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.
Video: How are CRISPR crops regulated differently than GMOs?
Critics say the Obama Administration balked on an opportunity to update Reagan-era guidelines on how agencies like the Department of ...
Black market GM cotton seeds flood Chinese market, cutting pesticide use and boosting yields
China is one of the world’s top cotton producers partly because of a widespread sowing of banned seeds, according to ...
Microbiologist, former Greenpeace supporter: Opposition to GMOs ‘responsible for death of poor people’
[Editor's note: The following article has been translated from Dutch and lightly edited for clarity.] [Editor's note: Hidde Boersma is ...
5 reasons why it’s so hard to know whether ‘organic’ food is really organic
Regulating [food] supply chains to ensure, for example, that “organic” foods deserve their labels is hard. Here are five reasons ...
Non-browning GM Arctic Apple set for fall consumer launch
The company behind the non-browning Arctic Apple is gearing up for its commercial launch with U.S. retailers this fall, following ...
India’s agriculture ministry has ‘no reservations about promoting GM mustard’
The agriculture ministry ... said it has no reservations about GM mustard, which has been cleared by an expert panel ...
China lobbies public on GMOs as ChemChina’s takeover of Syngenta nears approval
China will carry out a nationwide poll [June 2017] to test the public’s acceptance of genetically-modified food, a technology the ...
Plants vs pathogens: CRISPR-created crops fend off pests, add nutrition
Potato blight sparked the Irish famine in the 19th century, causing a million people to starve to death and another ...
To revive monarch butterflies, plant milkweed in yards and on wild lands, study says
If Monarch butterflies are going to stay off the endangered species list, they need more to eat. And it’s up ...
Anti-pesticide, anti-nuclear activist named France’s new environment minister
The new French president stunned businesses by appointing Nicolas Hulot, an anti-nuclear and anti-pesticide environmental activist, as the country's environmental ...
Video: Watch out, Gwyneth Paltrow, 5 pro-science moms combat GMO misinformation
In 2015, a group of bloggers wrote an open letter to celebrity moms Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ginnifer Goodwin—criticizing ...
To feed 1.4 billion people China technologizing its agriculture sector–Will it be enough?
China’s 1.4 billion people are building up an appetite that is changing the way the world grows and sells food ...
New GE rice variety boosts plant’s immune system to fight multiple diseases at once
Plants don’t have a bloodstream to circulate immune cells. Instead, they use receptors on the outsides of their cells to ...
‘Inextricably linked’ anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements cause preventable suffering
[Editor's note: Read the GLP's recent coverage of the Organic Consumers Association's and other anti-GMO groups' links to the anti-vaccine ...
Infographic: India poised to dramatically increase its global GMO footprint
GM crop footprint in India is all set to grow once the government gives its final nod to GM Mustard, ...
Maine approves 3 genetically engineered blight resistant potatoes that reduce pesticide use
With little fanfare, the Maine Board of Pesticides Control unanimously approved ... the registration of three new types of genetically ...
GMO-free top labeling issue for 13% of consumers
In recent years, public awareness campaigns have aimed to inform consumers of the presence of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), but ...
Less milkweed due to herbicide likely contributed to early monarch butterfly declines, study finds
[Monarch butterfly] numbers ... are shrinking. New research at Michigan State University, published in the current issue of the journal ...
Democrats accuse Trump of turning USDA into ‘pro-industry advertising business’ in support of GMOs
[T]he Department of Agriculture under President Trump is throwing its weight behind genetically modified foods with a new GMO-friendly information ...
Fate of approval of India’s first GMO food crop—mustard—unsure after sudden death of environment minister
Union Minister for Science and Technology Dr Harsh Vardhan was, ... given an additional charge of the Environment Ministry after ...
Mimicking gene changes in mutant cherry tomatoes can nearly double production
Plant geneticists have figured out how to almost double the production of garden tomatoes. Though most of us care mainly ...
GMO rescue of American chestnut tree may take longer than anticipated
The nearly century-old effort to employ selective breeding to rescue the American chestnut, which has been rendered functionally extinct by ...
Americans pay less attention to ‘organic’ and ‘GMO’ in weighing food health benefits, survey finds
Determining what exactly is a "healthy" food has us all scratching our heads. A new survey suggests that most Americans ...
Hype and agroecology: Is ‘low input’ farming better for the environment and economy?
[Editor's note: Henry Miller, physician and molecular biologist, is a fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s ...
What would Whole Foods look like if it were ‘science-based’?
[Editor’s note: Jenny Splitter is a writer, storyteller and mother of two.] Whole Foods used to be my idea of ...
Feeding the world: Will GMO seeds rescue yields as global climates dry and heat up?
Take the argument that more heat- and drought-resistant seeds are what’s needed to cope with climate change. The good people ...
Why GMOs face tough go in China despite huge imports and successful crops
[Editor’s note: Mark Lynas is an author and journalist who reports on crop biotechnology around the world.] Sometimes I hear ...
