The status quo is we keep doing what we are currently doing for decades. The risks of doing that are far greater in my opinion.
You simply cannot give any guarantee whatsoever that the dsRNA-based poison that you consider safe, really is safe or has unforeseen fatal effects.
You should read more about agriculture and look at the many success stories of farmers who produce in large scale without using poisons. Then you might understand that there is no need for poisons.
I don't know of any modern production system that's free of poisons (if you want to refer to poisons as anything that kills an insect, which seems to be the case), but willing to be educated.
As an example without soap, a friend has a garden. Call it holistic, permaculture or whatever. The same plants grow twice as big in his garden compared to neighbor's, because he tends to the plants, the soil and the garden using modern knowledge. No spraying. Lots of mulch, diversity, planning...
Still a hard no.
It's precisely this attitude that got us where we are today. 50 years ago, the response would have been 'the status quo is we're headed towards mass starvation as we become unable to feed the giant post-war population boom using traditional agricultural techniques'.
Now we're faced with the possibility of widespread ecological collapse of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Species are going extinct at thousands to millions of times the background rate. Even if we merely survive, the loss of genetic diversity will reverberate through millions of years and likely result in heavily degraded, less productive ecosystems that will require heavy human intervention in perpetuity to continue to function. We're basically cutting a huge hole in the boat underneath us, and signing ourselves up to bail out the water ... forever.
Let's be honest: we don't know the long-term ecological consequences of what we do. We didn't know 100 years ago, we didn't know 50 years ago, and we still don't know today. We do not have the ability to determine the long -term negative boomerang effect of mass application of so-called 'targeted' intervention.
> It's chemically identical to what you consume every day.
And how do you know drastically increasing the amount has no effect over the long term? Note that snippets of dsRNA floating around are potent immune system inducers, because it's what viruses create [1]. Does it have a long term pro-inflammatory effect? So let's assume you're correct, the dsRNA degrades quickly before humans eat it.
What about the transient immune responses of all flora and fauna in the sprayed area? What effect on the soil microbiome?
> no genetic modification
Literally modifying the genomes of fauna in the environment en masse in a highly selective way, putting enormous selective pressure in particular species. Do we even have any idea what that selective pressure will do? Will targeted species undergo rapid mutation and speciate? Will the descendant species become both more aggressive and harder to target, due to there being an empty ecological niche? Do those targeted species take on critical ecosystem roles that we're not yet aware of?
Note that this isn't idle speculation - just look at the enormous rise of MDR bacterial infections in hospitals, precisely the result of applying selective pressure for just a couple of generations.
The crux of all our problems is a chronic inability to admit that we don't know, and perhaps cannot safely know, the ecological consequences of our actions. But sure, kill away. If we're lucky, we won't be around when the boomerang hits.
For me (and this is only my opinion), a highly targeted dsRNA, which is completely organic (it's not synthesised), has no synthetic modifications, is present in massive quantities in nature, is consumed every day by every person on earth if they're had fruit or vegetables, does not persist in the environment, is likely much safer than any existing pesticide, synthetic or organic.
As for selective pressure, current broad spectrum pesticides, synthetic or organic, would cause greater ecological disruption I would think. Again, my point is that this is an attempt to remove that pressure, not add to it.
Saying it's all too hard to predict, so let's do nothing, just doesn't seem sensible to me. The risks of not acting seem clear and obvious. Have a look at the talks in the OECD link I provided, and you'll see there's a pretty precautionary approach being taken. It's not a case of 'let's have a go and see if it works. What could go wrong?'
Pesticides are mostly used for crops that humans do not eat directly. Food safety was never about beans or sweet potato or other efficient plant sources of protein and calories, it was about wheat, soybean and corn.
Their introduction, just like the introduction of GMOs is a result of a livestock agriculture lobbyists that made sure to increase yield of meat and other animal based products by promoting the use of aggressive compounds. These products are not a strategy for food safety but for luxurious and wasteful eating.
Pretending that biotic stresses simply don't exist is....umm..novel.
Trying to find a "smarter" way to poison things is exactly the status quo and it will lead nowhere good.
https://grist.org/industrial-agriculture/2011-04-13-big-ag-w...