[LINK] Round Up = "superweeds and hard-to-kill insects"

[Jim Birch]

Steven quoted:

> U.S. farmers are using more hazardous pesticides to fight weeds and
> insects due largely to heavy adoption of genetically modified crop
> technologies that are sparking a rise of "superweeds" and hard-to-kill
> insects, according to a newly released study.
>

Sounds suspiciously like another GM scare to me:

Is this a GM issue or an intensive monoculture farming issue?  If the same
type of farming was done with a non-GM strain would the same problems
occur?  Has the crop output increased more or less than the
herbicide/pesticide increase? Intensive farming has many important
positives like using less land and less resources for each unit of output.
People seem to think of farming as something like a TV ad for frozen
vegetable with lithe young smileys plucking peapods off lush vines but in
many ways farming is an intensified form of the completely normal
interspecies warfare that occurs everywhere in nature - intensified by the
availability of low-hanging fruit, and documented.  Farming has always been
problematical, ask to a farmer.  There isn't enough information in that
article to validate its argument.

It sounds like the regular arguments that the Internet is responsible for
whatever negative occurrence has just shocked someone but here the bad guy
is GM.

Jim