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.
India’s political flip-flopping over new GM field trials paralyzes innovation
In August, India’s ruling nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stopped its legislators from accepting Monsanto sponsorship to attend a farm ...
Gates Foundation funds research for genetic tools in sweet potato breeding
North Carolina State University will receive $12.4 million over the next four years from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ...
Agent Orange redux? Dr. Oz called out for fear-mongering on newest GMO products
Dr. Oz, infamous for his promotion of alternative medicine remedies and organic foods, and for his scaring people about chemical ...
9 most asked questions about GMOs: University of Florida’s Kevin Folta answers
The Refinery 29 has collected the most asked questions about GMOs from their readers and asked University of Florida plant ...
Cannabis DNA mapping could lead to more consistent “highs”
Nine months ago, Mowgli Holmes, 42, started Phylos Bioscience in Southwest Portland with entrepreneur Nishan Karassik, 44, with the aim ...
Vandana Shiva entitled to her own opinions, not her own facts
A recent New Yorker article by Michael Specter does an excellent job of putting the activism of anti-GMO campaigner, Vandana Shiva, into ...
Activists, farmers link GMOs to use of neonic pesticide, claim bees endangered
Today, genetically engineered crops dominate agriculture, and two-thirds of the world’s cropland gets a regular dose of neonicotinoids, including 90 ...
Politics not science likely behind China’s halt of crop biotech trials
Chinese officialdom appears to be at an impasse on its approach to genetically modified foods. The GMO impasse may have ...
Technology-based agriculture in Africa could lower carbon pollution as farming expands
Hank Campbell, editor of Science 2.0, summarizes a new study that looks at land use and carbon footprint for agriculture in ...
Anti-GMO policies stifling response to Australia’s growing farm pest problem
South Australian Liberal Senator Sean Edwards says an outbreak of beet western yellow virus has “blindsided” croppers in his home State ...
Fundraising by opponents of GMO labels outpaces advocates in Oregon
So far the No on 92 campaign has raised more than $1 million, about $800,000 of which is still on ...
Aussie organic farmer who lost GMO ‘contamination’ case faces $800,000 in court costs
Organic farmer Steve Marsh and his wife Sue could be forced to pay almost $804,000 in court costs after suffering ...
Colorado GMO label law = $500 food tax
The Right to Know Colorado GMO proposition 105 mandates the labeling of GMO food products. Since consumers like to know ...
Swaziland embracing GM cotton
Minister of Tourism and Environmental Affairs Jabulani Mabuza has challenged local farmers to embrace genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and apply the ...
PBS video: Golden Rice faces challenges in Phillipines
Vitamin A deficiency is a deadly threat to kids and pregnant mothers in the Third World. In the Philippines, the ...
7 ways biotech crops fail in feeding the world
Many in the biotechnology industry seem to believe there’s a simple solution to the global food crisis: genetically modified (GM ...
Can ‘Big Data’ help sidestep the controversy over GMOs and the future of food
Inside a squat building on San Francisco’s 10th Street, packed into a space that looks a lot like a high ...
Anti-GMO critics dominate National Academy of Sciences crop biotech evaluation
The first two days of hearings on the latest round of scientific review for biotech crops and genetically engineered foods ...
Generation Y put off by anti-science, anti-GMO bent of green activists
What do we know about the so-called ‘Generation Y’? They are the ‘80s and ‘90s ‘Echo boomer’ children, the web ...
What happens when 100 billion animals, over 18 years, eat GMOs?
Visit almost any anti-GMO website and you will find alarming headlines about the alleged dangers of GMO foods. They kill ...
New weed fighting herbicide-tolerant GMO trait approved
The Agriculture Department has approved the commercial planting of corn and soybeans genetically engineered to survive being sprayed by the ...
Biotech could increase crop yields by improving photosynthesis
Two down, one to go. Researchers have completed the second of three major steps needed to turbocharge photosynthesis in crops ...
South African chain’s committment to reduce GMOs doesn’t impress activists
Woolworths has announced that it intends to cut back genetically modified or GMO products by 50 percent but food activists ...
Let farmers, not activists, decide fate of GM crops in India
Professor Dr. Shanthu Shantharam of the Iowa State University’s Seed Science Centre said that the decision on the usage of ...
Regulating research in Uganda does not mean stopping research
Regulation should be part of any human activity as it creates a safe boundary for operation. Regulation is part of ...
Can researchers make a biotech wheat that’s not a GMO?
>Researchers have discovered "the most famous wheat gene," a reproductive traffic cop of sorts that can be used to transfer ...
Biotech industry appeasing anti-GMO critics
Executives at the helm of every biotech company, every farm bureau and every commodity group are listening rather intently to ...
