| Summary: | Glyphosate is the single most-used herbicide in the world. It has been on the market since 1974, but its use increased rapidly in North and South America with the adoption of the herbicide tolerant traits in crops that made its use possible in canola, cotton, corn and soybean to control weeds during the cropping season. Since the first report of a glyphosate resistant weed in a row crop in 2000, resistance has spread throughout most of the cropping areas of the Southeast and Mid- South regions of the US and is now growing in the Midwest cornsoybean belt. The reason for this development is clear, the use of only glyphosate to control weeds, its application to very large weeds and the use of low rates, coupled with lack of significant tillage and rotation to other herbicides or crops and other integrated weed management strategies have contributed to the situation. In Europe glyphosate is used in cereals to provide a weed-free field to sow the crop. Although the dynamics in Europe are different, the lessons to be learned from the US are that no herbicide system is immune to the development of resistance and care should be taken to integrate other complementary measures into weed management strategies in order to preserve the utility of all current herbicides.
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