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.
Why grow GMOs? Over 23 years, biotech crops boosted farm income $225 billion, cut pesticide use and slashed carbon emissions
Farmers who grow biotech crops have earned an additional $225 billion and greatly reduced agriculture's contribution to climate change, according ...
Pesticide fears spark winegrower interest in CRISPR-edited, disease-resistant grapes
According to a study conducted in 2011 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, wine grapes were first domesticated around 8000 ...
Colombia aims to restart aerial glyphosate spraying of coca crops under pressure from US
Alhough coca crop size fell 9% in 2019 to the lowest level in six years, the capacity to produce cocaine ...
African women are leading biotechnology advance across the continent
Women researchers are strongly influencing the adoption of agricultural biotechnology in Africa. “As African women, we are the ones who ...
CRISPR could cut development time for high-yielding seeds by 5-10 years
Crop hybrid technologies have contributed to the significant yield improvement worldwide in the past decades. However, designing and maintaining a ...
Biotechnology gives plant breeders a leg up in ‘evolutionary arms race’ against crop diseases
While crop pests and diseases can be spread by environmental factors, such as the wind, they also move into new ...
‘Eat them, poison them, drive them to cannibalism’: Kenyan scientists explore creative solutions to East Africa locust swarms
Eat them, poison them, and use scent to drive them to cannibalism - as a second wave of locusts threatens ...
Uganda proposes ‘stop-gap’ rules to block GMO crops that could be brought illegally across Kenyan border
The National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), plans to draft regulations that will guide the environmental release of Genetically Modified Organisms ...
India floats glyphosate weedkiller restrictions to curb demand for illegal herbicide-tolerant cotton
The agriculture ministry, in a draft notification, has restricted the use of glyphosate only through Pest Control Operators (PCOs). “No ...
USDA proposes measures to crack down on fraud in organic farming
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) proposes amending the USDA organic regulations to strengthen oversight ...
Despite Europe’s strict GMO rules, biotechnology can still help farmers feed the continent
The EU has recently laid out a series of targets to dramatically reduce the amounts of chemicals used in European ...
Animal-free ice cream maker Perfect Day eyes launch of lab-made milk and mozzarella cheese
As many investments, new products and R&D have been slowed down in recent months, Perfect Day is continuing to grow ...
Antioxidant-rich corn could mitigate symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease, study finds
Flavonoids from a specific line of corn act as anti-inflammatory agents in the guts of mice with an inflammatory-bowel-disease-like condition, ...
Farming a ‘climate villain’? IPCC may have inflated greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that agriculture is one of the main sources of greenhouse gases, ...
Ghanaian chief calls for commercialization of GMOs
A Ghanaian chief, Nana Adjie Panin II, has called for the country’s commercialization of genetically modified (GM) seeds. Genetically modified ...
Food crops engineered to behave like drought-tolerant succulents may better adapt to climate change
“Water-storing tissue is one of the most successful adaptations in plants that enables them to survive long periods of drought ...
US GMO crop cultivation accelerates as farmers gain access to more biotech seeds
[Editor's note: GMO crops were widely adopted by US farmers after their initial approval in 1996. According to a new ...
Natural pesticide claimed as replacement for antibiotics as treatment for citrus greening disease decimating US citrus industry
The new treatment effectively kills the bacterium causing the disease with a naturally occurring molecule found in wild citrus relatives ...
Deal to limit future glyphosate suits against Bayer collapsing, but $10.9 billion settlement likely to hold
The plan concocted by Monsanto owner Bayer AG and a small group of lawyers was filed [in June] in U.S ...
European Food Safety Authority rebuffs activist criticism of its safety assessment of insect and herbicide resistant GMO crops
The Risk “Assessment of genetically engineered organisms in the EU and Switzerland” (RAGES) project (2016‐2019) evaluated the risk assessment of ...
Will the Bayer glyphosate settlement fall apart? Judge says he may reject $10.9 billion Monsanto Roundup agreement, saying future plaintiffs might be hurt
[In June] Bayer agreed to pay as much as $10.9 billion to settle close to 100,000 U.S. lawsuits [alleging its ...
Pandemic likely to lead to a global shortage of protein-rich foods with African and Asia hardest hit
A global shortage of protein-rich foods is expected this year due to COVID-19 and other factors, says a new report ...
Could success of Europe’s only cultivated GMO crop help ease public fear of biotechnology?
Within the spirit of breaking the taboo around [GMOs], we had decided to start working on a manuscript a few ...
Beyond GM crops: Climate-friendly sheep and biofactory goats expand horizons of genetic engineering
If GMO plants now occupy 11% of cultivated areas in the world, only one genetically modified animal is currently authorized ...
A precautionary tale of COVID and GMO pseudoscience
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, it’s sparked numerous conspiracy theories that are often spread by extreme right and “alternative” medicine ...
GMO insect-resistant Bt prevents cancer and saves farmers up to $167 million per year, study shows
Previous field studies have reached no collective consensus on whether Bt corn, the most commonly planted transgenic crop worldwide, has ...
After Bayer settles glyphosate-cancer suits, Australian farmers pledge to defend the herbicide
In spite of the fact Bayer made no admission of guilt when settling with plaintiffs that alleged its glyphosate-based herbicides ...
