Originally posted on Quora November 15, 2022
It turns out one of the unmentioned side effects of the Glyphosate/GM combos is not only the decimation of pollinators, micro-organisms in the soil and farmers but crop diversity as well.
The Failure of BT Cotton and the Continued Success of Indigenous Cotton in India
The basic agro-monopolists model of the Bayer-Monsanto conglomerate is to first sell their glyphosate herbicide as a panacea for weeds and then to sell round up ready GM crops that are resistant to this poison. The catch is that they can only be bought as sterile terminator seeds that only last a single generation and since the agro-monopolist has patented these seeds they can extract royalties from farmers and charge exorbitant prices for new seeds. These sterile terminator seeds are also packaged with a need to spray more chemical fertilizers creating even higher overhead costs. The agro-monopolist does not care if farmers have to take on debt at interest that they’ll never be able to pay off, leading to the infamous farmer suicides, or if they completely erase the biodiversity of indigenous crops for their monoculture. In India’s case, indigenous cotton was displaced by cotton genetically engineered with BT toxin to repel insects and the higher yields and incomes never materialized but higher debts to cover higher overhead costs did.