Dow Brings Back An Agent Orange Ingredient for New GM PlantsSayer Ji, Contributor Dow AgroSciences (a subsidiary of Dow Chemicals) recently announced their development of genetically-engineered corn, soybean, and cotton plants metabolically resistant to the herbicide 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), a major ingredient in Agent Orange. What this means for our future is that, if approved for use, vast regions of our country will soon be sprayed with a chemical that has been linked to over 400,000 birth defects in Vietnam. How did we end up here? History is repeating itself before our eyes. Dow Chemicals and Monsanto, joined at the karmic hip, both manufactured Agent Orange for use in Vietnam, and both are notorious for minimizing the adverse health effects associated with exposure to the agent. Neither corporation learned from its mistakes, largely because the US government underwrote the risk of using the chemical, and therefore shielded them from the bulk of the legal and financial fallout. But this lack of culpability has now set up the conditions for a reliving of the horrors of systemic herbicide exposure, only this time on American soil, with Monsanto choosing glyphosate (also a birth-defect causing chemical), and Dow Chemical sticking with its old time favorite. The two corporations are now pitched in a heated battle for dominance, as Monsantos once global hegemony over genetically engineered staple crops like soy and corn began to falter, in the following four ways: 2) Insects began to develop resistance to Monsantos Bt gene, which was engineered into their plants as a natural insecticide, conferring theoretical resistance to Bt-sensitive pests. 3) Research on glyphosate, the major active ingredient in Roundup, which has been used at the rate of 80,000 tons in the US in 2007 alone, began to accumulate, linking it to dozens of serious adverse health. 4) Glyphosate was found to contaminate our air, food and groundwater. Given these fatal flaws in Monsantos once impenetrable armor, Dow AgroScience is positioning its new GE plants as a next-generation solution to the problems of glyphosate and Bt resistance. However, by engineering what amounts to Agent Orange-resistance into their new and improved crops the potential environmental and health fallout to exposed areas is nothing less than horrific. Do we need to view pictures of the victims of Agent Orange to be reminded of how toxic the ingredients in this herbicide are? (Warning: the images are graphic). Instead of learning from Monsantos colossal mistakes (which happens when you play geneticist-as-God and use a broad spectrum poison to kill all but your chosen plants) Dow AgroSciences solution is to multiply the problem by a factor of three, creating the first-ever, three-gene, herbicide-tolerant staple crops. While Dow AgroScience claims that 2,4 D resistance will not present the same problem that Roundup resistance did for Monsanto, the science to support these marketing claims is not on their side. In a recent article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, researchers reviewed Dow Chemicals own published research on 2,4 D resistant crops,and found it highly misleading and inaccurate. They noted: In their recent article, we feel that Wright et al. (1) [Dow AgroSciences researcher] misrepresented the potential for 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D)resistant weeds in 2,4-Dresistant cropping systems and exaggerated the sustainability of their approach to addressing glyphosate-resistant weed problems in agriculture. They also noted: We were surprised that Wright et al. (1) stated that only very few 2,4-Dresistant weed species have evolved without quoting a specific number. We checked the database that they used to support this claim (2) and were alarmed to learn that, globally, 28 species across 16 plant families have already evolved resistance to the synthetic auxin herbicides, the mode of action to which 2,4-D belongs. Of these, 16 are known to be resistant to 2,4-D specifically (for comparison, 21 species are resistant to glyphosate globally). Furthermore, the claim that 2,4-D resistance is unlikely to evolve because of the complex and essential functions that auxin plays in plants is unsubstantiated. In a nutshell, 2,4 D and 2,4 D resistant crops are not a solution to the underlying problem of herbicide resistance in genetically engineered crops. In the same way that we have created the monster of antibiotic-resistance super-bugs like MRSA (methillicin-resistant staphylococcus aureus), continually developing more and more toxic chemicals to combat a problem that can not be solved with them, Nature will ultimately survive the manmade systems that seek to dominate her modes of production; the question is whether we will survive ourselves, if we continue down this path much longer. This article first appeared at GreenMedInfo. 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