NEWS: Biotech Agriculture: Biotech cotton offers protection against pest
Checkbiotech
By Ken Alltucker
February 6, 2007
Excerpt...
Farmers say genetically modified seeds help guard state's crop by keeping bugs at bay.
Americans are distrustful when scientists begin tinkering with the food supply by altering crops or cloning animals.
But the practice of planting biotech crops is widespread in Arizona and elsewhere.
Arizona's main foray into biotech agriculture is the use of a modified cottonseed designed to wipe out a pest that some say once endangered the state's cotton crop. The genetically modified seed...Bt Cotton, has improved cotton yields and nearly eradicated the pink bollworm.
"In my opinion, it probably saved the cotton industry in the state of Arizona," said Bruce Heiden, who owns a farm in Buckeye. "In our farming operation, genetically engineered plants and seeds have removed tons and tons of pesticides. I have been fighting all my life to make pesticides available. Now we're going to learn to live without them, and that's safer for the environment."
That's the argument farmers across the United States use as they switch to biotech crops. Those involved in agriculture tout the use of such crops as a way to use fewer pesticides and improve yields. Farmers increasingly are turning to biotech crops to grow cotton, corn, soybeans, alfalfa or other crops.
U.S. farmers have led a worldwide charge for the use of such crops. U.S. farms account for 135 million of 252 million acres of biotech crops planted worldwide in 2006, according to the International Service for Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications.
Debate over altered crops
Even as more farmers plant such crops, a recent survey shows that Americans aren't aware that corn, alfalfa, processed foods or other foods found on supermarket shelves have been altered at the genetic level.
"Most people don't understand the extremes that commodity crops are genetically engineered," said Michael Fernandez, executive director of the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology. Fernandez said public opinion over the use of such farming methods is up for grabs.
"There's a relatively small number of people who are strongly opposed and a small amount in favor," of biotech crops, Fernandez said. "Most people fall somewhere in the middle. Their opinions are not firmly held."
That's not the case with using cloned animals for food. Almost two-thirds of people (64 percent) say they are uncomfortable with the idea of cloning animals, according to a survey last year by the Pew Initiative.
Nevertheless, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to declare this year that meat from cloned cows, pigs and other animals is safe to eat.
The cloned animals likely will not be used as food because of the expense. Rather, farmers likely will clone their most desirable animals and use the meat and dairy products from the cloned animals' offspring.
Vicki Chandler, director of the Bio5 Institute in Tucson, said each biotech product must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
"You need to take a look at the product and evaluate the safety from there," said Chandler, who cited cotton as productive use of biotechnology for plants.
Battling persistent pests
Heiden said he was skeptical about using biotech seeds on his family farm in Buckeye.
At the height of the pink bollworm invasion, Heiden said he would spray insecticides as often as 15 times a year. He worried that a modified seed would not curb the need for spraying pesticides and would end up costing a bundle.
"We're always skeptical of something until we have a chance to try it," said Heiden, a second-generation farmer who has been working the fields of his family farm, H-Four Farm, since the 1950s.
He has become a convert. Crop sprayings have dwindled to just a handful each year to ward off other pests and weeds.
The National Cotton Council of America estimates that pink bollworm cost cotton producers as much as $32 million in lost yields and related costs. Those lost crops have been all but eliminated under the pink bollworm eradication plan, a federally funded program targeting the bollworm in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas and parts of northern Mexico.
Bt Cotton is genetically modified to grow a natural insecticide known as Bt toxin. The modified seeds, engineered by St. Louis-based Monsanto Co., are made with a bacterium whose gene is placed into cottonseeds that resist bollworms.
Environmental groups abroad, particularly in the European Union, have assailed the use of Bt Cotton over fears that the modified cotton could develop resistance to antibiotics and prove harmful to humans. Those fears have not materialized, according to Bruce Tabashnik, head of the University of Arizona's entomology department.
"It is probably the most closely watched (eradication) program in the world. The resistance has not increased," Tabashnik said.
Farmers throughout the state now routinely plant the seed as part of the effort to get rid of the pest.
Wiley Murphy, who farms 500 acres in southern Arizona, said his entire farm is planted with biotech seeds. Just a few years ago, he would spray five or six times a year to fight off pink bollworm. That has been reduced to about once a year.
He said Arizona's use of biotech seeds won't restore cotton as one of the staples of Arizona's economy. The state's production has winnowed over the years as farmers increasingly sell valuable land to developers.
But he said the use of modified seeds allows cotton farmers to maximize production while avoiding the harmful effects of pesticides.
"Environmentalists should be happy with this," Murphy said. "I don't know of a single case where it has been harmful."
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