Chemical Controversies
Pesticides are substances that prevent, destroy, repel, or reduce the severity of pests. Pests are living things that occur where they are not wanted or that cause damage to humans, crops, or animals. Pests can be insects, rodents, unwanted plants, bacteria, viruses, or different types of fungus. Pesticides can vary in how toxic they are to humans and the environment. Some are persistent in the environment, animals, and birds, lasting for years; others break down soon after they are released. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants licenses, or registrations, to pesticides that it has found do not pose unreasonable risks to human health and the environment; it has registered at least 865 pesticides, which are used in thousands of pesticide products.
Below is the complete archive of related articles sorted by date.
Will corporate mergers in agriculture spur innovation?
[Editor's note: Ed Wiederstein is a former president of the Iowa Farm Bureau and a farmer in Iowa.] When funding was more ...
‘Non-GMO’ ranked near top, ‘organic’ at bottom in study of consumer meat preferences
For many consumers, buying a gallon of milk is much more complex than finding the preferred fat content and expiration ...
Will California break with EPA and ban chlorpyrifos pesticide?
Approximately one million pounds of chlorpyrifos—about 20 percent of what’s used nationwide—are applied annually in California to dozens of food ...
‘Glyphosate is vital’: Scottish farmers launch campaign to support herbicide’s reauthorization
As the EU decision on whether or not to re-authorise the herbicide glyphosate approaches, a farming union has called on ...
‘Backlash’ against GMOs may be more about corporate power than science
Much of the backlash against GMOs is less about genetic engineering and more about the business practices of the corporations ...
There are no GM oranges — So why is Tropicana deceiving consumers with Non-GMO label?
[Editor's note: Greg Jaffe is the Director of the Project on Biotechnology for the Center for Science in the Public ...
Bee experts say ditch Cheerios’ wildflower seeds, plant native ones to fight pollinator decline
[Editor's note: Jenna Gallegos is a 5th year plant biology PhD student at the University of California, Davis.] Honeybees are ...
Insect-resistant Bt GMO eggplant helps Bangladesh farmers increase income, reduce pesticide use
[Editor's note: Deb Carstoiu is managing director of plant biotech communications at CropLife International.] The eggplant, known in Asia as brinjal, ...
Video: Has organic farming ‘ideology’ spread through the scientific community?
[Editor's note: Andrew McGuire is an agronomist at Washington State University’s Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources.] At the core ...
Sorghum resistant to herbicide, drought, pests in advanced development
For the past several years sorghum research has lagged behind that of corn and soybeans, but that could soon change ...
Canada’s food regulator finds herbicide glyphosate on 30 percent of samples — But only 1.3 percent above ‘acceptable’ limit
Canada's food regulator has found traces of the controversial herbicide glyphosate in nearly 30 percent of about 3,200 food products ...
Boulder County, Colorado to phase out GMO crops and neonicotinoid insecticides
Boulder County commissioners voted 2-1 on Thursday [April 13, 2017] to approve the latest version of their plan for phasing ...
Does the administration’s block of the chlorpyrifos pesticide ban signal a changing regulatory landscape?
One of the first things this administration did was to rescind a government proposal to ban a pesticide used on ...
Green meal: GMO foods, synthetic milk, lab-grown meat on the menu
Feeding the 10 billion will require some creative solutions – and unpalatable compromises. Perhaps we can learn to love algae, ...
Neonicotinoid fiasco: How American NGOs turn Europe against science, push EU towards insecticide ban
The current EU ban on neonics has been disastrously counterproductive, resulting in an increased use of more damaging pesticides, mainly ...
Understanding toxicity: Caffeine ’40 times more toxic’ than glyphosate herbicide
[Editor's note: Alison Bernstein is a neuroscientist who studies the role of epigenetics and environmental exposures in Parkinson’s disease.] LD50 ...
Activist-fueled ‘over-regulation’ of GMO research stymies potential to feed the world
[Editor's note: Dr. Amjad M. Husaini is a professor of biotechnology at the Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology in India.] ...
Trump’s deregulation push could undermine trust in safety of our food system
Pro-agriculture conservatives seem to be welcoming Trump’s push for deregulation because they felt Obama-era policies on GMOs and school lunch ...
New EU independent herbicide glyphosate study shows no toxic effects or genetic changes
Results of a new animal study into possible health risks of the weedkiller glyphosate will be published in time to ...
Urban ‘treatment-free’ beekeeping leads to explosion in killer Varroa mites
[Editor's note: Toni Burnham runs one of 10 hives at the National Arboretum in Washington, DC.] In this season of vitriol ...
Has Big Ag funding corrupted Canadian chemical and pesticide safety research?
A Fellow of the Academy of Toxicological Sciences, [Len] Ritter is one of Canada’s leading experts on the effects of ...
How Cargill flubbed its non-GMO labeling partnership, angering farmers and consumers
As soon as Cargill announced that an outside group had certified more than a dozen of its ingredients as non-GMO, ...
Conventional (GMOs) vs organic farming: Which is better for animals and the environment?
[Editor's note: Iida Ruishalme is a writer and a science communicator from Sweden who holds a M.Sc. in Biology.] I ...
Hobbyist beekeeping practices and rejection of chemical treatments major driver of bee-killing Varroa mites and disease
Hobby beekeeping is very common. A European Bee Health Report found that in many countries, the majority of beekeepers pursue the activity ...
Tomatoes resistant to fungus and blight developed by 94-year-old West Virginia scientist
Mannon Gallegly, West Virginia University professor emeritus of plant pathology, has made it his mission to develop a disease-free tomato ...
EU Food Safety Authority: Risk from pesticide residue on foods low, unlikely to pose health risk
[Editor's note: The following is from the EFSA's 2015 European Union report on pesticide residues in food, published April 11, ...
Hawaii documentary claims presence of Big Ag GMO test facilities forces islands to import food
Did you know that the state of Hawaii imports between 80 and 90 percent of its food? This is, among ...
