We lost on Proposition 37, but the campaign is just beginning! Guess who the opponents of Prop. 37 were? Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences, ConAgra, BASF (“The Chemical Company”), Syngenta, and their allies, who put at least $40 million into deceptive ads to defeat Prop. 37 so they could keep earning billions by selling poison. It’s discouraging that their money swayed so many people, because the facts show GMO is not the deliverance they claim.

One of the claims made when genetically modified food was put on the market in the mid-1990s  (over the objections of FDA’s own scientists, by the way) was that crops engineered to withstand pesticides would permit a reduction in the amount of pesticides used. That should have been good for the environment, right?

Yes, if it had lasted more than a few growing seasons. But in fact, pesticide use has gone UP by millions of pounds per year, and I bet you can guess why. It’s called evolution. As has always happened with pesticides, the target creatures (bugs, for instance, or weeds) are not all killed—the strongest survive and produce the next generation. It doesn’t take long for organisms with short life cycles to become resistant to the pesticide in question. Growers solve this problem by using more chemicals, or stronger ones. For years this has been called the “pesticide treadmill” that farmers can’t seem to escape. (Unless they switch to organic).

Just last month a scientific study demonstrated that pesticide use has gone UP since GMOs were introduced. The author concluded, “Overall, pesticide use increased by an estimated 183 million kgs (404 million pounds), or about 7%.”

If that isn’t enough, pesticides are implicated in the mass deaths of millions of bees that pollinate our crops. That is definitely not sustainable! What you can do: keep alert for new strategies to defeat GMOs and the corporations that make billions from them.