Daily Food & Ag 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.
‘In the Weeds’: Answering the question—Do biotech crops increase pesticide use?
At CSPI, we set out to answer the question of whether GE crops increase the use of pesticides, and dove ...
GE probiotic? CRISPR-edited yeast produce vitamin A precursor beta-carotene
Researchers have genetically engineered a probiotic yeast to produce beta-carotene in the guts of laboratory mice. The advance demonstrates the ...
Chemicals can no longer easily defeat weeds and insects. These genetic solutions might help farmers control voracious pests
’Resistance is leading to this problem where the control measures that we have relied on for decades are no longer ...
Brazil approves environmentally ‘Friendly’ GM tool for controlling fall armyworm
Brazilian farmers are a step closer to using an environmentally friendly tool to control a destructive agricultural pest with the ...
Viewpoint: GMO misinformation—How ‘pseudoscience and romanticization of premodern agriculture’ undermine food sustainability
There are legitimate grievances to be made about modern industrial agriculture, but the use of modern biotechnology for the development ...
DNA of lettuce: How humans bred a weed into a favorite leafy vegetable over 6,000 years
Try to imagine a collection of 2500 different types of lettuce: approximately 1500 varieties that were ever grown by farmers ...
US intelligence report predicts greater global role for biotechnology
Biotechnology could potentially account for about 20 percent of the global economy by 2040, with agricultural and manufacturing uses the ...
Bangladesh developing new generation of genetically engineered disease-resistant Bt eggplant to fight plant diseases, dramatically cutting insecticide use
Starting with only 20 farmers in 2014, the technology of Bt brinjal – a crop developed to drastically lower hazardous ...
Scientific conundrum solved? Dairy-free cheese that mimics the real thing in development
“Coming at it from a scientific perspective, you can't help but realise that there's no magic in cows or in ...
Claiming pollinator declines are linked to pesticides, Walmart announces new policy encouraging produce suppliers to stop using chlorpyrifos and neonicotinoids on crops
Pollinators include butterflies and moths, birds, bats, beetles and many more, and without them some of our favorite foods wouldn’t ...
Market for CRISPR-edited crops will be limited by hazy global regulatory environment and societal ambivalence
New breeding techniques pioneered by genome editing have gained substantial traction within the last decade, revolutionizing the plant breeding field ...
Viewpoint: Why is National Geographic embracing simplistic activist narratives on nuanced pesticide controversies?
For more than a century, National Geographic has produced a high-quality magazine that is well-grounded in science, history and culture ...
Video: 7 years of agricultural productivity has been lost to climate change. Global warming is already slowing us down
The future potential impacts of climate change on global crop production has been quantified in many scientific reports, but the ...
Overwhelming majority of Europeans support compulsory labeling of GM-derived food, claims study commissioned by EU Green group
[A] report, commissioned by the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament and carried out by the polling organisation Ipsos, surveyed ...
What will it take for consumers to embrace lab-grown meat?
Always a wealth of information when it comes to this subject, [Eat Just CEO Josh] Tetrick explains what exactly it ...
Video: Vaccines are rescuing the world from COVID. Could they also protect food crops from deadly plant diseases and pandemics?
Preventing plant-disease outbreaks is an urgent matter — as urgent as having a rapid response strategy for human viruses. The ...
Global warming causing eucalyptus trees, used for lumber, to invade native ecosystems. CRISPR gene editing could prevent that
Oregon State University’s Steve Strauss led an international collaboration that showed [a] CRISPR Cas9 gene editing technique could be used ...
Do pesticide residues on crops pose a hazard? Latest EU Food Safety Authority report says no
The latest report on pesticide residues in food in the European Union is now available, giving a snapshot of residue ...
Genetics and a second Green Revolution: Gene editing essential to address increasing crop losses as warming temperatures cause a surge in insect populations
For millennia, insects and the plants they feed on have been engaged in a co-evolutionary battle: to eat or not ...
China develops GM corn variety to combat yield-cutting fall armyworm
Food security is a major policy issue in China. To strengthen the nation's seed industry, the country has approved a ...
Facing EPA skepticism and a slew of suits targeting Xtend cropping system, Corteva ends development of their dicamba-choline weedkiller
[Corteva Agriscience] opted to end the EPA registration process underway for a novel dicamba herbicide containing a dicamba choline salt ...
Advocacy groups and biotechnology opponents urge FDA to strictly regulate genetically engineered animals
In January, the Trump administration proposed that the FDA, USDA and the U.S. Health and Human Services Department sign a ...
Viewpoint: Spend $83,000 on organic food to prevent cancer? Here’s why you should save your money
The alternative health advocates at Natural News recommend you spend an additional $83,000 on organic food to avoid cancer and ...
Biodegradable plastic from plants: How GE camelina could advance industrial sustainability
Skeptics beware, the proposition around growing a genuinely natural biodegradable plastic may be tied to a technology whose time has ...
‘Let the government arrest us’: India’s farmers will plant more illegal glyphosate-tolerant cotton to protest GM crop restrictions
It is illegal to grow [herbicide-tolerant Bt (HTBt)] cotton in India since the Government has not cleared it for commercial ...
Five reasons to be optimistic about the future of genome editing
Though the past year delivered social, economic, health and personal difficulties that challenged people across the globe, science strutted its ...
New piece of the climate change puzzle: Gene identified that could help plants cope with hotter temperatures
Warmer temperatures signal to plants that summer is coming. Anticipating less water, they flower early then lack the energy to ...
