Non-gmos use pesticides, nearly all farming does, and usually more than GMO crops.
Eg https://i0.wp.com/sitn.hms.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/20...
From
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/gmos-and-pesticides/
From
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/gmos-and-pesticides/
More clearly, Roundup kills weeds, not bugs.
Pesticide is an umbrella term for herbicides, insecticides, and other types of substances. If you've read the paper, it mentions that too:
> Pesticides are substances used to repel, kill, or control animals (insecticides) or plants (herbicides) that are considered to be pests.
You are correct, though, in that while insecticide use decreased (because GMOs help insect resistance), herbicide use has actually increased because of herbicide tolerance of GMO crops.
"We need to use poison to grow food to feed everyone" is bunch of false-dilemma poppycock.
If it were truly a matter of "we need to feed everyone", we wouldn't be wasting massive amounts of grain on raising cattle, which is one of most wasteful ways of generating food there is. 80% of agricultural land is used for cattle, but they only represent 20% of the calories in food consumed.
We also wouldn't be growing corn just to turn it into ethanol, a net-energy-negative process.
We also wouldn't be controlling the price of sugar, thus creating a huge demand for corn to turn into corn syrup.
Corn is also an incredibly resource-intensive crop all on its own, and the monocropping is terrible for the soil. But corn is where the money is..
It's not. Europe uses somewhat lower amount of pesticides because it has more land that regularly freezes which helps to control insects.
When corrected for that, Europe uses more pesticides for similar climates.
> yields are higher than in the US.
They aren't, when corrected for the land area.
https://ag.purdue.edu/commercialag/home/resource/2022/05/int...
According to data from the UN, in 2020 North America used 2.77 kg pesticiedes per hectare cropland and Europe used 1.69 kg/ha, and yet Europe has higher yields per hectare. So clearly Europe uses less pesticedes per produced amount of food.
> They aren't, when corrected for the land area.
I should have said "for the geographical area". You need to compare yields in similar climates and soils.
While this may be causal, agriculture is incredibly complex, and I would hesitate to come to any conclusions about causality from this bit of data alone.
and as far as I know the US did do exact the opposite en mass
GMO by itself isn't bad, but a lot of GMO is made in a way which is harmful to the soil on the long term (and sometimes even short term)
Similar much higher limits for the amount of fertilizers used allow you to use approaches to growing crops which short and mid term have more yield but also drain the soil in a non-substainable way leading to a death spiral of needing increasingly more and more fertilizers, insecticides and at some point GMO modified crops.
While most EU countries had for a long time (but not necessary still have) laws which require a more sustainable ground usage and having a larger movement of people buying food which even more stricter constraints wrt. fertilizers and pesticides.
I don't think this is true. Did you mean livestock?