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.
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 ...
Plants that ‘fertilize themselves’? Gene discovery could lead to reductions in synthetic fertilizer use
The lessons of plant diversity and competition learned from a clover patch, which are featured in a special issue of ...
Israel will not require additional regulations for gene-edited plants
Danziger Innovations announces that the Israeli National Committee for Transgenic Plants (NCTP) has made yet another major step in regulating ...
US flower sellers forced to destroy 9 varieties of petunias after tests show they’re genetically modified
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced [May 16] that U.S. flower distributors have begun to destroy countless petunia plants ...
India’s first approval of GMO food—mustard—could open door to over 100 GE food products
After many ifs and buts, the commercial release of genetically modified (GM) mustard seems to have reached a decisive phase ...
China agrees to evaluate 8 GMO crops in trade deal with US, ending long delay
China's promise to evaluate eight varieties of U.S. genetically modified crops by the end of [May 2017] under a trade ...
GLP’s Jon Entine: Gene editing will cut time, costs of commercializing new genetically engineered crops
Monsanto, the world’s largest producer of GMO seeds, is betting that a new technology called gene editing may calm consumers ...
EU to propose 10-year extension of glyphosate herbicide
The European Commission will propose extending by 10 years its approval for weed-killer glyphosate, used in Monsanto's Roundup, a spokeswoman ...
Plaintiffs suing Monsanto over alleged carcinogenicity of herbicide glyphosate say EPA colluded with company
For 12 years, [Christine] Sheppard had no idea what might have caused her non-Hodgkin's lymphoma -- until a group of ...
Has ‘big data’ lived up to its promise to revolutionize farming?
For farmers—and the tech companies that want them as customers—data has been a disappointment. A few years ago, the agricultural ...
Canadian parliament voting on mandatory GMO food label
Members of the Canadian Parliament will decide whether to approve mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods in a vote in ...
UK approves field trial of GM potatoes resistant to blight and nematode
In the United Kingdom, farming minister George Eustice (DEFRA) has approved a four-year trial of genetically modified (GM) potatoes at ...
CSPI’s Greg Jaffe: USDA should regulate GMOs, gene-edited crops based on end-product, not process
[Editor's note: Greg Jaffe is the Director of the Project on Biotechnology for the Center for Science in the Public ...
Pink GM pineapple with high levels of antioxidants unlikely to boost human health
[Editor's note: Layla Katiraee is a scientist with a PhD in Molecular Genetics.] A couple of months ago, I saw ...
UK’s Labour Party ‘pledges to ban’ neonicotinoid insecticides if it takes power
Neonicotinoid seed treatments will be banned if Labour forms the next government, according to a leaked draft of the party’s ...
‘Organic civil war’: Do advocates care about promoting food security and sustainability?
Last June [2016] Stephanie Strom, reporting for the New York Times, broke the story about how Whole Foods had upset ...
Ghana suspends GMO cotton field trials after Monsanto withdraws funding
[Ghana's] Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has suspended trials of GMO cotton in the country after US Company ...
From kale to cows: Modern supermarket full of foods genetically modified by humans
Here are just a few of the modern supermarket offerings that we have been genetically modifying for centuries: Cow and ...
‘Unstoppable’: How corn took over America’s farmland
Farmers who had long rotated plantings among a diverse group of grains are increasingly turning to a single one. Corn ...
How Trump’s ‘get-tough’ immigration policy is impacting agricultural technology innovation
President Donald Trump's get-tough attitude on immigration is spurring a surge of high-tech investment in America's heartland, where farmers are ...
Coming age of CRISPR gene editing: What in heck is the ‘Pink Chicken Project’?
A new website called "the Pink Chicken Project" offers up an intriguing nugget of an idea: what if we turned ...
Podcast: Horticulturalist Kevin Folta exposes US Right to Know’s smear campaign against biotech scientists
The development of GMOs have helped farmers feed more people and create sustainable methods in modern agriculture. But that fact ...
India expected to approve 3 indigenously developed varieties of insect-resistant GMO Bt cotton
The government is expected to soon allow commercial release of three genetically modified (Bt) and indigenously developed varieties of cotton ...
What does USDA organic label really mean? WaPo investigation finds imported corn and soy often mislabelled
A shipment of 36 million pounds of soybeans sailed late [2016] from Ukraine to Turkey to California. Along the way, ...
What role can crop biotechnology play in feeding Nigeria’s growing population?
[Editor's note: Modesta Nnedinso Abugu is program assistant for the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology-Nigeria Chapter and Fellow of Cornell University’s ...
Federal judge rules EPA did not consider potential impact of neonicotinoids on insects besides bees
A Minnesota beekeeper has won a round against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a protracted lawsuit over a ...
If biofortified crops are goal, both genetic engineering and conventional breeding necessary
[Dr Swati Puranik, of the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences at Aberystwyth University in the UK] and her ...
