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.
How tech-driven, ‘eco-rational’ environmentalism can help solve the world’s problems
Few of us are committed to having an evidence-based worldview — it’s truly hard to do. We have to remain ...
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, ...
Seafood of the future: Could lab-grown fish replace its wild and farmed relatives?
Do we need animals to make meat? What if we could grow cells outside the body of an animal to ...
Neonicotinoid insecticide ban, drought could cut French sugar beet yields 30-50 percent, USDA finds
France is the largest producer of sugar beets in Europe growing just over 30 percent of EU27+UK's production in ...
Democratic strategists urge Joe Biden to take on Monsanto to win rural support
The Biden campaign wants to undercut President Donald Trump’s sweeping victory across rural America in 2016 by making its case ...
Zinc-fortified crops may fight diabetes, cardiovascular disease in poor countries better than supplements
The double burden of malnutrition is a rapidly growing global health problem. Many populations now face the combination of undernutrition ...
Cuba expects massive crop yield increase with GMO insect-resistant, herbicide-tolerant corn
In the midst of a deep food crisis and a shortage of supplies in the country, the Cuban regime opened ...
GMOs ‘pose no health risks,’ biotech experts say, but ‘bioengineered’ food labels coming anyway
Nearly 70 percent of processed foods at U.S. grocery stores contain at least one genetically engineered ingredient. Even though most scientists believe that genetically ...
Bt cotton in Africa: Role models and lessons learned
Africa’s cotton farmers are struggling to recoup their investments because they lack access to quality seeds that can increase yields ...
CRISPR crop development proceeds rapidly, but ‘bottlenecks’ limit promise
Since its discovery as a bacterial adaptive immune system and its development for genome editing in eukaryotes, the clustered regularly ...
‘Steadily increasing’ GMO acceptance in Europe fuels efforts to revise biotech restrictions
Since 1996 till 2018, the global area cultivated with GM crops has increased 113-fold, making biotech crops one of the ...
Viewpoint: Germany’s pesticide use drops for 8th straight year, but anti-GMO groups say that’s not good enough
German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture data show that use of crop protection products, e.g. pesticides, went down last ...
GMO crops don’t cause infertility, systematic evidence review finds
A systematic review of published literature was conducted to determine genetically modified (GM) plants' potential impacts in infertility indices. Based ...
Florida green lights release of malaria- and Zika-fighting GMO mosquitoes
Florida Keys officials have voted to allow the experimental release of millions of genetically modified mosquitoes into a yet-to-be-decided area ...
EU blocks Austria’s planned glyphosate ban, rejecting claim that weedkiller harms human health
The European Commission has blocked Austria from implementing a planned ban on the controversial weedkiller glyphosate, a document seen by ...
USDA invites public comment on petition to approve GMO chestnut tree
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is inviting public comment on a petition ...
Has ‘Big Tech’ replaced ‘Big Ag’ as America’s favorite corporate villain?
For years, large agricultural companies and farmers have felt the sting of public opinion. Seed and crop protection companies have ...
Video: GMO insect-resistant Bt corn vs conventional corn—which is more vulnerable to pest attacks?
They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. A video of my farm on social media has attracted more than ...
CRISPR-edited canola slated for 2021 field trials, moving crop closer to commercialization
Yield10 Bioscience....announced [August 17] that it has obtained a positive response from USDA-APHIS’s Biotechnology Regulatory Services (BRS) for its CRISPR ...
Viewpoint: ‘Bird apocalypse’? Study wrongly blames neonicotinoid pesticides for declining bird biodiversity
Though periodic deaths of bees continue to happen, and have been documented for as long as records of bees have ...
Indian scientists call out anti-GMO groups trying to block insect-resistant Bt eggplant safety field trials
Alliance for Agri Innovation (AAI), a special interest group of [the] Federation of Seed Industry of India (FSII) has urged ...
Federal court upholds dicamba weedkiller ban, opening door to possible Supreme Court challenge
On [August 17], three dicamba registrants lost one of their last remaining legal options to overturn a federal court's mandate ...
Vegan eggs, lab-grown beef jerky and 10 other alternative proteins we could be eating soon
[On August 11], Big Idea Ventures (BIV) announces the launch of its second food technology accelerator program in New York City ...
Viewpoint: Europe can’t produce enough food if it cuts use of farm chemicals but opposes gene editing
Europe is asking its farmers to use fewer pesticides and less fertilizer, while still producing the same amount of food ...
Sustainability report questions Beyond Meat’s environmental benefits, but is it a fair analysis?
Beyond Meat is lacking in environmental impact disclosures when compared to conventional meat giants Hormel and Tyson Foods, according to ...
Video: What are the risks and benefits of animal gene editing?
University of California – Davis’ Alison Van Eenennaam answers questions on genome editing. Van Eenennaam discusses her research on hornless ...
Top-10 myths about GMOs, pesticides and organic farming, according to biotechnology experts
Scientists who have conducted research on GM crops have attested to the safety of such crops and their contributions to ...
