Glyphosate is by far the world's most widely used and important herbicide because it is efficacious, economical and environmentally benign (Dill et al., 2008; Duke & Powles, 2008). Glyphosate dominates for non-selective weed control in agricultural ecosystems, especially to remove weeds between rows in established perennial tree, nut, vine crops and before seeding of annual crops. Globally, glyphosate is also the non-selective herbicide of choice in urban and industrial areas, national parks and other amenity areas. In these use patterns, there have been few instances of weeds evolving glyphosate resistance. While there are documented cases of glyphosate-resistant weed evolution in several countries (Table 1, reviewed by Powles, 2008) given the long term glyphosate usage, experience establishes that plants cannot easily evolve resistance to this herbicide.
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