You know the bugs can develop resistance to some of the pesticides as well, right?
Resistance is a common problem for any pest control method, which is why the researchers have to come up with new methods to fight off teh bugs.
You bet. That's been happening as long as anyone's developed pesticides. Ultimately we end up with food that's been poisoned to the point where the bugs have adapted through enough generations to overcome it, while we have not, and we go ahead and ingest the poison.
What a great approach that's been.
Of course the alternative is much smaller crop yields, the occasional blight/famine caused by a bug swarm, and an overall loweing of our quality of life.
A question: if we are being "poisoned" as you claim, how are life expectancies going up and up?
Uhh... "poisoned" does not necessarily mean "killed". And chemicals in food are not the only factor in life expectancies. Surely you don't mean to say that?
And no, the alternative is natural deterrents to those factors that attack our crops, whether insect or parasite or fungus. There's a chasm of collected wisdom in these methods, but no, we take the clobber-it-over-the-head mentality throwing a chemistry set at a given insect ... as if that insect exists in a vacuum and killing it affects nothing else. A simplistic mentality incapable of seeing wholistically.
This just came over the wire today:
Unapproved genetically modified wheat from Monsanto found
>> Japan, the largest market for U.S. wheat exports, suspended imports from the United States and canceled a major purchase of white wheat on Thursday after the recent discovery of unapproved genetically modified wheat in an 80-acre field in Oregon.
How the altered crop made its way to the Oregon field remains a mystery. The strain was developed by Monsanto to make wheat resistant to the companys own industry-leading weed killer. Monsanto tested the type of altered seed in more than a dozen states, including Oregon, between 1994 and 2005, but it was never approved for commercial use.
.... This was not from a recent trial, which means its been sitting there in the environment, said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit group. Its highly doubtful that its just on one farm. If its out there, its out there. The centers science policy analyst, Bill Freese, added, Its been 12 years since this wheat was grown officially in Oregon. It doesnt just disappear and magically appear 12 years later.
Freese added that Monsanto has 15 new permits, issued in 2011, to test herbicide-resistant wheat in Hawaii and North Dakota, including an unusually large 300-acre field in North Dakota. Freese said the size of that field would make it difficult to prevent accidental spread. <<
This is exactly what I was telling shiny-shoe-boy a while back; a polluted gene pool. No doubt Monsanto is even now working on plans to sue Wonder Bread when it shows up there for patent infringement.
I'm taking this over to the Monsanto (DNA Protection Act) thread. The present thread should be abandoned; it's about an event which has passed.