The USDA has prepared the way for approval of a new product from Dow Agrosciences -- a corn strain that can withstand Dow’s herbicide 2,4-D. The company plans to sell the corn to industrial farmers whose fields are choked with weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide.
If the corn is approved, it will undoubtedly mark the beginning of at least another decade of chemical-intensive farming concentrating on a few chosen crops pushed by big agribusiness.
According to Mother Jones:
“If it and other new herbicide-tolerant crops can somehow be stopped, farming in the U.S. heartland can be pushed toward a model based on biodiversity over monocropping, farmer skill in place of brute chemicals, and healthy food instead of industrial commodities ... The frustrating part is, there no reason to send a flood of this stuff onto U.S. farm fields, where it will likely run off into ground water, as both Roundup and Syngenta's toxic herbicide atrazine already has ... [A] simple program called Integrated Weed Management could rescue U.S. farm fields from Roundup-resistant superweeds without recourse to more herbicides.”