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 technology ‘wipes out’ traditional work, biotech investment could revitalize rural America
Cow-free burgers are now all the rage — after Beyond Meats’ recent IPO, shares rose 163% on the first day ...
Vermont: First US state to mandate its own GMO crop regulations
On June 17, 2019, Vermont Governor Phil Scott signed a new law, which creates a committee to review new genetically-engineered ...
Mexico’s self-fertilizing corn could be worth millions. Will village where it grows share in the profits?
In a 1979 visit to Totontepec, a small town in Oaxaca, Mexico, naturalist Thomas Boone Hallberg marveled at the local ...
Demand for sustainable farming fuels growth of ‘GMO-free’ gene silencing tools to combat pests
Since its discovery more than 20 years ago, RNA interference (RNAi) has been extensively used in crop protection platforms. So ...
No Bee Armageddon: US honeybee colony numbers stable for 25 years. Thank capitalism?
Warnings of an impending "bee apocalypse" became widespread in 2006, after some commercial beekeepers reported the mass disappearance of worker ...
Viewpoint: Anti-GMO movement’s romanticized notions of ‘natural food’ won’t solve global nutrition challenges
Food science and farm technologies today provide Americans with an unprecedented abundance of safe, healthy and nutritious food. Yet, consumers ...
Bayer lawsuit: Judge cuts punitive damages in glyphosate-cancer case from $75 million to $20 million
A federal judge on [July 15] slashed a damages award Bayer AG owed a California man who blamed Roundup weed ...
Crops engineered to stay green longer could produce more food for growing global population
A team of Clemson University scientists has achieved a breakthrough in the genetics of senescence in cereal crops with the ...
1/3 of the world’s soil is degraded. But technology can bring our farmland ‘back to life’
In Iowa they call it “black gold” – a fertile blanket covering the landlocked Midwestern state. Thousands of years of ...
EU ‘probably won’t’ re-approve Bayer’s glyphosate weed killer after 2022, German agriculture minister says
German Agriculture Minister Julia Kloeckner said glyphosate herbicide probably won’t have enough support to gain re-authorization for use in the ...
Scientists urge speedy introduction of GMOs to help Ghana cut food imports
As Ghana’s government rolls out a master plan to drastically cut down on food imports, scientists are urging the speedy ...
CRISPR immunizes potato against plant viruses, cutting production costs of globally important food crop
Society and the legislative authorities are often cynical about the presence of [transgenes] in GMOs. However, more advanced plant breeding ...
If Bayer settles glyphosate-cancer lawsuits, final costs could range from $2.5-$20 billion
There’s a $2.5 billion question hanging over Bayer AG. Or perhaps a $20 billion question, depending on who you ask ...
Brazilian farmers sue Bayer to reclaim $151 million in royalties on GMO cotton
Brazilian cotton producers in the state of Mato Grosso on [July 11] sued Bayer AG, seeking to cancel the chemical ...
Everything you should know about India’s pro-GMO farmers defying ban on biotech crops
With a few Haryana farmers symbolically defying a government restriction against sowing banned [GMO] Cotton in Hisar, and the government ...
Global farming trends put pollinators at risk, threaten food security, study claims
A multinational team of researchers has identified countries where agriculture’s increasing dependence on pollination, coupled with a lack of crop ...
Price of lab-grown burger could drop from $280,000 to $10 by 2021
Lab-grown meat, first introduced to the world six years ago in the form of a $280,000 hamburger, could hit supermarket ...
Manipulating plant mitochondrial DNA could boost crop diversity, promote food security
Researchers in Japan have edited plant mitochondrial DNA for the first time, which could lead to a more secure food ...
‘Second generation’ GMO plants could turn marginal soils into productive farmland
Roughly one-third of the world’s arable land suffers from lack of accessible iron, rendering it inhospitable to staple crops like ...
Glyphosate manufacturers reject alleged weed killer-cancer link in response to federal Roundup report
Glyphosate registrants defended their products as safe to use in comments submitted .... to the Department of Health and Human ...
Viewpoint: ‘We’ll be eating each other in 5 years’? How ‘catastrophic’ environmentalism threatens sustainable farming
In April, the cry of climate catastrophe seized the political agenda. ... It was the only subject driving the zombie ...
Zambia increases GMO imports after assessment shows ‘products safe for consumption’
Zambia's regulator of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) on [July 8] announced that it has allowed some companies to import products ...
Lab-grown protein could make up 35% of meat consumption by 2040 amid growing concerns about animal agriculture
Memphis Meats, based in Emeryville, California, is one of a growing number of startups worldwide that are making cell-based or ...
Hybrid corn boosts grain yields 89%, nitrogen use efficiency 73% over 70 years
During the past 70 years, hybrid corn varieties have increased both yield and nitrogen use efficiency at nearly the same ...
Sydney, Australia may end glyphosate use as public opposition to Bayer’s weed killer grows
Sydney’s city council said on [July 5] it was reviewing .... the use of Bayer AG’s Roundup, after other councils ...
Podcast: Save our forests with GMO trees? Let’s look at the costs and benefits first
We have genetically engineered food; how about trees? In [June 8's] Academic Minute, North Carolina State University's Jason Delborne looks ...
Monsanto’s GMO soybean ‘safe as conventional counterpart,’ EU expert panel confirms
Following the submission of [an] application .... from Monsanto (hereafter referred to as ‘the applicant’), the Panel on Genetically Modified ...
