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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Viewpoint: When politics and emotion dictate pesticide safety rules, farmers lose
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Viewpoint: Farm to Fork failure—How Europe’s ‘obsession’ with organics undermines the global sustainable farming movement
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Viewpoint: Synthetic pesticides are the solution to East Africa’s famine-causing locust swarms
For months, billions of these pests have migrated from remote deserts into populated regions of East Africa and into Asia, ...
Neonicotinoid insecticide ban, drought could cut French sugar beet yields 30-50 percent, USDA finds
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Viewpoint: Germany’s pesticide use drops for 8th straight year, but anti-GMO groups say that’s not good enough
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EU blocks Austria’s planned glyphosate ban, rejecting claim that weedkiller harms human health
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Viewpoint: ‘Bird apocalypse’? Study wrongly blames neonicotinoid pesticides for declining bird biodiversity
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Federal court upholds dicamba weedkiller ban, opening door to possible Supreme Court challenge
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Viewpoint: Europe can’t produce enough food if it cuts use of farm chemicals but opposes gene editing
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Following ‘ministerial spat’ over glyphosate, Mexico will phase out weedkiller by end of 2024
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Viewpoint: GMOs a ‘corporate plot’ to control the food supply, and 9 other biotech myths, debunked
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Viewpoint: Europe must abandon ‘fear of progress’ to defeat anti-science chemophobia
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Did Monsanto wrongly sue this farmer for accidentally growing patented GMO canola?
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France poised to lift neonicotinoid insecticide ban to save pest-ravaged sugar beet industry
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Next Green Revolution: Gene-silencing technology opens door to safer pesticides, more GMO crops
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French winegrowers challenge proposed ‘unfair, unenforceable’ glyphosate weedkiller restrictions
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Democratic lawmakers propose ban on organophosphate and neonicotinoid insecticides
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Podcast: Global population crash; Pesticide bans backfire; beef producing CRISPR male cows
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Aristolochic acids: Natural insecticides found in medicinal plants cause of mysterious kidney disease?
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EPA proposes herbicide tiafenacil as ‘low-risk’ alternative to control glyphosate-tolerant weeds
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GMO herbicide-tolerant canola poses no hazard to human health, EU food safety officials find
Following the submission of application EFSA‐GMO‐RX‐002 .... from Monsanto Company, the Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms of EFSA (GMO) was ...
Facing decimated yields, French sugar-beet growers demand access to banned neonicotinoid insecticides
Since April, the beet yellows virus has destroyed a large part of France's sugar beet harvest, including nearly 50% of ...
China could crack down on fall armyworm pest invasion with GMO insect-resistant Bt corn
Due to its wide host range, high reproductive and dispersal capacity, the fall armyworm (FAW), Spodoptera frugiperda (J.E. Smith), which ...
Bayer appeals $265 million dicamba weedkiller verdict, alleging damage to Missouri peach farm exaggerated
Bayer AG sent a private investigator [in July] to evaluate the business of a U.S. peach grower who won a ...
