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.
Can CRISPR gene editing save chocolate from extinction?
Beyond the glittery glass-and-sandstone walls of the University of California’s new biosciences building, rows of tiny green cacao seedlings in ...
Viewpoint: GMO debate’s name-calling, death threats and ‘anti-science’ rhetoric bad for agriculture
What has the world come to when people get death threats for expressing an opinion about agriculture? The toxicity of ...
Geneticist Wayne Parrott: Non-GMO label promotes food safety misconceptions
Marketers have learned to never underestimate the power of claiming superiority due to the absence of something. Nowhere is this ...
Ugandan anti-GMO activists applaud President Museveni’s rebuke of bill authorizing GMOs
Civil society activists have backed President Museveni for rejecting to assent to the Biosafety Bill 2017, saying the move saved ...
How African nations expect to learn from Burkina Faso’s GMO Bt cotton breeding problems
Stakeholders in the agricultural biotechnology sector are offering assurances that the problems that prompted Burkina Faso to temporarily halt cultivation ...
Speed breeding: Researchers show wheat, canola and other key crops can be bred 6 generations per year
Pioneering new technology is set to accelerate the global quest for crop improvement in a development which echoes the Green ...
GM Arctic Apple promises to ‘dramatically reduce’ consumer food waste
I’m an apple loyalist—I pack one as an after-lunch snack nearly every day of the week. So I jumped at ...
As Japan moves to embrace Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement, even without the US, GMO issues loom for consumers
Consumer groups and farmers in Japan fear the repercussions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP), which is quickly moving ...
Scientist raised next to sugarcane farm where controlled burning rampant explains ecological benefits of GMO sugar beets
In the early 90s, I lived in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, known for music, art, and its green Valle del Turbio. This ...
Egypt develops high-yield arid-resistant GMO wheat but activist opposition blocks biotechnology advances
Researchers at Egypt's National Research Center (NRC), affiliated with the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, obtained a patent for ...
Popular Cavendish banana heading towards extinction, with GMO and gene edited varieties only viable saviors
We are in the age of the Cavendish, a banana cultivar that accounts for 99 percent of imports to the Western world. But ...
‘Cruel and inhumane for rich nations to deprive developing world of GMO technology’: Purdue president Mitch Daniels
Of the several claims of “anti-science” that clutter our national debates these days, none can be more flagrantly clear than ...
Improving the health of dairy cows using gene edited breeding–What are the issues?
How society regards the use of genetic modification and genome editing can have a significant influence on how these technologies ...
Farmer exposes Non-GMO Project’s Twitter crop patent misinformation campaign
The Non-GMO Project spreads misleading and inaccurate information about food, agriculture and health on its website and social media. This ...
Beyond GMOs: Gene editing’s potential to transform food and farming depends on public acceptance
[The following is part of a letter from the editor of MIT Technology Review, David Rotman.] Decades of fretting over the ...
Genetically modified healthier foods: Will consumers accept Cargill’s low-fat GMO canola oil?
Rich Fletcher spent 11 years tinkering with the genetics of the canola plant in pursuit of a single goal: Lowering ...
Phase out of GMO cotton in Burkina Faso taking increasing toll on farmers and industry
When cotton traders in Burkina Faso announced in 2015 that they were phasing out the cultivation of genetically modified cotton, they attributed ...
Fraudulent ‘organic’ food imports overwhelming USDA, investigation finds
The U.S. Department of Agriculture fails at regulation of organic food as fraudulent products overwhelm the agency’s conflicted, compromised system, ...
Mystery of anesthetics: Despite lack of central nervous system, plants too ‘pass out’ from ‘knock out’ drugs
Just like humans, plants can succumb to the effects of general anesthetic drugs, researchers report in the Annals of Botany. The finding ...
Uganda’s president declines to sign GMO bill into law
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has declined to sign into law a bill on the development and application of genetically modified ...
Will new wave of gene-edited crops ease public fear of GMO food?
To many scientists, the potential of gene editing seems nearly limitless, offering a new way to rapidly create plants that ...
Milk without cows: Commercialization of synthetic dairy products in the works
Berkeley-based Perfect Day – which is creating ‘vegan’ dairy proteins without cows – is in talks with food industry partners ...
Video: MIT scientists create plants that glow in the dark
Imagine that instead of switching on a lamp when it gets dark, you could read by the light of a ...
Biotech advocates hope Trump tackles regulatory overreach on GMO crops
The agricultural biotech sector is cheering President Donald Trump's assault on regulatory overreach, seeing its best shot in years to ...
Canada proposes new limits—but no ban—on neonicotinoid insecticides to protect bees
The [Canadian] federal government has proposed tighter restrictions around two insecticides that are harmful to bees, but stopped short of ...
EPA reaffirms global scientific consensus that glyphosate herbicide does not cause cancer
The federal Environmental Protection Agency on Monday [Dec. 19] said glyphosate, the primary ingredient in the weed killer Roundup and ...
Viewpoint: Use Amazon Smile to support real charities—not Non-GMO Project’s fearmongering
Many people will turn to the Internet this year for holiday shopping, with Amazon being a popular choice. Savvy shoppers ...
