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.
GMO-skeptical Sierra Club gives cautious endorsement to disease-resistant, biotech chestnut tree
By almost any metric, the American chestnut was a perfect tree. Massive, fast-growing, and rot-resistant, it was easy to mill ...
Viewpoint: Let them eat cheese: Evidence shows this ‘guilty pleasure’ doesn’t deserve its unhealthy reputation
A large body of research suggests that cheese’s reputation as a fattening, heart-imperiling food is undeserved. When it comes to ...
Video: ‘One more tool in our toolbox’: The case for crop biotechnology
Agriculture scientist Channapatna Prakash offers a crash course on agricultural biotechnology on this episode of the Nothing is Rocket Science ...
GM, insect-resistant, Bt corn could reach Kenyan farms in 2021 — and may help double crop yields
The TELA Bt maize variety if adopted can help [Kenyan] farmers double their yields. Speaking [February 22] during an open ...
‘This seed is ours’: Cuba poised to grow locally developed, insect-resistant GM corn to mitigate effects of climate change
Between 2014 and 2018, Cuba imported 700,000 tons of corn per year, more than 1,500 million dollars in imported food, ...
Machetes, not glyphosate: Mexican president tells farmers to manually remove weeds following herbicide restrictions
[Mexican] President Andrés Manuel López Obrador …. proposed the use of machetes to remove weeds from crops instead of using ...
Growing food in space may offer sustainability benefits beyond genetically engineering plants on Earth
Sending fancy French grapes into orbit might sound like an expensive PR stunt. There is, after all, a long history ...
Gene editing could boost UK’s virus-plagued sugar beet industry, country’s agriculture minister says
[British farming and environment minister George] Eustice told the annual conference of the National Farmers Union [on February 23] that ...
Senate confirms Obama Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to head USDA again
The Senate confirmed Tom Vilsack as U.S. Agriculture Secretary, opening the way for the Biden administration to move forward with ...
East Africa battles locust swarms by turning them into animal feed and organic fertilizer
Scientists say warmer seas are creating more rain, waking dormant eggs, and cyclones that disperse the swarms are getting stronger ...
GM crops could support food security in Africa, new study suggests
Genetically modified (GM) maize has produced higher yields than conventional hybrid varieties in South Africa, highlighting the technology’s potential to ...
Cavendish banana could ‘disappear’ in the 2020s. Can CRISPR gene editing save it from a deadly fungus?
[T]hat the Cavendish banana will disappear sometime in the 2020’s is extremely likely. It is being threatened by a fungus ...
Urine test to detect glyphosate weedkiller is a marketing ‘hoax,’ French farmers say
Are the Elisa tests used by environmental associations to analyze the level of glyphosate present in urine .... reliable? No, ...
China launches GM crop research initiative to strengthen food security
China will support R&D of innovative agricultural GMOs, such as new genes, new technologies and new products. Wang Gangyi, a ...
GMOs in Bangladesh: Insect-resistant eggplant a sustainability success. Here’s how the country can safeguard its progress
In the seven years since Bangladesh approved its first genetically modified crop — insect-resistant eggplant (Bt brinjal) — the number ...
‘False paradigm’: Pitting organic and conventional farming against each other won’t promote sustainability, says GLP’s Jon Entine at USDA Ag Outlook Forum
Interest groups have become so hardened in their views about which types of agriculture benefit the environment that the fact ...
Bill Gates under fire for urging wealthy countries to give up beef and switch to synthetic meat
The Microsoft founder-turned-global health philanthropist [Bill Gates] discusses ways to tackle climate change in his new book, “How to Avoid ...
25 years of GM crops: Biotechnology a blessing to many farmers, but not without costs
Brent Rendel, who started farming in the early 1990s, easily remembers how magical Roundup Ready crops seemed and the awe ...
New Zealand farmers experience 25% lower cancer rates than city dwellers, study shows, challenging misleading environmentalist claim they face higher pesticide cancer risks
The good news [in the 2020 New Zealand] State of Cancer report is that the overall incidence of cancer is ...
GM canola, soybean don’t harm biodiversity, 15-year Japanese government study finds
According to the report by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), [to] date no sign of any ...
Anti-GMO Europe wants to fight climate change. Will it approve the eco-friendly (but GM) Impossible Burger?
Impossible Foods’ efforts to enter the European market have faced a 15-month-long battle over the key ingredient that gives its ...
Peru extends GM crop cultivation ban to ‘investigate’ biotechnology’s impact on biodiversity — which government says will take until 2035
The Peruvian Congress approved a moratorium that prohibits the entry of Living Modified Organisms (transgenic) for cultivation or breeding purposes ...
CRISPR could help produce allergen-free soybeans. Here’s how it works
Food allergies occur when you eat .... and your immune system reacts to certain proteins in the food. Proteins that ...
GMOs and nutrition: Disease-resistant, biofortified cassava could boost Africa’s access to essential minerals
For the first time, an international team of scientists… have developed cassava displaying high-level resistance to cassava mosaic disease (CMD), ...
Feeding astronauts on the Moon and Mars means sustaining plants and animals in space. Can science make it happen?
Given that missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond will not be able to rely on regular resupply missions, these ...
Viewpoint: Giving up hamburgers won’t stop climate change
Climate change is the biggest challenge of our lifetime, which we must address with urgency, but swapping out a hamburger ...
Lab-grown wood: Could scientists make better trees than nature?
Wood and other plant-based materials may be renewable resources, but obtaining usable forms typically requires lots of transportation, milling, and ...
