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.
Refusal to embrace GM crops is hurting Indian farmers
India has enjoyed successes with genetic engineering in agriculture, but its relationship with this environmentally friendly, wealth-enhancing technology may be ...
India’s Minister of Agriculture: Farmers prefer growing GM crops
NEW DELHI: Farmers tend to prefer growing genetically modified crops as they give a higher yield, are more disease resistant and provide ...
Hawaiian officials introduce additional GMO bills
Hawaii Island’s food fight is about to get even more messy. After sitting on the sidelines during the last three ...
Agroecology, conventional breeding superior to GMOs
My last post discussed the success of public sector scientists who discovered and developed genes in soybean, using conventional breeding, that confer ...
Science and GMOs are not the bad guys here
Blogger Beth Hoffman, who is like me a Forbes contributor, tells us in a garbled polemic against genetically modified (GM) foods that, ...
Syngenta to take a continent to court to upend pesticide ban
Syngenta is preparing to spray its lawyerly might all over Europe in a bid to be allowed to keep killing ...
Journal article claiming GMOs might pass “genetic benefits” to weeds challenged
It is well accepted observation that when the pseudoscience or anti-science crowd runs out of supporting evidence (usually when it’s ...
Is it anti-science to be anti-GMOs?
“The science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe.” So asserts the consensus statement on ...
Why genetically modifying food is a bad idea
Recently the debate over genetically modified (GMO) foods has heated up again. In just the past few weeks, articles about ...
Real threat to food security is ginned-up panic over GMOs
There has been a lot of commotion about GMO crops in the press this summer. It amazes me that there ...
Tomatoes ripe for improvement
Science is trying to build a better supermarket tomato. At a laboratory here at the University of Florida’s Institute for Plant ...
Mark Lynas on Philippines travesty: True story about who destroyed Golden Rice GM rice crop
Did you hear that a group of 400 angry farmers attacked and destroyed a field trial of genetically modified rice in the ...
Battling India’s “Monsanto Protection Act,” farmers demand end to GMO
On August 8, thousands of farmers and activists from across 20 Indian states demonstrated in New Delhi against the Biotechnology ...
GM bananas: from nutrition to disease resistance
According to Professor James Dale, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), when Banana Bunchy Top Virus (BBTV) struck Australia in 1913, ...
Lynas slams Indian official for blocking GM eggplant
NEW DELHI: British environmental activist Mark Lynas, who once "demonised" geneticially modified crops and now campaigns for their cause, blames Jairam Ramesh for ...
“We need a holistic approach to bee health challenges”
Bee health has been the subject of much media attention over the last year — and rightly so. Bees are ...
First mainstream GM food on sale in Britain
A Frankenstein food breakfast cereal designed for children and packed with additives linked to bad behaviour and hyperactivity is being ...
Is it time for scientist activism against GMO fear-mongering?
In areas of southeast Asia and Africa, vitamin A deficiency is common and can cause blindness. The World Health Organization estimates that ...
EU group claiming “hidden GMO” sunflowers killing bees
New alert in Italy, were bees are dying on sunflower crops. Multiple cases of honeybee colony decline and neurological symptoms ...
Monsanto poised to take over the weed industry
Earlier this month, the state of Illinois joined the party and legalized medical marijuana, becoming the 20th state in the ...
U.S. farm, food groups want better oversight of GMO field trials
More than 150 U.S. farm and food businesses and organizations on Wednesday called for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ...
Beer and GMOs: What’s in your beer?
A few weeks back, an entrepreneur (in this case a modern-day version of a snake oil salesperson) who calls herself ...
Greater Spokane Inc. comes out against Washington’s GMO labeling initiative
Later this year, Washington will vote on whether to label genetically modified foods, or GMOs, and the debate is starting to ...
More critics up against Kenya’s GMO imports ban
A senior US trade specialist has called on Kenya to lift its import ban on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) imports, saying it ...
Michael Pollan and Amy Harmon ‘talk’ it out
A few weeks ago, Amy Harmon's New York Times feature on the challenges Florida orange growers are facing in managing ...
US regulation misses some GM crops
Five years after developing an apple variety containing a defense to fend off apple scab — which took 85 years ...
‘GMOs, traditional foods can coexist’
Speaking at a recent public debate at Makerere University's school of Food Technology, Nutrition, and Bio-engineering in Uganda, British environmentalist ...
