Food & Agriculture Features
The GLP explores the role of genetic engineering in food production and the polarized debate surrounding it. We highlight the work of our own writers, as well as that of contributors from around the Web. The GLP does not take a position on genetics-related issues; any opinions expressed belong to the authors.
Categories include:
- Chemicals and pesticides
- Organics
- Conventional crops
- New breeding technologies
- Animal biotechnology
- Food systems
- Sustainability
- Regulations
- Politics
- Ideology
Biopharming can help pioneer new treatments but cumbersome, outdated regulations block innovation
Obtaining medicines from plants is not new. Aspirin was first isolated from the bark of the willow tree in the ...
Podcast and video: Animal mRNA vaccines under fire; Too many antibiotics in agriculture? Does ‘Big Ag’ control the global seed market?
The same technology that yielded COVID-19 vaccines could help protect livestock from deadly diseases, but a growing chorus of skeptics ...
Plant microbiomes: Humans are not the only organisms that need healthy biomes. Here is how to grow safer and more nutritious food and feed
A “physical examination” is the standard way to track human health. It involves a variety of measurements such as blood ...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to detect crop diseases are on the way
Swarms of locusts devastating crops in East Africa, corn rootworms wreaking havoc in the Midwestern US. Blights destroying rubber trees in Brazil and ravaging potatoes in South India ...
Viewpoint: GMO crops are key to sustainable farming — why are some scientists afraid to talk about them?
A shallow piece in the journal Science downplaying the importance of GMO crops belongs in a New Age publication ...
Re-examining 10 science-challenged studies suggesting GMOs are harmful
The blog "10 Scientific Studies Proving GMOs Can Be Harmful To Human Health" is now a fixture on cyberspace. A ...
“GMOs”, “contamination” and “coexistence”: Challenging the misuse of concepts and wrongheaded regulation of agriculture and food
The term “genetically modified organisms” (or “GMOs”) has come into wide use over the past two decades although it is ...
Does conventional livestock farming use drugs at ‘unnecessarily high levels’, endangering human health, as activist critics claim?
Livestock farming generates some striking external impacts: while production provides 30% of human dietary protein, it occupies 75% of agricultural ...
GLP podcast and video: ESG undermines sustainable farming? Top-10 anti-biotech propagandists; FDA’s ‘healthy’ food labels
Environmental-Social-Governance (ESG) metrics are supposed to help promote sustainable industry, but could they actually undermine efforts to make farming more ...
Here’s how the GMO purple tomato soon to be in US grocery stores came to fruition
Norfolk Healthy Produce’s purple tomato first appeared in The New York Times Magazine eight months ago. Genetically engineered to naturally produce ...
Agriculture and climate change: Taking the best of all farming systems could tip the carbon scale in the right direction
Agriculture contributes a significant portion of the world's climate-changing greenhouse gases. In turn, changes in climate will reduce agricultural yields ...
Crops that tolerate droughts and climate change? Here’s how cactus genes could help
This past summer, a widespread drought across the United States lowered crop yields by as much as one-third as corn, ...
GLP podcast and video: ‘Clean’ cosmetics aren’t so clean; England embraces CRISPR crops; Gene-edited animals produce 30 percent more meat
So-called "clean" cosmetics have become a big business in recent years. But as with food fads like "Non-GMO," clean cosmetics ...
Why the European Union needs to grow genetically-engineered crops
The United States, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Japan, and India are among the growing number of countries that have deregulated ...
Viewpoint: Biotechnology rejectionists claim the Green Revolution caused more harm than good. Here are the facts.
After the Second World War, regional famines began to occur. Believing that increasing agricultural performance can be the solution to ...
French Academy of Agriculture scientist challenges government to ‘follow the science’ and revise its regulatory opposition to genetically edited crops
While a debate is in progress at the European level about the genetically edited products, it is time for the ...
GLP podcast: ‘Only 60 harvests left,’ debunked; Beating pesticide resistance; ‘Regulation through litigation’ threatens sustainable farming?
Have we so badly depleted the world's soil that we only have 60 harvests left? No. New "green" pesticides could ...
Lab-grown meat and other alternatives to farming could free up Earth’s farmland for conservation or development
Here’s the basic problem for conservation at a global level: food production, biodiversity and carbon storage in ecosystems are competing for ...
Viewpoint: How tort lawyers came to fund environmental activist fundamentalist attacks on science and agriculture
Since the period of stakeholder dialogue in the 1990s and early 2000s, environmental activists engaged in the policy process to ...
Viewpoint: How Environmental—Social—Governance (ESG) screens can be manipulated to promote misleading science and damage sustainability efforts
While the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investor point system has had a bit of a rough time over the ...
GLP podcast and video: EWG’s ‘Dirty Dozen,’ debunked; On pesticides, trust experts, not ideologues; Ukraine war derails EU’s Farm-To-Fork proposal
It's the time of year when Environmental Working Group (EWG) puts out its much-ballyhooed "dirty dozen" list of fruits and ...
Viewpoint: Challenging myths — Organic farming fleeces consumers and does not significantly promote sustainability
As I discussed in Part 1, many Americans have begun to seek “authenticity” in many aspects of their lives. There’s ...
Scientists rebuke Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen list of ‘pesticide-soaked’ vegetables and fruits
The safety and nutritional benefits of fruits and vegetables is verified by decades of science. Toxicology studies and analyses confirm ...
Viewpoint: No, DNA is NOT a drug—Why the FDA’s continued insistence to regulate gene edited research animals as drugs blocks US-based innovation
Investigational research animals that have been genome edited CANNOT enter the food supply in the United States irrespective of the ...
Viewpoint: ‘Only 60 harvests remaining on Earth’? Environmentalist exaggerations obscure dramatic advances in biotechnology-boosted agriculture
A little over 200 years ago, one of the noted economists and philosophers of the day, Thomas Malthus published an essay ...
Honeybee health: Driving problem is not climate or pesticides but the deadly Varroa mite
Some food grown in the US, especially high-cost luxuries like almonds, are pollinated using bees. Since bees are most often ...
Changing negative perceptions about GMOs? Gene-edited purple tomato with great taste, longer shelf life and as much anthocyanin as blueberries is one of many new GM foods
The first genetically modified (GM) food ever made commercially available to the public was a tomato, invented in the US ...
