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.
Grapevines that spent a year in space may help researchers breed crops better suited for climate change
Researchers in France are studying a dozen bottles of French wine and hundreds of snippets of grapevines that returned to ...
Nigerian farmers welcome new cassava varieties: ‘My joy knows no bounds’
Nigerian farmers are enthusiastic about the government’s approval of five new varieties of NextGen cassava that promise to double yields ...
Viewpoint: COVID-19 vaccine success should prompt us to rethink our fear of GMO ‘Frankenfoods’
[COVID vaccines are] one of the biggest, and certainly the most high-profile, utilizations of genetic technology in the history of ...
Viewpoint: ‘Science-based trade’ — Why the US should dispute Mexico’s glyphosate, GM corn bans at the WTO
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, issued a decree that has U.S. agriculture worried. The decree bans glyphosate, a herbicide, ...
Food of the future: Will plant-based and lab-grown proteins become household staples?
Plant-based meats are now a fixture at fast-food restaurants around the world, and plant-based milk is a household staple. Alternatives ...
UK sugar beet farmers could be growing gene-edited, disease-resistant crops within 5 years
[British Sugar] is investigating gene-edited beet seed as a long-term solution to [virus yellows] disease, which devastated crops across eastern ...
Following glyphosate ban, Belgian gardeners find ‘eco-friendly’ weedkillers mostly ineffective
The majority of weed-killing products on the market today were rated “weak” or “bad,” according to results from the Belgian ...
‘Peak meat’ 2025? As plant-based proteins grow more popular, beef consumption will drop, study predicts
An increasing number of people are eating meat and dairy alternatives as concern grows over health, the environmental impact of ...
Natural GMO: Whiteflies stole a gene from plants millions of years ago that can protect them from pesticides
Pale, squishy, and smaller than a sesame seed, these sap-sucking bugs terrorize more than 600 plant species, infecting them with ...
Viewpoint: Animal agriculture offers potentially ‘game-changing solutions’ to climate change
Cows are often assigned disproportionate climate change blame, but recent weeks in Washington bring hope that political leaders may begin ...
CRISPR ‘super corn’ with more kernels could reduce land, fertilizer and water use
Thanks to selective breeding over the course of some 9,000 years, humans were able to transform an ancient wild grass ...
Could lab-grown wood halt deforestation around the world?
[P]lant cells that have similar properties on mass to wood can be used to create materials that could be used ...
Thanks to gene editing, another biotech-driven farming revolution might be ‘just around the corner’
The basic principle of crop breeding is to first discover and then select for variants with desired traits. While selection ...
Mexico’s proposal to phase out glyphosate, GM corn spurs ‘across-the-board’ farmer opposition, USDA says
On December 31, 2020, Mexico published a decree which announced a revocation of existing permits for genetically engineered (GE) corn, ...
Lab-grown tuna could satisfy growing demand for fish without the severe environmental impact
From 1961 to 2015, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, global fish consumption grew from 9kg to 20.2kg ...
‘No shortage of dangers’ and no easy answers for the monarch butterfly
North America’s monarch butterfly population is in trouble. That much has been clear for decades but scientists have found that ...
Viewpoint: USDA, FDA should abandon ‘tangled’ gene-edited animal rules and collaborate to commercialize more products
The science says and continues to say that foods made from genetically modified crops are safe for consumption, they can ...
Bowing to political pressure, India scraps plans to trial GM, insect-resistant, Bt eggplant
[The Indian government] has junked its decision of allowing scientific field trials of transgenic crops including indigenously developed Bt brinjal. ...
Bolivia will repeal rules expediting GM crop approvals, inciting pushback from farmers who want access to new technologies
It's official. The [Bolivian] Central Government will seek to annul the supreme decrees that paved the way for the use ...
Biden Administration backs aerial glyphosate spraying to combat Colombia’s cocaine trade, drawing criticism from some drug policy experts
Biden’s administration celebrated Colombia’s decision to restart aerial eradication of coca in its annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. Colombian ...
‘Stop conflating all biotechnology with genetic engineering’: The case for more refined USDA regulations
Policymakers had known for years that the U.S. regulation of crop biotechnology was out of date, and by 2016, discussions ...
Poverty and hunger follow Africa’s fall armyworm invasion
Africa’s fall armyworm invasion has contributed to poverty and hunger among smallholder farmers, a pioneering study shows. Severe levels of ...
Viewpoint: Public investment in farming technology could cut land use by 63 thousand square miles—’about the size of Iowa’
Using existing research on the relationship between R&D and productivity and SIMPLE, a global economic model of agriculture, we find ...
First lab-grown chicken nuggets just hit restaurants in Singapore, and more ‘slaughter-free’ meats could arrive in 2021
The company behind [an in vitro cultured] poultry product, Eat Just, has since sold more than 200 servings of the ...
Here’s how GM canola-derived fish feed could make aquaculture more sustainable
Fish feed ingredient Aquaterra, derived from genetically modified canola, has been certified for sustainable aquafeed production by Friend of the ...
Bayer won’t appeal first glyphosate-cancer verdict to the U.S. Supreme Court
Bayer will not appeal a $20.5 million Roundup verdict—the first Roundup verdict in the nation—to the U.S. Supreme Court, the ...
CRISPR offers hope for controlling African swine fever
New vaccine trials hold great promise in the management of an East African strain of African swine fever (ASF), one ...
