For the Agrichemical Industry, Organic Cotton is a Pest

Growing vast monocrops of cotton, it turns out, is a dirty business. Globally, cotton occupies 2.4 percent of cropland -- and burns through 16 percent of the insecticides used every year, the Environmental Justice Foundation reports.

May 11, 2010 | Source: Grist Magazine | by Tom Philpott

Like the food you eat, the clothes on your back come from somewhere.
If you wear cotton, that “somewhere” is ultimately a farm (with detours
at a textile mill, a clothes factory, etc).

Growing vast monocrops of cotton, it turns out, is a dirty business.
Globally, cotton occupies 2.4 percent of cropland — and burns through
16 percent of the insecticides used every year, the Environmental
Justice Foundation reports.

Indeed, conventional cotton production in the United States has long
required a veritable monsoon of poisons. Cotton can even give even
industrial corn a run for its money in terms of environmental impact.
According to the U.S.
Geological Survey,
pesticide applications for cotton run “3 to 5
times greater per hectare than applications of pesticides to corn.”

To try and stem the chemical cascade, farmers in cotton country have
largely switched to seeds genetically modified to contain a pesticide
and to withstand Roundup, Monsanto’s broad-based herbicide. Today, upwards of 60 percent
of cotton grown in the U.S. contains those traits
.

Trouble is, that “solution” to cotton’s chemical dependence is
already failing. In cotton country, Roundup-resistant “superweeds” are a
large
and growing problem,
forcing farmers to employ a toxic
cocktail of herbicides
to control weeds. And now, Monsanto recently
revealed, a strain of cotton bollworms has developed
resistance to the company’s widely planted pesticide-carrying cotton
strain.
Who knows what new poison concoctions will be needed to
exterminate these “superbugs”?