Source: Children’s Health Defense

By Claire Robinson

Genetically modified (GM) crops have increased agriculture’s dependence on pesticides rather than reducing it, a study published in April found.

Drawing on data from four GM crops — Bt cotton, herbicide-tolerant (HT) soybean, HT and/or Bt maize, and HT canola, the researchers — including agricultural development expert professor Glenn Davis Stone from Washington and Lee University and Bt cotton expert K. R. Kranthi of the International Cotton Advisory Committee — traced the surge in chemical use over three decades.

They found a paradox: while GM seeds were supposed to reduce pesticide use, their introduction caused pesticide use to soar. The researchers explain this outcome using the Jevons paradox, an economic theory that dates back to 1865.

British economist William Stanley Jevons argued that efficiency in resource use often leads to more, not less, consumption. The study applies this idea to GM crops, which were claimed to reduce pesticide use, but in reality have made it skyrocket.

The researchers consider the two most prevalent GM seed-pesticide technology regimes: Bt crops and herbicide-tolerant (HT) crops.

Both seeds are billed as efficient technologies: HT crops are claimed to facilitate more efficient weed control, and Bt crops are claimed to control insect pests more efficiently.

However, the researchers found that, “Like other technological efficiencies… the increased use of GM crops over the past 30 years has not contributed to input reductions nor to land reclamations, but to the expansion of agricultural land and increased use of the very pesticides these technologies are purported to curtail.”

This is due to the complexity of agricultural systems:

“The efficiencies of GM crops not only lower the cost for individual farmers to use, in aggregate, more pesticides; they also make those pesticides ever more essential to the political economy of agriculture through the input-intensive monocultures in which they are embedded.

“In fact, increases in chemical usage occur throughout these GM crop systems because technological substitutions like GM seeds cannot be separated from their cascading impacts on labour, weed and pest ecology or agricultural decision-making.”

Bt cotton in India: Farmers buy more insecticides than ever

The authors consider the example of GM Bt cotton in India. Bt cotton was introduced with the promise of reducing insecticide use. The technology initially worked. Farmers used fewer insecticides and had lower input costs. The government supported its spread, so that by the mid-2000s, Bt cotton covered most cotton-growing areas.

But within a few years, the trend had reversed. Pests developed resistance and new pests appeared. In response, farmers sprayed more insecticides. By 2018, cotton farmers in India were spending 37% more on insecticides than before Bt cotton’s introduction.

What began as a cost-saving solution turned into a treadmill of higher expenses and increased pesticide use.

The authors comment, “The irony is that the wide adoption of Bt cotton, a technology with the express purpose of reducing insecticide sprays, is itself a key reason that Indian farmers apply more insecticides to their fields now. There is simply much more cotton now grown in India, and it is planted in monocultures that demand more of many kinds of resources.”

“This is agricultural elasticity: With new social and biological technologies like Bt cotton seeds and fertilizer subsidies, cotton cropping can expand, and farmers can intensify their efforts as capitalist cotton producers. These complex interactions only emerge after time, complicating the original technological efficiency of spraying less by requiring more inputs like fertilizers, land and water.”

GM crops and chemical use

The study shows that this pattern was also found in the U.S. with GM herbicide-tolerant crops. These crops initially made weed management more efficient, as farmers could save labor costs as well as spraying only broad-spectrum glyphosate, which is cheaper than other herbicides. And crucially, they could apply glyphosate herbicide to the growing crop without fear of killing it.

The result was a dramatic escalation in glyphosate application, particularly in soybean cultivation. Among U.S. farmers, the number of soybean acres treated with glyphosate jumped from 9.2 million to 113 million between the pre-HT year of 1994 and 2018.

During this time, the number of soybean hectares rose from 24.9 million to 36.1 million, and the percentage of area treated with glyphosate rose from 15% to 87%.

Monsanto (now Bayer) promoted glyphosate as a weedkiller with a complex mode of action that would delay resistance in weeds. But this claim turned out to be false, as the study emphasises.

As glyphosate-resistant weeds spread, farmers had to spray more of the chemical. When glyphosate alone failed to control the weeds, manufacturers created GM crops tolerant to even more toxic chemicals, such as dicamba and 2,4-D.

Farmers began spraying these chemicals as well as glyphosate. As the authors of the new study point out, “These herbicides add yet more externalised public cost in the form of volatile herbicide drift.”

Likewise, in Argentina, Brazil and Canada, GM crops promised simpler weed control but delivered higher herbicide use.

In modern chemical-intensive agriculture, farmers adopt GM crops; they use more chemicals; pests and weeds adapt; and companies develop new GM traits and chemicals, which farmers buy again.

The researchers call this an agricultural efficiency “trap.” With the GM crops examined in the study, at first, there is an appearance of greater efficiency and productivity.

But over time, farmers are locked into systems that increase pesticide use and raise long-term costs. Those costs include externalized ones like deforestation, soil degradation, water pollution, plant damage from spray drift and labor exploitation.

Whole systems approach needed

The researchers write that it is not useful to analyse the effects of GM crops on the level of individual elements like resource use, chemical input or land use. Instead, agricultural efficiencies are best analyzed at a system level, to account for the complex social, ecological and political factors at play that skew different parts of the production system.

Beyond the GM crops issue, an example given by the researchers is irrigation technologies, which allow for more efficient use of aquifer resources, enabling agriculture to expand to use more water across a larger landscape and in higher-value, more water-intensive crops. The end result will be increased demand for and use of water.

Another example is land sparing. Powerful lobbies are calling for what they term the “sustainable intensification” of agriculture — the idea that maximising yield from existing farmland by increasing fertilizer and pesticide use will theoretically “spare” land for nature.

The researchers point out that this is a discredited notion because:

“Increasing efficiencies generally induce agricultural expansion. Statistical models considering yields and forest loss across the tropics conclude that expansion is more common than land-sparing … especially when political economic conditions encourage private land accumulation, create new demands for products or allow new land to be developed.”

The researchers conclude:

“GM crops are simply the latest of many technological innovations that have enabled a form of capitalist agriculture to persist. HT crops exemplify this with their clear connection to rises in glyphosate use.

“Farmers around the world, especially over the long term, have increased their use of those herbicides that the GM crops are designed to work with. Bt crops provide a subtler example of the Jevons paradox in that their spread has increased land use, intensified monocultures and paradoxically increased pesticide applications in India.”

They recommend pursuing alternative systems that sidestep the Jevons paradox trap by seeking systemic change rather than “incremental technical fixes toward efficiency.”

They state, “In complex living systems like farms, efficiency is much too narrow a goal. Instead, the long game of stability through diversity makes for a better evolutionary strategy.”

Originally published by GMWatch.

Claire Robinson is editor at GMWatch.