Daily Food & Agriculture Digest
Every day, the staff of the Genetic Literacy Project scours the Web for stories on a range of agricultural and food issues, including the GMO debate, conventional and organic farming, regulations, new breeding technologies and sustainability. We publish excerpts of those stories and encourage our readers to visit the original publications for the complete stories.
Here’s how CRISPR is evolving into a tool to protect small African farmers
A research team has used genome editing to produce a rice variety resistant to yellow mottle virus, which is responsible for high ...
Viewpoint: ‘Drought-sensitive crops keep Kenya on the precipice of famine’ — Why anti-GMO court challenges stall biotech solutions to Kenya’s food security
Dr Chris Ojiewo of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) says Kenya is on the path of a ...
Viewpoint: Proposed Arizona lab-grown meat ban protects cattle ranch interests and holds back needed food innovation
House Bill 2121 has been introduced in the Arizona legislature and would ban the sale or production of cultivated meat ...
Ugly, browning bananas could become a fruit of the past as gene-editing tweak reduces spoilage
Bananas turning brown is a natural process that occurs over time as the fruit overripens and produces too much ethylene ...
Methane gas from cow burps and other sources accelerates global warming. Here’s a genetic tweaking technique that could transform it into organic fertilizer
A Bay Area biotech firm is working on a clever strategy to capture a worrisome greenhouse gas, and in the ...
Nearly half the Earth’s land mass is devoted to growing crops, with no large arable areas still uncultivated. With demand for food expected to skyrocket by 2050, what are our options?
By 2050, the global population is projected to total 9.7 billion people. That’s nearly 2 billion more folks on the ...
How Russia is weaponizing food and fertilizer
Europe is more food dependent on Moscow now than we were before the war, with the bloc replacing energy dependency ...
Viewpoint: Will ‘irrational fears of mutations and a naive understanding of nature’ derail Europe’s effort to reform 20+ years of misguided crop biotech regulations?
The European Commission has now published a proposal on how, in the future, to regulate crops produced by new breeding ...
Growing food without dirt? Electric ‘e-soil’ reduces fertilizer usage, boosts barley crop growth by 50%
Growing crops without soil may sound like a contradiction, but for the research team "Eplants" (Electronic Plants) at Linköping University, ...
‘If a viable herbicide was discovered this year, farmers couldn’t use it until at least 2035’: Why new weedkillers take so long to hit store shelves
Some often wonder why there have not been any new herbicide modes of action [or MOAs] registered in the past ...
Biodegradable plastic made of milk byproducts tackles plastic pollution and food waste all at once
As the issue of plastic pollution continues to escalate in the United States, a scientist from the Agricultural Research Service ...
European organic farming pioneer on why agricultural sustainability supporters need to drop their opposition to gene edited crops
For years, as director of the Swiss Research Institute for Organic Agriculture (FiBL), Urs Niggli fought against the genetic modification ...
50%+ yield boost: Nigeria commercializes four varieties of insect-resistant, drought-tolerant corn
Nigeria’s government is taking the bull by the horns and exploring various ways by which the nation can put an ...
Far-right election successes across the EU may disrupt European Commission’s goals to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050
The growing electoral success of nationalist parties across the [European] continent risks undermining pro-environment forces in the next European Parliament ...
Viewpoint: Is California violating the free speech right of farmers in demanding a safety warning label on glyphosate? The liberal federal Ninth Circuit court rebukes the state for labeling the weedkiller a ‘dangerous chemical’
California’s Proposition 65 has become a poster child for ineffective and counterproductive over-warning. You know what we are talking about. ...
Carbon tradeoff: Which is better for the environment — grain-fed or pasture-raised beef?
Beef production accounts for the largest share of global livestock greenhouse gas emissions and is an important target for climate ...
American Pediatric Society lambasted by scientists, researchers, GLP’s Jon Entine for promoting scientifically-baseless claim that food grown from genetically modified seeds pose unique dangers to children
Immunologist and microbiologist Andrea Love, Ph.D., recently received a flood of messages from concerned parents and pediatricians. They were all ...
Modernizing ancient techniques: How harnessing microbes could make alternative proteins more palatable
There’s a growing category of foods using an age-old technique that experts say could be a dark horse in the ...
Viewpoint: ‘I’m talking about you Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth’ — Nobel Laureate Sr Richard Roberts urges Thailand to reject anti-biotechnology advocacy group fearmongering
Speaking in an exclusive interview to The Nation, Dr Sir Richard J Roberts, Nobel Prize winner for medicine in 1993, ...
Just 27% of Americans think genetically modified foods are safe to eat. It’s time to set the record straight
Thirty years after tomatoes became the first genetically modified produce sold in the U.S., lots of people remain skeptical of science-ified ...
Pondering the future of fruit in a climate-challenged world: Can we grow fruit without trees?
Plant Cell Culture technology utilizes the ability of a single plant cell to produce multiple cells. In the lab, we ...
Is Bill Gates a global agriculture puppet master? Indian fact-checking site unmasks anti-biotechnology ‘environmentalists’ as source for fake claims
No, the statement that Bill Gates instructed world governments to replace real food with genetically modified alternatives to combat global ...
Viewpoint: Fake meat doesn’t taste anything like the real thing. Pilot project putting pig genes in soybeans hopes to change the status quo
Paladini is the CEO of Moolec Science, a molecular farming firm that uses crops to grow animal proteins. The idea is ...
How genetics can revolutionize 100-year old strategies failing to protect honeybees
Beekeepers lose between 30% and 40% of their colonies annually, mostly to parasites and pathogens. Losses during one bad year ...
Glyphosate disinformation: French activists use fake ‘glyphosate detection tests’ in campaign to turn public against safe weedkiller
Opponents needed a tool that would strike public opinion. Monica Kruger, an activist and director of the private veterinary testing ...
How zapping roots with electricity can supercharge plant growth
Barley seedlings grow on average 50% more when their root system is stimulated electrically through a new cultivation substrate. In ...
Sucralose, aspartame, stevia: With the use of sugar substitutes continuing to rise, questions mount about their impact on diets
Many people are cutting back on their sugar intake for health reasons. But the food industry has found another way ...
