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.
As climate dislocations accelerate, here’s how genetically modified mosquitoes could offer lifeline to controlling dengue, Zika and other mosquito-vectored diseases
With insecticide resistance increasing and climate change priming the environment for longer breeding seasons and a wider geographic range, the ...
Viewpoint: Europe’s energy crisis and Farm-to-fork organic-promoting policy is fueling food insecurity — a ‘glaring oversight’ in EU State of the Union address
EU solidarity with Ukraine was the overwhelming focus of European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union ...
Canada relaxes rules governing gene-edited crops
Canadian health regulator Health Canada has published a fresh set of guidelines on gene-edited crops. The new instructions cover gene-edited crops that ...
Suffering from devastating pest infestations, Ethiopian cotton farmers resort to using illegally smuggled GMO seeds that have controlled the same problem in Brazil
Cotton growers in Ethiopia resort to unauthorized GMO cotton illegally smuggled from Sudan. Bt-RR cotton seed is currently being cultivated ...
Viewpoint: Government funding and clearer regulatory guidelines critical if China hopes to grow its lab meat sector
China has been increasingly voicing its support for the development of plant- and cell-based proteins, and Chinese scientists have declared cultured ...
Nestle, General Mills, PepsiCo and other food companies have pledged support for regenerative agriculture. Is this a greenwashing campaign?
According to a new report by the non-profit Forum for the Future, the regenerative agriculture movement in the U.S. has ...
Find it hard to control your appetite and keep your weight in check? Bigger breakfasts maximize metabolism, research suggests
Eating a big breakfast and a smaller dinner could aid weight loss by making you feel less hungry, say researchers ...
Viewpoint: With Europe suffering unprecedented drought, EU politicians are seriously debating the use of sustainable, drought-tolerant, low-insecticide use genetically modified crops
Europe’s summer of drought has been impossible to ignore. Rivers dried up, exposing the skeletons of warships and ancient buildings. Images captured by ...
Viewpoint: ‘He overlooks complexity’ — Will King Charles promote his cult organic farming views and reject agricultural biotechnology?
King Charles didn’t discover his penchant for sustainability all by himself. After Charles met the Indian anti-globalization activist and environmental ...
Viewpoint: Ideologically-based beliefs are preventing New Zealand consumers from experiencing the benefits that gene editing in agriculture can bring
It is over two decades since the Royal Commission on genetic modification (GM) responded to the task of evaluating the ...
Can ginger, chili peppers or green tea keep you full for longer? Scientist fact-checks common diet claims
It's likely that your weekly shop is packed with packaging promising that the food inside will taste great, stay fresh ...
Microbe milk: We’ve used precision fermentation to make cheese for decades — lab-made dairy may be the next technological leap
Although plant-based analogs have never managed to fully capture the taste and texture of the real thing, a new crop ...
‘Canary in the coal mine for agriculture’: Simple soil temperature test can predict and prevent spread of corn-ravaging worms without pesticides
Soil temperature can effectively monitor and predict the spread of the corn earworm, a pest that ravages corn, cotton, soybeans, ...
Climate panel predicts massive dislocations in agriculture and billions of dollars wasted unless drastic mitigation measures taken
According to a landmark report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IIPC), approximately nine years remain to limit ...
EPA reaffirms conclusion that herbicide glyphosate is safe for humans and environment but pledges updated review by 2026
EPA walked away from a legal battle on its interim determination that glyphosate is likely not carcinogenic to people, telling ...
Not The Onion: California Supreme Court rules bumbles are fish — but justices say state species protection act is poorly worded
The state Supreme Court agreed September 21 to allow dwindling species of bumblebees to be considered for protection as endangered ...
Viewpoint: Moderating agricultural pesticide use is a good idea — but only if it helps balance environmental and economic realities and is not just an ideological exercise
The EU is going too far in its control of pesticides. The Commission is updating the 2009 Sustainable Use Directive ...
TikTok fact check: No, malaria-fighting GMO mosquitoes released in Florida are not a vector for ‘Bill Gates’ next planned pandemic’
Claims that the Bill Gates-funded company Oxitec is responsible for a paralyzing mosquito-borne virus spreading through Florida have recently circulated ...
Bangladesh looks to agricultural technologies to address climate change impacts and food insecurity
There has been a revolution in agriculture in Bangladesh in the last three decades with the application of various modern ...
Spraying wheat with bacteria? This seed coating helps plants pull nutrients from the soil and increases yields
Lavie Bio, a subsidiary of Evogene, is a biological agriculture company that strives to bring innovation to the global food industry. The ...
10 years into the lab grown meat revolution yet there are few approved foods. What are the barriers to scaling cell meat into blockbusters?
2021 saw USD 1.4 billion invested in cultured meat businesses and 107 new start-up businesses. 25 countries have at least ...
Soybean yields in Africa are 50 per cent less than global average. A new GMO version could make up the difference — if approved
According to a study published in Science [August 18], the researchers genetically modified three genes of soybeans by effectively upgrading photosynthesis – a ...
Viewpoint: CRISPR could bring about a sustainability and productivity revolution in food and farming
Technological advances can reach far beyond robotics, automation, sensors, or the predictive and analytical capabilities of artificial intelligence. In a way, ...
Sandblasting weeds out of the ground? A ‘quick, cost-effective and simple’ way to protect crops without spraying chemicals
Weed hunters? No, it's not a joke. It's a real concept that aims to tackle a serious and costly problem ...
Viewpoint: ‘Crop safety lacks scientific rigor’ — Academic panel argues for modernized regulations in light of technological advances
Advances in genetically engineered (GE) crop breeding have encouraged new measures to be taken when analysing crop safety ...
Activists love to cite Einstein quote that without bees, life on Earth would soon perish. Snopes fact checking finds ideologues made it up
In 2002, Snopes came across a quote about bees’ importance to the global ecosystem that the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Albert ...
Viewpoint: Agri-bashing — How European Green Party groups have evolved into unscientific propagandists
“The organic lobby exists in Brussels, it has a storefront and is called Ifoam”, admits the environmental activist Martin Pigeon, ...
