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.
What will it take for consumers to embrace lab-grown meat?
Always a wealth of information when it comes to this subject, [Eat Just CEO Josh] Tetrick explains what exactly it ...
Video: Vaccines are rescuing the world from COVID. Could they also protect food crops from deadly plant diseases and pandemics?
Preventing plant-disease outbreaks is an urgent matter — as urgent as having a rapid response strategy for human viruses. The ...
Global warming causing eucalyptus trees, used for lumber, to invade native ecosystems. CRISPR gene editing could prevent that
Oregon State University’s Steve Strauss led an international collaboration that showed [a] CRISPR Cas9 gene editing technique could be used ...
Do pesticide residues on crops pose a hazard? Latest EU Food Safety Authority report says no
The latest report on pesticide residues in food in the European Union is now available, giving a snapshot of residue ...
Genetics and a second Green Revolution: Gene editing essential to address increasing crop losses as warming temperatures cause a surge in insect populations
For millennia, insects and the plants they feed on have been engaged in a co-evolutionary battle: to eat or not ...
China develops GM corn variety to combat yield-cutting fall armyworm
Food security is a major policy issue in China. To strengthen the nation's seed industry, the country has approved a ...
Facing EPA skepticism and a slew of suits targeting Xtend cropping system, Corteva ends development of their dicamba-choline weedkiller
[Corteva Agriscience] opted to end the EPA registration process underway for a novel dicamba herbicide containing a dicamba choline salt ...
Advocacy groups and biotechnology opponents urge FDA to strictly regulate genetically engineered animals
In January, the Trump administration proposed that the FDA, USDA and the U.S. Health and Human Services Department sign a ...
Viewpoint: Spend $83,000 on organic food to prevent cancer? Here’s why you should save your money
The alternative health advocates at Natural News recommend you spend an additional $83,000 on organic food to avoid cancer and ...
Biodegradable plastic from plants: How GE camelina could advance industrial sustainability
Skeptics beware, the proposition around growing a genuinely natural biodegradable plastic may be tied to a technology whose time has ...
‘Let the government arrest us’: India’s farmers will plant more illegal glyphosate-tolerant cotton to protest GM crop restrictions
It is illegal to grow [herbicide-tolerant Bt (HTBt)] cotton in India since the Government has not cleared it for commercial ...
Five reasons to be optimistic about the future of genome editing
Though the past year delivered social, economic, health and personal difficulties that challenged people across the globe, science strutted its ...
New piece of the climate change puzzle: Gene identified that could help plants cope with hotter temperatures
Warmer temperatures signal to plants that summer is coming. Anticipating less water, they flower early then lack the energy to ...
Viewpoint: Here’s why we have to harness gene editing to promote global food security
There is an urgent need to develop crop varieties which tolerate adverse growth conditions while requiring fewer inputs. Plant breeding ...
CRISPR food in Japan: Consumers more skeptical of gene-edited livestock than crops, survey shows
Because humans tend to feel closer to animals than plants, and commonly express feelings regarding animal welfare but not plant ...
Agroecology in Africa: Silver bullet or pathway to poverty?
A model of agroecology that limits farming inputs in Africa to solely indigenous materials is meeting resistance from farmers and ...
Viewpoint: Uganda’s ‘mistrust of science’ threatens local farming innovation and economic growth
Uganda is merely watching as other countries embrace technologies such as biotechnology that are transforming agriculture and earning them huge ...
Skeptical of AquaBounty’s salmon? Nature makes GM fish, too
A new study by Queen's University researchers Laurie Graham and Peter Davies finds "conclusive" evidence for the controversial idea that ...
GM Golden Rice yield and grain quality comparable to conventional counterparts, field studies show
The first series of peer-reviewed publications on the GR2E Golden Rice field trial data are now available in Nature Scientific ...
Gene editing could help Kenya’s valuable tea crop retain its competitive edge
Genome editing may help protect Kenya’s most important cash crop — tea grown in the country’s prime highlands — from ...
‘Meat: It’s still what’s for dinner.’ Can popular plant-based burgers really displace beef?
Walmart now peddles house-brand vegan “chick’n patties,” and KFC is trialing not-chicken nuggets developed by Beyond Meat. But here’s a ...
Changing course, Health Canada finds neonicotinoid pesticides ‘not a threat’ to aquatic insects
In 2018, Health Canada proposed to phase out all agricultural uses of thiamethoxam, a Syngenta product, and clothianidin, a Bayer ...
While COVID held our attention in a vice grip, 2020 brought some major crop biotech breakthroughs
This month marked one year since the COVID-19 pandemic turned life upside down around the world. The anniversary wasn’t exactly ...
Engineered tomatoes kill whiteflies by ‘silencing’ gene that protects them from pesticides
A pernicious agricultural pest owes some of its success to a gene pilfered from its plant host millions of years ...
Central Uganda’s new leadership pledges support for GM crops: ‘We have a cardinal role to ensure food security’
Newly elected leaders from Wakiso district in central Uganda pledged support for genetically modified (GM) crops during a sensitization workshop ...
Infographic: Here’s where GM crops are grown around the world today
Do you know where biotech crops are grown in the world? This updated ISAAA infographics show where biotech crops were ...
Processed food doesn’t necessarily equal unhealthy food, study finds
Classification systems that categorise foods according to their ‘level of processing’ have been used to predict diet quality and health ...
