Study: GM Crops Good for the Environment - The Farmer's Daughter USA

The feedback I always get from the anti-GMOers is that there are no studies showing GM products are safe or sustainable. Of course nothing could be farther from the truth. GMOs are studies for years and millions of dollars are used to accomplish it. Even once the company perfects it, the FDA requires another 7 years of their own testing to make sure.

But, here’s another study conducted by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing that shows the use of Bt crops is actually good for the environment overall. (Refresher: What is Bt corn?)

Without getting all scientific about it, I’ll break it down like this: when we spray pesticides, it isn’t just the bugs eating our crops (“the pests”) that die, but also the other bugs. Left to their own devices, some of those other bugs could be a predator pests. But we have to spray because, without it, we’d have no crop. After the introduction of Bt corn, which certain insects are unable to digest, only the pests die. This leaves those predators to go work in the non-GMO fields and attack the bugs there, thus reducing the overall need for pesticides.

In fact, since the introduction of Bt corn, pesticide use has dropped 50%.

Now, it doesn’t help with all pests and some of them don’t really have a natural predator that is going to really make a difference. This fact accounts for why the use hasn’t dropped even further.

The conclusion:

Broadly speaking, the deployment of Bt crops may favour biocontrol services and enhance economic benefits not only in Bt crop fields but also in the whole agricultural landscape.

So the use of Bt, which is completely safe for human beings, has a side effect of lowering overall pesticide use — which should make the organic folks happy. Don’t get me wrong, the proper use of pesticide application is safe and environmentally compatible, but it’s also costly. Lowering our use of it is a positive if done in a smart way (as compared to just going organic).

Oh, and something foreign to the anti-GMOers, this study actually used scientific principals:

The new research, published in the journal Nature, monitored both insect pests and predators between 1990 and 2011, during which time Bt cotton swept aside traditional GM cotton. It examined 36 sites across six big cotton-growing provinces in northern China, where about 2.6m hectares of cotton and 33m hectares of other crops – notably maize, peanut and soybean – are grown each year, by more than 10 million small-scale farmers.

If you’d like a link to the full study, click here.