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.
Book review: ‘The Lives of Bees’ offers 14 tips to help keep honeybees healthy and pollinating our crops
What were the lives of wild honey bees like before humans began intensively managing them and moving them all over ...
Viewpoint: Don’t ignore organic industry’s conflict of interest in stoking fears about glyphosate dangers
A California jury recently awarded a $289 million judgment against Bayer, the maker of the herbicide. Lawyers somehow convinced the ...
Viewpoint: France’s bad science—its stances on food safety and GMOs at sharp odds with European scientists
Paris is worried that the whitening additive that makes sweets gleam — titanium dioxide, also called E171 — and is ...
3 things we should do to preserve insect biodiversity
Insects make up the bulk of terrestrial diversity. Reports of insect declines, best documented in Europe and North America, suggest ...
China to increase farm imports from US as two nations call for ceasefire in ‘multibillion-dollar tariff war’
President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China agreed on [June 29] to resume trade talks after a seven-week breakdown, ...
Pesticide exposure boosts cancer risk in farmers? Busting one of social media’s favorite agriculture myths
Did you hear? Farmers have less cancer overall than the general population .... Nearly 10 years ago .... U.S. Agricultural ...
Price floor for Bayer shares may not exist as Monsanto glyphosate-cancer litigation costs mount
On June 7th, 2018, Bayer .... consummated its $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto, the largest GMO and agricultural chemical distributor ...
‘Innovative’ GMO Impossible burger could help support US soybean growers, says USDA chief Sonny Perdue
Sonny Perdue may be a champion of agriculture and agribusinesses in all its forms. But even he isn’t immune to ...
Argentina approves fifth GMO cotton variety in effort to boost crop yields, spare natural resources
Argentina's Minister of AgroIndustry Luis Miguel Etechevehere and Christian Monty, Head of Global Cotton from BASF have announced the release ...
German farmer’s group calls for updated EU GMO crop rules to combat climate change
German farmers want access to new breeding technologies to protect against climate change. This would require a change in the ...
Viewpoint: Why Monsanto’s pro-GMO ‘crusade’ to win the millennial generation failed
Monsanto has been a lightning rod for people’s views on food, the food system, global health, and war since well ...
Saving bees ‘to death’? Our efforts to grow the honeybee population by using artificial hives may harm other pollinators
Everyone wants to save the bees. But as populations decline every year, we may be saving them to death. Human ...
Maharashtra state in India contemplates lifting GMO herbicide-tolerant cotton ban amid farmer protests
Demands to lift [the] ban on the use of herbicide-tolerant Bt (HTBT) cotton in the state are growing stronger. Several ...
New CRISPR-based platform detects plant pests, identifies useful traits for crop breeding
SHERLOCK technology is a new CRISPR-based platform that is rapid and portable and enables detection and quantitation of plant genes ...
If US banned neonicotinoid insecticides, pesticide use could increase, posing threat to humans and pollinators, study suggests
New research from Gian Carlo Moschini at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University and Ed ...
Under shareholder pressure, Bayer hires law firm to initiate ‘radical overhaul’ of glyphosate litigation strategy
Chemicals giant Bayer, under pressure from activist shareholders, said on [June 26] it has hired an external lawyer to advise ...
Organic industry-funded study finds trace levels of antibiotics, pesticides in conventional milk
Results from a recent study examining what’s in organic versus conventional milk show that the majority of samples of conventional, non-organic ...
‘RoboDUCK’: Weed-killing robot could cut chemical use in rice farming
An engineer working for Japanese carmaker Nissan has built a robot to help farmers reduce the use of herbicides and ...
French rapeseed yields hit 14-year low following drought, neonicotinoid insecticide ban
French farmers are getting so tired of beetles chomping on their rapeseed that some of them may decide to further ...
Viewpoint: Farmers use glyphosate to grow healthy crops, not because ‘Big Ag’ makes them
Until the public sees agriculture and the agricultural landscape for what it is and quits calling a circle a square, ...
Impossible Foods vs. Beyond Meat: Arms race to control booming plant-based burger market is on
Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are served in almost 20,000 restaurants across the country, and the list of restaurant chains ...
There’s little evidence showing diet soda is harmful—so why do experts recommend we avoid it?
Low-calorie sweeteners represent just about everything that’s wrong with our diet. They’re mostly synthetic. They play to the human preference ...
‘Third way’ agriculture: How technology, good judgement can save our food supply from climate change
Imagine waking up in a world that has become so hot and so crowded that most of what you eat ...
Despite threat of arrest, pro-GMO protests in India spread across 11 districts in state of Maharashtra
A ‘pro-GM seed’ movement, which had begun in one district of Maharashtra with farmers defying [a] ban on planting unapproved ...
Viewpoint: Mining phosphate to produce Bayer’s Roundup weed killer could contaminate environment ‘for years to come’
Roundup, the world’s top herbicide, has been mired in controversy in recent months as the jurors in three court cases ...
Newly identified rice gene could help develop drought-tolerant biotech crop varieties
Drought is one of the abiotic factors that affect the yield of crops. Studies have shown that basic leucine zipper ...
Milk without cows? Biotech startup recreates dairy proteins in the lab
Lab-grown meat is getting a lot of attention along with plant-based meat substitutes. Technology is driving the industry toward providing ...
