IS COTTON CONQUERING ITS CHEMICAL ADDICTION?
In a recent article, Dr Kranthi, Head of ICACs technical section and previously director of the Indian Central Institute for Cotton Research (CICR) notes that these five countries are also seeing pest problems ‘brewing up’. The problems are ‘boll weevil, cotton bollworm, pink bollworm, whitefly and leaf curl virus’. With yields stagnating and pesticide use increasing, he warns of a potential serious threat to cotton, not just from pest resistance but also from new pests, herbicide resistance, and disease. While some countries have the capacity to act quickly, others do not. Even those with capacity have not responded quickly enough to the declining effectiveness of Bt cotton, or to the fact that technological responses to pest problems do not last forever: ecosystems respond to change with new pests filling the voids left by those successfully controlled. There is a continued race for technology to stay ahead of nature’s speed of adaptation, a race on a knife edge. To be successful, new tools will need to be broader, selective and IPM compatible rather than more GM or more broad-spectrum chemicals, and embrace cottons with different, shorter seasons or other characteristics such as physical and physiologically adaption for pest survival, biological control, and agro-ecological approaches. The concentration of power among a few companies in the agricultural chemicals and input sector remains a concern, in terms of the supply of inputs such as seeds and pesticides, and increasingly, technology to make use of data. A series of three mega-mergers, (the latest of which is between Monsanto and Bayer, following those of Dow Chemicals and DuPont and ChemChina’s purchase of Syngenta) means even greater influence19 and global monopoly of the chemical market supply and distribution, hence higher cost of pesticides.
Photo: cotton bollworm
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