Statement of Aaron Schock, Congressman, 18th Congressional District of Illinois Hearing on "Are Superweeds an ‘Outgrowth’ of USDA Biotech Policy (Part I)”
Washington,
Jul 28 -
Chairman Kucinich, I thank you for providing me the opportunity to make opening remarks here today. I’d also like to thank our witnesses who traveled to be with us today. Before I begin, I’d like to ask for unanimous consent to insert for the record a copy of remarks by the Illinois Farm Bureau & Illinois Corn Growers, expressing shared concern about additional government regulation of our nation’s farmers.
The title of today’s Hearing confuses me even more than the underlying premise. The attempt to link advancements to help farmers produce greater yields, become commercially viable, and better stewards of their land and the environment to some sort of habitat negligence is totally befuddling to me.
The underlying premise of this hearing is that farmers across this country are not employing the best management practices on their fields. According to the Chairman, they have no concern about their long term economic and environmental sustainability, and are thus destroying their fields and the environment. In his view, only new government regulation can combat these weeds.
Mr. Chairman, I understand the purpose of this hearing is to reaffirm your belief that by some unnatural process, the use of genetically engineered seeds and the use of weed repellent have led to some unnatural superweed. Yet, the facts couldn’t be further from the truth.
U.S. growers have been growing herbicide tolerant crops and using herbicides to control weeds for almost 60 years. Since 1980, 90 percent of the corn and soybeans grown in the U.S. have been herbicide tolerant, grown in fields treated with herbicides. Because U.S. growers have been using herbicides for almost 60 years they have been dealing with herbicide-resistant weeds for more than 50 years. Certain weed species will inevitably become resistant to some herbicides, or ANY other control methodology for that matter. Neither the government nor the growers can prevent resistance from occurring. Rather, they can employ those best management practices which will help them stay two steps ahead of the next generation of weeds while remaining economically viable and successful.
If your goal today is to end the use of science and technology in the industry of agriculture, I ask you, how will U.S. Agriculture continue to play a role in feeding the world’s six and a half billion people? Surely we can’t do that by going in reverse and employing practices which will put our farming community at a competitive disadvantage.
In reality, I would argue the market controls already in place are more than enough to ensure farmers are employing the best practices to control herbicide-resistant weed growth on their fields. It’s actually our farmers, not the government, who are more concerned about the development of new herbicide resistant weeds. And it is this concern which has already prompted them to employ crop and herbicide rotation and other best management practices to combat any weeds at the first sign of growth. The farmer who employs these practices will lose less of his yield to weeds and be more profitable in the long run. And the farmer who doesn’t, well he won’t be a farmer for long. The fact of the matter is that farmers yield more efficient growth from their fields today than ever before. They have done this during the same period of time which these supposed “superweeds” have begun taking over.
Farmers realize that over use or reliance on any single product to mitigate weed growth quickly results in the need to use a new and more expensive product. As such it is already in their own financial interest to rotate weed mitigation techniques. In addition, the agriculture industry realizes that it is in its best interest to mitigate extraneous weed growth as they spend tens of millions of dollars developing these products. In order to obtain returns on their investments, these companies seek the use of their products over a long period of time. Selling a herbicide product that proves to be effective for only a few years is not a way to stay in business.
The laws of nature tell us that weeds will naturally become tolerant to any single mitigation practice, so why would we want to limit those practices a farmer may employ? What we should be talking about here is ensuring our farmers have all the tools necessary, the most complete playbook, to mitigate weed growth, not limit their options.
The real question here today seems to be, how much should we be regulating human behavior? At what point do we say there are enough government regulations and market controls in place so that we can trust humans, faced with myriad incentives, to make the right decision. Will there always be a handful of bad actors? Yes, but does that mean the government should reach further into the lives of every farmer across this country with more regulations?
Do we tell a person how many cigarettes they can smoke a day...how many cheeseburgers they can eat each day or how many drinks they can have? No. Rather we try to educate that person, giving them all the facts available and tools necessary to make the right decision. Ultimately the decision is theirs; we leave it up to each citizen to employ that practice which will best ensure his or her long term health, or in this case economic sustainability…
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