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.
Viewpoint: Anti-biotech farmers and green politicians decry EU relaxation of genetic engineering rules — ‘Specter of patentable supercrops from corporate giants looms over Europe’
The specter of patentable supercrops is looming over Europe's agricultural landscape, raising concerns about a handful of corporate giants dominating ...
How do people uniquely respond to different diets? 500 Americans will be living at scientific facilities for six weeks to find out
Kevin Elizabeth, a 28-year-old tech worker, is one of 500 Americans who will be living at scientific facilities around the ...
Viewpoint: ‘Pumping toxic chemicals onto breakfast tables’ — Nigerian activists claim GMOs are part of Western effort to depopulate African continent
Agriculture stakeholders have warned against the dangers of proliferation of Genetically Modified (GMO) crops in the country ...
Insect-based food is climate-friendly and packed with protein — but consumer resistance remains strong
Insect proteins have many advantages, from an environmental perspective, over cattle. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), insect farming requires ...
Case study: How foreign-activist-imposed ‘organic obsession’ undermined Sri Lanka’s food security in less than one year
The recent scenario of the food security collapse in Sri Lanka provides a poignant reminder of the importance of this ...
Disease-free pigs: CRISPR gene-edited animals in development resist virus that has decimated pork farms for decades
CRISPR-based genome editing has already been successfully applied to sickle cell disease and additional companies are working on developing their ...
Supermarkets vs farmer’s markets: Which is more climate friendly?
Urban farmers markets epitomize an environmentally-conscious lifestyle—home-grown vegetables, paper bags, the occasional beetle in your organic raspberries. Surely nothing could be ...
Video: Devastating Witches’ Broom disease is wiping out cassava crops across South Asia. Here’s how CRISPR nanotechnology could help contain the spread
In Southeast Asia, most smallholder farmers rely on cassava: its starch-rich roots form the basis of an industry that supports ...
Viewpoint: Why is Bayer paying billions of dollars in negligence lawsuits over Roundup weedkiller when consensus science shows no links to cancer and the EPA does not require warning labels?
In total, Bayer has paid more than $10 billion in settlements to those claiming that Roundup causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. There’s just one ...
Viewpoint: Feeding your child 2,000 nectarines or 340 apples in one day? Environmental Working Group claims about the dangers of conventionally-grown produce are scientifically absurd
The advocacy organization American Council on Science and Health, or ACSH has written extensively about the safety of conventionally grown ...
Preservatives and probiotics: Do additives in meat and cheese harm gut bacteria?
Nisin, a lantibiotic, is a preservative used in the production of foods including packaged meat such as sausages and dairy ...
Combining cutting-edge and low-tech innovation: Tanzania leverages AI to speed up development of climate-proof bean varieties
[At Tanzania Agriculture Research Institute,] TARI partner the Alliance of Bioversity International and [International Center for Tropical Agriculture] CIAT’s trial ...
Viewpoint: African nations leverage gene editing to break Europe’s anti-technology stranglehold on food production across the continent
On the African continent, a dozen genetic-editing projects are being put at the forefront of agriculture. However, for the past 20 ...
Genetic diversity squeeze: Camembert is on the verge of extinction. Here’s what can be done to rescue ‘endangered cheeses’
Each hunk of Camembert or smear of brie is an ecosystem, an assortment of fungi and bacteria that turn milk ...
Australia is first country to approve genetically engineered banana, modified to resist disease
Queensland researchers have just received news over 20 years in the making – their genetically modified banana species called QCAV-4 has ...
Viewpoint: ‘Science is evolving, and times have changed’ — Foodie France slowly opening doors to ecology-promoting gene-edited crops
Science is evolving, and times have changed. “Life is constantly mutating. Every year there are 240 million mutations in a ...
Climate-smart agriculture: Here are the barriers keeping South Asian farmers from adopting next generation farming techniques
A researcher originally from Bangladesh has been looking at farms in South Asia to determine why agricultural practices aimed at ...
‘Peach tree grown’ hamburgers? Marjorie Taylor Greene’s incoherent fulminations targeting cell-based meat highlight ignorance of right-wing science rejectionism
For some reason, a lot of conservatives have a knee-jerk negative reaction to lab-created meat. I checked the writings of ...
Latin America: A biotech laboratory and world champion in GMOs and gene editing
Since the commercial release of GMOs began in the mid-1990s, Latin America has been a key region in the industry ...
Want to sample lab-grown meat? Too late — experimental tastings at premier restaurants around the world are on pause. Here’s why, and what the future holds
July 2023 was a landmark moment for the cultivated meat industry. For the first time, meat brewed directly from chicken ...
Concord grape colored tomato with antioxidant-packed flesh? It contains a key secret: Snapdragon DNA
As home gardeners in the U.S. page through seed catalogs and pick out their favorite heirlooms, there's a new seed ...
Viewpoint: New low for anti-GMO activists — Nigerian environmental groups claim modifying crops causes sterilization
A few weeks ago, the chairman of the Global Prolife Alliance (GPA), Dr Philip C. Njemanze, sent a petition to ...
Kosher animals? Here’s why not all cellular-based meat will pass muster with Jewish law
From the perspective of Jewish law, lab-grown meat poses several novel questions, most obviously if it’s kosher. The short answer ...
Viewpoint: Are we in the midst of a ‘beepocalypse’ or besieged by ‘false bee alarmism”?
“Bee populations in the United States are declining at a rapid, unprecedented rate,” Ohio State University first reported in 2020. Phys.org added last ...
Urban farming sounds great in theory — but releases more CO2 than conventional agriculture. Here’s what needs to change
A new study in Nature Cities compared carbon emissions from small farms and gardens in major cities across the U.S. and Europe with ...
Bioluminescent petunias: Light-up mushroom genes are secret ingredient in green glowing genetically modified plants — and they are now on sale
Consumers in the United States can now pre-order a genetically engineered plant for their home or garden that glows continuously. At a ...
Arizona joins slate of states pushing cell-based meat bans
Arizona, along with Florida and Texas, is the next state to propose stringent laws like censorship and bans for cultivated ...
