I am one of the few reading Bee-L who also knows how to "farm" in the sense
of producing commercial crops at a profit on several hundreds of acres of
land through good years and bad. The RNAi thing is not about beekeeping, it
is about farming. I know a bit about growing feed corn for dairy herds.
Let's be clear on this - the talk of using RNAi to kill varroa mites is
nothing but speculative talk - PR misdirection. The application before the
EPA is for a hybrid GMO corn including RNAi to kill western corn rootworms.
The poor fuzzy bee, beset by mites? Once again, our bees are being
exploited - used as a hood ornament on a juggernaut that does nothing for
beekeepers or bees. And this time, it is Monsanto doing it. Shame on them!
Note that they even provided the NY Times with the photo of the poor bee
with a mite on its back in the press release. Can't blame the
(intern-written, intern-edited) NY Times for anything but lazy reporting
here.
If one wants to fight the corn rootworm, and increase the supply of feed
corn for animals and sweet corn for humans, one way to do this would be to
grow corn only for food, not for fuel. One could support Rep Bob Goodlatte's
(VA) bill to eliminate the Renewable Fuel Standard, which creates massive
subsidies for corn grown for fuel, rather than food. His bill would
eliminate the RFS and "make ethanol compete in a free market."
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr1462
http://tinyurl.com/marf7ah
When even Forbes magazine says your basic business model is a joke, it is
time to rethink the basic idea:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/05/17/ethanol-isnt-worth-
costlier-corn-flakes-and-tortillas/
http://tinyurl.com/43v7xou
"the cost of corn feedstock for corn-based ethanol is $3.80 per gallon of
gasoline. This doesn't include the cost of production of the ethanol, the
cost of transportation or any other costs besides the corn price, clearly
making corn-based ethanol a money-losing proposition."
To make matters worse, the corn rootworm can (now) live on things other than
corn. "Rotation-resistant rootworms" can lay their eggs in soybean fields
and other crops rotated with corn, allowing the larvae to infest corn the
next spring. The goal with biofuels was to switch from corn to "cellulose"
biofuels, but technical problems have prevented this (remember Bush saying
"Switchgrass", over and over? There was a reason for that, as corn-based
ethanol made no sense from the start.) The bad news is that the perennial
grass Miscanthus x giganteus, another biofuels crop that would likely be
grown alongside corn, ALSO can host the corn rootworm.
The EPA has been upping the quotas for biodiesel from vegetable oil and
ethanol from sugarcane to replace the stalled cellulose-based biofuels. But
the available US sugar and vegetable oil supply is not enough to fill the
quotas if cellulose fuel technology remains not-yet-ready-for-prime-time.
If the EPA keeps demanding that people misuse food crops to make fuel,
biodiesel and sugarcane ethanol acreage will increase in places like Brazil,
meaning more deforestation in the tropics. I've heard that they are
knocking down a brazilian trees a month!
But an easy way to protect corn is to stop growing quite so much, and be
willing to accept lower yields in the fight against the rootworm. Corn is
such a massive business, expect a big fight over this.
The concerns about collateral damage to non-target insects seem valid,
significant, and worthy of careful consideration. I don't need to explain
them, there are geneticists writing long and detailed comments here:
http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketBrowser;rpp=25;po=0;D=EPA-HQ-OPP-2013-048
5
http://tinyurl.com/lxc7v6v
Beekeeping, the only sport that takes us so far afield, we end up standing
in bulldozed Brazilian rainforests talking about sugar cane replacing
switchgrass that was supposed to replace corn back in 2007, that was
supposed to replace "foreign oil", because the darn systemic pesticides
won't stay stuck to the corn seed, and can blow around and kill bees.
But varroa mites? No such pesticide is being proposed, nor has one been
shown to work in even a lab setting. I smell vaporware.
***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
|
