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.
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Decoding wheat genome enhances production in the face of severe climate disruptions
Editor's note: Wheat rust and spot blotch are two fungal diseases that cause a devastating amount of crop damage around ...
How conflicts of interest, NGO activism undermine European bee health oversight
The EU recently banned three neonicotinoids to protect honeybees. But a closer look shows the decision was influenced by an ...
Will Trump cut funding of UN agency accused of ‘shoddy science’ for designating glyphosate probable carcinogen?
Editor's note: This article discusses the International Agency (IARC) for Research on Cancer, a sub-group of the World Health Organization ...
#GlyphosateIsVital: British farmers take to social media to defend herbicide’s environmental benefits
The Twitter campaign under the hashtag #glyphosateisvital has been backed by a number of British farmers, who have posted tweets ...
Can microbes be turned into tiny chemical factories?
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are all the rage today in venture capital circles...What happens when machine learning meets biology? ...
How Israeli software improves crop yields through genetic analysis
NRGene is working with Syngenta Ag and Monsanto Co. to detect plant traits that can produce higher-yielding crops, and with ...
Insect resistant Bt corn losing effectiveness against earworm, study finds
Editor's Note: This article discusses a research paper called "Field-Evolved Resistance in Corn Earworm to Cry Proteins Expressed by Transgenic ...
Trump claims credit for Bayer, Monsanto keeping jobs, biotech research in US
President-elect Donald Trump met with the chief executives of German chemical giant Bayer and agriculture company Monsanto [during the week of January 10] and discussed ...
USDA will not regulate Scotts’ and Monsanto’s glyphosate-resistant GMO grass
APHIS [Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service] received a petition from the Scotts Company of Marysville, OH, and Monsanto Company ...
Organic yields lag conventional by 20% in developed countries, 43% in Africa, meta-analyses find
In most regions of the world, row-crop farming is primarily conducted in [large] fields, but knowledge of processes and management ...
Canadian farmer: Genetically engineered crops lower prices, increase sustainability
Editor's Note: The author of this article, Bob Bartley, is a Canadian farmer who grows genetically modified corn, canola, and ...
Does Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” list discourage Americans from eating fresh produce?
Editor's note: This article examines the potential influence of the Environmental Working Group's annual Dirty Dozen list of foods with the ...
How do you know what information to trust about glyphosate, GMOs? Do a ‘SMELL test’
Editor's Note: This article, written by Country Guide agriculture columnist Gerald Pilger, discusses how to determine whether an article is ...
Glyphosate found in urine poses no health risk in German study
... Glyphosate sales in Germany have increased substantially from ... 2000 to … 2014. The interim peak of approx. 7600 ...
EFSA head: Debate over banning glyphosate not about science, herbicide’s safety
Editor's Note: This article discusses comments made by Bernard Url, the head of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) surrounding ...
Will DuPont-Dow merger raise global food prices?
The gigantic Dow Chemical-DuPont merger is experiencing some serious antitrust pushback in Europe and some Washington insiders feel it could ...
Vietnamese farmers to increase planting, imports of genetically modified corn
… Le Ba Lich, chairman of the Vietnam Animal Feed Association, told VnExpress that Vietnam has imported four million tons ...
Environmental, economic costs of EU neonicotinoid ban ‘devastating’, according to study
[A] potential ban or suspension of NNi [neonicotinoid seed treatment] technology would have tremendous economic implications.... To take few examples: over ...
Sustainability activists fear agrochemical, seed company monopolies will damage food security
... In the global agriculture sector, there have long been seven international manufacturers of pesticides and seeds, the report says ...
Farming practices, not glyphosate, primary driver of weed resistance
Editor's Note: This article features a talk given by Peter Sikkema, researcher at the University of Guelph's Ridgetown Campus on ...
Myth busting: Is agricultural pesticide use in the US, and its impact, going down or up?
Anti-GMO groups have shifted their focus from demonizing GMO crops directly to criticizing chemical usage, particularly the herbicide glyphosate, for ...
Unintended consequences? Genetic engineering innovation stifled by Toxic Substances Control Act
[L]ast summer Congress issued reforms to the Toxic Substances Control Act, a 30 year old law governing how the EPA ...
Big Ag megamerger? Trump meets with Bayer, Monsanto CEOs
Top executives of Bayer AG and Monsanto Co. met with President-elect Donald Trump Wednesday in New York to pitch the ...
Computer scientist Stephanie Seneff proposes questionable theory linking glyphosate to autism
[Editor's note: Stephanie Seneff, co-author of this paper, is a controversial MIT computer scientist and anti-GMO critic who has advanced ...
USDA to certify farmland switching from conventional to help increase production of organic food
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on [Jan. 11] took a step toward increasing the production of organic foods — which has not ...
Rusty-patched bumble bee listed as endangered, neonic pesticides pose ‘particular threat’, says USFWS
The rusty patched bumble bee ... was listed on [Jan. 10] as an endangered species, becoming the first wild bee in the ...
New RNAi spray formulation protects plants from viral infection for 20 days
...[A] team at the University of Queensland in Australia has managed to achieve long-lasting gene silencing inside plant cells. They ...
