They are genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate, an herbicide that is commercially known as Roundup.
With glyphosate going off patent in September 2000, generic manufacturers were anxious to strike a deal.
Terms of the deal they struck remain secret, but most of Atanor's glyphosate stayed in Argentina.
Glyphosate is also the largest herbicide in use and has been this way for a long time.
FORBES: Monsanto Looks Cheap As An Option On Global Food Crisis
As I reach his land I can see clearly where the glyphosate has hit, nearly everything is dead.
Louis, attributed the drop to price decreases for Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides, which were not offset by volume growth.
Officials counter that glyphosate, the herbicide involved, is harmless to health, and that the coca industry itself does huge ecological damage.
Albaugh told Monsanto that, if need be, he would import glyphosate from Argentina, which could push the U.S. price of glyphosate down.
But in an irony Albaugh can appreciate, Monsanto has suggested some farmers use other herbicides, including 2, 4-D, in concert with glyphosate to combat resistance.
In May 2004 Syngenta acquired from Bayer the rights to produce corn seed that can tolerate the herbicide glyphosate, providing the same protection against weeds as Roundup.
This year Atanor will begin selling glyphosate in agricultural powerhouse Brazil, but it took it 11 long years to get necessary approvals from the government.
Albaugh had an advantage because Atanor had a recipe for glyphosate.
According to Benbrook, the negative effects of genetic engineering have resulted from the widespread adoption by farmers of crops such as corn and soybean engineered to be resistant to the herbicide glyphosate.
FORBES: How Groundbreaking New Technologies Are Smothered By Anti-Technology Ideologues
Another problem: Scientists have identified 12 glyphosate-resistant weeds.
Glyphosate was a wild success, beyond Albaugh's expectations.
It is specifically modified to be used with glyphosate, marketed by Monsanto as Roundup, an herbicide considered less damaging to crops, less environmentally harmful than the range of pesticides used in conventional farming and toxicologically benign.
Farmers and traffickers have largely neutralised the effects of spraying through smart countermeasures such as planting coca bushes in denser and less visible plots and cultivating new strains of coca that are resistant to the herbicide glyphosate.
Several years ago a coalition of environmental groups joined with a handful of organic farmers to sue in federal court to halt the planting of genetically engineered sugar beets modified for resistance to the herbicide glyphosate (better known by its trade name, Roundup).
FORBES: The New York Times' Mark Bittman Offers Poisoned Food For Thought
Much of that increase has been in a herbicide called glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup and generic versions of it) and because glyphosate has negligible toxicity to birds, invertebrates and mammals, it has a much lower Environmental Impact Quotient (EIQ) than the herbicides it replaces.
FORBES: Bittman of the 'New York Times': Always Out To Lunch
应用推荐