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SW: →What Increased Yield?: adding info
"Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis. The study – carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt – has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.... The new study confirms earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsanto GM soya produced 6 per cent less than its closest conventional relative, and 11 per cent less than the best non-GM soya available.... A similar situation seems to have happened with GM cotton in the US, where the total US crop declined even as GM technology took over.... Last week the biggest study of its kind ever conducted – the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development – concluded that GM was not the answer to world hunger. Professor Bob Watson, the director of the study and chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when asked if GM could solve world hunger, said: 'The simple answer is no'" [http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/exposed-the-great-gm-crops-myth-812179.html?startindex=10].
Monsanto of course disputes this conclusion by implying that somehow their genetic engineering can inherently cause each individual plant to produce more food than it could naturally. India's Devinder Sharma, however, takes exception to that claim by pointing out that rather than ''increasing yields'', what GM crops were actually designed to do through the use of copius amounts of their herbicides and the inclusion of BT pesticide is to ''reduce crop '''losses''''' from from insects and weeds - and that's when working as designed (increasingly not the case) [http://devinder-sharma.blogspot.com/2009/03/do-gm-crop-increase-yield-answer-is-no.html].
<blockquote>''This is not amusing. It can't be taken lightly anymore. I am not only shocked but also disgusted at the way corporations try to fabricate and swing the facts, dress them up in a manner that the so-called 'educated' of today will accept them without asking any question ... In scientific terms, these are called crop losses, which have been very cleverly repacked as yield increases. What Monsanto has done is to indulge in a jugglery of scientific terminologies, and taking advantage of your ignorance, to build up on claims that actually do not exist ... When was the last time you were told that herbicides increase crop yields? Chemical herbicides are known to be reducing crop losses. This is what I was taught when I was studying plant breeding. And this is what is still being taught to agricultural science students everywhere in the world ... If GM crops increase yields, shouldn't we therefore say that chemical pesticides (including herbicides) also increase yields? Will the agricultural scientific community accept that pesticides increases crop yields? ... whenever the crop yields are higher the scientists and the companies take credit. But when the crop yields are lower the blame invariably shifts to weather. And it makes me wonder why don't the scientists pat the weather at times of bumper harvest? You guessed it right''.</blockquote>
==The rise of the superweeds==
