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.
Do biotech crops boost yields for organic farmers?
Nutrition, the environment and worker’s wellbeing are the banners of the green crusade. But, with organics charging an average of 50% more ...
How do you make a lab-grown burger?
In July, [the alternative-meat] movement passed a new milestone: In a packed auditorium in suburban Maryland, the FDA convened the ...
India a testing ground for technologies that benefit farmers worldwide, Bayer says
On August 21, 2018, Bayer Crop Science .... kicked off a process to integrate the global seed behemoth Monsanto into ...
Australia: ‘No grounds’ to ban Roundup, despite glyphosate-cancer controversy
The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) is aware of the August 2018 decision in the Californian Superior Court ...
GMOs are ‘yucky’—the real reason consumers dislike biotech crops?
Twenty-two years after Monsanto introduced its Roundup-resistant soybeans, the debate over genetic modification is far from over .... in the U.S., ...
Record-high yields suggest climate change no threat to coffee production
For roughly the last two years, the media has been warning us that climate change is threatening the world's supply ...
Is ‘factory farming’ an accurate description of modern agriculture?
I’ve lived in four states on the East Coast and Gulf, and I’ve never found myself wanting come harvest time ...
Could green benefits of biotech crops win over ‘ideological’ environmentalists?
A new study in Nature Sustainability reports that “[e]xtensive field data suggest that impacts on wild populations would be greatly reduced through boosting yields ...
Viewpoint: Organic food companies count on ‘consumer ignorance’ to sell their products
Consumers today have more food choices available than at any other time in human history .... but the terms and ...
Video: Biotech could drive sustainable economic growth, but public support is crucial
“We should all be doing less. We all need to chill.” It wasn’t an obvious rallying cry for delegates at ...
Will ‘regulatory red tape’ cost India its status as world’s top cotton producer?
Delivering his fifth Independence Day speech on August 15, 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that he wanted to add ...
Dogs trained to sniff out bacterial diseases could protect bee populations
A new approach in the fight against American foulbrood – a disease effecting beehives across the world – is the ...
Anti-GMO activists can’t be allowed to ‘have their way,’ African farmer warns
When I was a little boy, what I feared most were the masqueraders .... human beings wearing masks or ...
Mushroom-based biopesticides could cut environmental damage from synthetic chemicals
.... In the year 2012 — the last time the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) published a report on the subject — chemical ...
France’s neonicotinoid ban a ‘dead end’ for farmers who need to fight pests
The ban on the use of neonicotinoids as of September 1, 2018 is leading to agronomic dead ends for many ...
Low yields, high costs stop India from embracing organic agriculture
Nearly 25 years ago, an event held at the American Center Auditorium in Chennai on the topic of the Green Revolution witnessed ...
Patent war may stop Bayer from selling new GMO Bt insecticide cotton in India
German chemical and pharma major Bayer AG, which has acquired biotech company Monsanto .... said it cannot introduce new Bt ...
Educating farmers key to biotech crop success in developing world
African countries and the Philippines have made significant progress in developing genetically modified (GMO) crops, adding impetus to the drive to ...
GMO controversy is a political debate, not a food safety issue, farmers say
According to a recent article in the New York Times, most consumers don’t know or realize that for decades they ...
Famous chemist Bruce Ames a chemical ‘industry apologist,’ anti-GMO group claims
[The] Ames test .... is literally textbook science that is taught to students all over the world. .... It was ...
As ‘Dicamba drift’ crop damage declines, will EPA re-approve controversial herbicide?
The world’s largest agribusiness expects the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to announce a renewal and an updated label ...
New Age Meats lab-grown sausage passes first taste test
On [September 17th], the startup, called New Age Meats, let a handful of journalists and prospective investors taste its prototype product ...
Can I drink glyphosate? Answers to common questions about the controversial weed killer
In recent weeks, there has been an uptick in the conversation about the safety of glyphosate, a common weed killer, ...
Novel uses for plant hormones could boost crop yields to ‘new limits’
Amidst the growing interest in soil health and soil-plant interactions is a fledgling collective of newer concepts and products, from ...
Video: How CRISPR gene editing can protect and improve our food supply
Following the July European Court of Justice decision to regulate gene-edited crops as GMOs, a debate over the costs and ...
‘Gluten free,’ ‘organic’ and other health fads driving ‘huge’ changes in food production
U.S. consumers are increasingly scanning labels to check that products do not contain certain ingredients, such as gluten, GMOs, antibiotics, pesticides ...
Viewpoint: US should cut funding to ‘politically-driven’ IARC cancer agency
[September 19th], Congress passed an appropriations bill that kept funding intact for the .... International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The ...
