the problem in the first place), and resistant corn borers are now in the environment, where other farmers now can’t use Bt, because it doesn’t work on the adapted pests.

It’s not the sole responsibility of the corporations, but if they actually had the best interests of the farmers at heart, they would be implementing a plan that would ensure people were getting a balanced diet rather than growing cash crops. The fact that they don’t do this proves to me that their motive is profit,…

No, I’m saying that rather than encouraging them to plant a cash crop to sell, with one nutrient that helps stave off a limited number of deficiency diseases, we should be encouraging them to grow multiple crops that will ensure a balanced diet.

The fact you ignore is that resistance developed more quickly because of the lower, chronic doses the pests were being exposed to - and that is a consequence of the technology.

Latest estimates suggest that, using conventional farming, we have less than a hundred harvests left before the soil is depleted too far. GM won’t solve that. Different farming practices, incompatible with the control of a limited number of crops controlled by a limited number of agricorporations, might.