07/June/21

 

The recent return of the pink bollworm pest in several Indian states has provided cause for concern about widespread resistance in pests towards the toxins produced in Indian Bt cotton plants, as well as about farmers’ livelihood security. A new study is the first to provide empirical evidence on the socio-economic consequences of recent bollworm attacks in India based on an exploratory study conducted in Telangana. It shows why some peasant farmers can only deal with the consequences of this technological failure to a limited extent. Progress in Development Studies (paywall)

 

 

On 1 June, 21 anti-glyphosate activists were acquitted of criminal damage by a court in Foix, France, for making containers of glyphosate-based herbicides (like Roundup) unsellable by covering them with paint. Their defence lawyer Guillaume Tumerelle argued that their actions during their three protests had been justified by the toxicity of glyphosate-based herbicides. The court agreed, ruling that the activists' actions were justified by necessity and proportional to the dangers posed by these herbicides. GMWatch

 

 

A new lawsuit claims that dicamba herbicide drift extensively damaged vineyards in Texas. Dicamba is sprayed on GM dicamba-tolerant cotton, which can be grown close to the vineyards. Those vineyards’ owners, according to a press release from the law firm that filed the case, “saw their highly productive vineyards wither and, in some cases, die as a result of the dicamba-resistant seed system’s use on over two million surrounding acres of cotton". That release says that 57 Texas wine grape growers have filed suit against Bayer-Monsanto and BASF (which also sells dicamba products) for “hundreds of millions of dollars". The suit alleges that some grape growers saw 90 percent reduction in their yield owing to dicamba drift. And grapevines, unlike some other crops, cannot simply be replanted the next year for a similar yield; they require decades to mature and produce the right quality of fruit for some wines. Modern Farmer

 

 

The COVID-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus. The coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took a rare and unnatural sequence used by gain-of-function human researchers — implying that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape. The presence of this sequence is strong evidence of gene splicing, and the absence of diversity in the public outbreak suggests gain-of-function acceleration. The scientific evidence points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory. Wall St Journal