Molly Ivins December 12AUSTIN, Texas — Congratulations to the voters of Texas' Golden Triangle for having rid themselves of Congressman Clueless. If ever a public official deserved to lose, Steve Stockman was that man. Good work there, team. This leaves us only with Rep. Ron Paul as an obvious candidate for the sheltered workshop. And now for some Brave New World news. Our country is on what is known as the pesticide treadmill. This means that insects become resistant to the effects of pesticides, so farmers start using new and more potent pesticides, to which pests eventually become resistant, and so on and on and on. 'Round and 'round we go, and where we stop, nobody knows. Resistance is part of the evolutionary process. When bugs are exposed to a toxic chemical, some of them survive; they reproduce, and their offspring inherit genes resistant to that particular chemical. The more the chemical is used, the faster the resistance process occurs. More than 500 insects have now developed resistance to one or more pesticides; so have 270 species of weeds and 150 plant diseases. This information comes from an excellent newsletter, Rachel's Environment and Health Weekly (P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403), which is named for the late Rachel Carson. It's full of useful nuggets. The pesticide treadmill works in another way as well: By killing off beneficial organisms that help keep pests in check, pesticides often create the conditions in which pests can flourish. A painful and expensive reminder of how this works came with last year's disastrous cotton crop in the Rio Grande Valley and around San Angelo, caused by (of all things) the state's boll weevil eradication program. Farmers lost $300 million worth of cotton because of infestation of beet army worm; scientists at the Agriculture Research Service in Weslaco blame the beet army worms on overzealous spraying against boll weevils. Just across the border, Mexican farmers who hadn't sprayed had a dandy crop. Valley farmers have sued, declaring that the Texas Boll Weevil Eradication Foundation — which they have to pay for — is unconstitutional, and the mess is now before the state Supreme Court. As the Texas Observer noted, all that the weevil eradication fund has produced so far is a plague of lawyers. The World Bank said in a recent report: "Since the 1940s, pest management technology has increasingly relied on chemical pesticides.
The alternative to pesticides is a system called IPM: integrated pest management. Consumers Union has put out a new book, "Pest Management at the Crossroads," which explains how IPM could reduce the public health dangers and environmental hazards of pesticides by 75 percent in the next 25 years while increasing crop yields as well. IPM diagnoses the source of pest problems — i.e., finds out where the little buggies are breeding — and then uses preventive practices and biological controls to hold pest populations within acceptable limits. Sounds better than spraying the land with tons of poison every year, doesn't it? Not to the pesticide corporations — $29 billion in sales in 1995, $10.4 billion in the United States alone. According to Rachel's Weekly, the recent merger of Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy to create Norvatis produced the world's largest agrichemical corporation, with sales of $4.4 billion in 1995. It's twice as big as Monsanto. And now the pesticide industry is onto a whole new way to increase the use of chemical pesticides by genetically engineering crops. "This year, Monsanto started selling soybean seeds that have been genetically altered to withstand Monsanto's herbicide Roundup," says Rachel's Weekly. "Roundup (glyphosate) kills just about everything green so it must be applied to weeds with great care and in limited amounts, to avoid harming nearby crops. But now Monsanto has incorporated a petunia gene into soybeans, and the resulting soybeans are not harmed. Now an entire field can be doused with Roundup, killing the weeds but not the soybeans. The short-term result is increased soybean yield and, of course, soils and nearby water supplies and wildlife contaminated with Roundup. Because neither the farmer nor Monsanto pays the price of ecological or public health damage from such techniques, the result is more profit for farm corporations, more profit for Monsanto and increased costs to public health and environment." Here we have a classic case of a problem with a solution that does not harm public health or the environment and a solution that harms both but provides huge profits for corporations with immense political power. If the people rather than the corporations controlled our political system, we would choose the rational solution. But greed keeps fouling up common sense. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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