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.
US FDA: Gene-edited crops can have many advantages for consumers
Scientific advances in biotechnology, such as genome editing and synthetic biology, hold enormous potential to improve human and animal health, ...
Infamous Seralini GMO rat tumor study debunked by European scientists
Three European studies have disproved Gilles-Éric Séralini’s widely circulated claims that genetically modified maize (corn) induces tumors in rats. Séralini, ...
Organic farming advocate Klaas Martens comes out in favor of gene-edited crops
Klaas Martens, a prominent voice in the organic movement and a third-generation grain and livestock farmer, says he would be ...
Indian scientists develop GMO mustard with higher yields
Researchers at Delhi-based TERI School of Advanced Studies have developed an early flowering transgenic variety of mustard. The work is ...
Podcast: Has the GMO debate reached a turning point?
For more than a decade now, environmentalist groups have waged a successful campaign against biotechnology in agriculture. Playing on the ...
Viewpoint: Quick start on gene-edited crop research gives UK advantage over rest of Europe
Good news for the UK, but bad news for the anti-science, anti-progress green movement: the Telegraph reports that ‘gene-edited super-crops’ are ...
Farmers on social media: The dark side of being an ‘agvocate’
I have tried my best to encourage people that it is essential to share their farm stories in the title ...
New GMO cotton variety turns fertilizer into nutrition and weed killer
A newly developed fertilizer system will provide nutrition to engineered cotton crops worldwide and a deadly dose to weeds that ...
How herbicide-resistant GMO soybeans transformed Brazil’s economy
As Brazil grew richer in the 2000s, its agricultural workers left their farms in droves and headed to work in ...
Ethiopia approves first GMO crop: insect-resistant Bt cotton
The Government of Ethiopia is the latest African country to authorize cultivation of biotech crops by granting two landmark approvals for environmental ...
Anti-GMO group: ‘Bayer is now the new Monsanto’
Bayer’s decision to drop the name means Monsanto products like Roundup will still be Roundup, but now they will be ...
Viewpoint: Indian government’s anti-GMO policies trying to fix something that isn’t broken
The cotton revolution in India, through the use of genetically modified (GM) BT cotton, has been well researched and documented ...
Are farmers the key to countering glyphosate fearmongering?
The public conversation around glyphosate is all flowing in one direction. A cluster of environmental campaigners, organic food activists and ...
Viewpoint: Retiring the Monsanto brand could be good for the GMO debate
Though critics will no doubt accuse Monsanto of greenwashing its products under the less-familiar Bayer brand, I’d like to argue ...
France to vote on mandatory label for meat and dairy products from animals fed GMOs
French politicians have backed a proposal for mandatory labelling of meat and dairy products from animals raised on genetically modified ...
Golden Rice: Debunking Greenpeace’s ‘misinformed and politically motivated’ claims against the vitamin-enhanced GMO crop
The campaign against GR2E was partly misinformed, partly politically motivated. ... One argument is that the benefits of GR2E are ...
GMO crop pioneer Marc Van Montagu: Overpopulation—not GMOs—drives monocultures
At roughly the same time as Mary-Dell Chilton and Monsanto, who were working in the United States, [Belgian molecular biologists ...
EU neonicotinoid ban could leave UK sugar beet farmers with no defense against virus
Following the partial neonicotinoid ban on flowering crops in 2013, the latest restriction which was voted on earlier this year, ...
Viewpoint: Pesticide regulations should assess societal context, not just safety
Apart from the inherent scientific complexity, the glyphosate case illustrates a fundamental societal issue. The mere fact that the European ...
Salt-resistant rice shows promise for turning Middle East deserts into productive paddies
Chinese scientists have successfully grown and harvested rice in the deserts of Dubai after developing a strain that allows the ...
Mark Lynas: Scotland’s GMO ban hurts food security in Africa
Mark Lynas, a former eco-warrior who, five years ago, made a dramatic U-turn from trying to shut down scientific research ...
233 scientists call on world’s governments to ‘greatly restrict’ use of neonicotinoid insecticides to protect biodiversity
Continued applications of the most widely used insecticides in the world must be urgently restricted, say 233 scientists in a tightly ...
Viewpoint: Will France stand up for science in battle over glyphosate safety?
In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron held fast with his environmental allies against science and declared they would ban the herbicide ...
Can Joyn Bio’s genetically engineered microbes replace chemical fertilizers?
Big Ag is addicted to nitrogen fertilizers. It’s a massive problem for the global climate, yet it may yield to a ...
Factor GMO: The curious disappearance of the ‘world’s largest international study on GMO safety’
In late 2014, an obscure Russian group called a press conference in London to announce the launch of the “world’s largest ...
Health Canada sticks with phase out of neonicotinoid insecticides although its study finds impact on bees is limited
Health Canada is sticking with its proposal to phase out most outdoor and agricultural uses of a common pesticide, even ...
As world’s scientists herald CRISPR revolution, will Africa follow?
I am only wondering if those spreading the misinformation are currently following the recent “super” GMO technique referred to as ...
