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.
Viewpoint: What the US can learn from Sri Lanka’s disastrous ‘green’ embrace of anti-GMO hysteria?
Since Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948, its agricultural policies focused on reaching self-sufficiency in food production. Thanks to chemical fertilizers, pesticides, modern ...
Viewpoint: Are predictions of market chaos from Mexico’s proposed GM corn ban overhyped?
Negotiations between the United States and Mexican governments continue over Mexico’s planned phaseout of imports of genetically modified corn, first ...
How digital innovations can spur a Fourth Agricultural Revolution
Two billion people in the world currently suffer from malnutrition and according to some estimates, we need 60% more food ...
Viewpoint: Indigenous historical wisdom can play a key role in developing sustainable food systems
In the past century, Indigenous knowledge has been dismissed in different ways. Take the Green Revolution, a vast increase in ...
Food waste revolution? How upcycled garbage can help build a more sustainable future
Edible by-products from food manufacturing are a potential resource that can be tapped to sustainably increase food supply, reduce obesity ...
Neonicotinoids are restricted or banned in some European countries. Why is it so hard to find safer and more effective alternative pesticides?
The [French] government has just issued a decree authorizing, by way of exemption, the use in 2023 of sugar beet ...
‘We’re in the biotech era’: The push to make cattle and dairy production more sustainable
With rising temperatures and worsening drought, scientists are dreaming up ways to ensure farming and agriculture can be better for ...
Did India’s GM mustard approval circumvent the law as anti-GMO activists claim?
The Coalition of GM-free India, a group of NGOs opposing genetically modified crops, released a report on [January 6], alleging ...
Viewpoint: Changing mindsets — Organic agriculture is less efficient than conventional farming and has a larger carbon footprint
The United Nations recently confirmed that the world population has officially reached 8 billion. However, what should be a celebration ...
How do Japanese consumers view the coming era of gene-edited food?
Are genome-edited foods trusted? The National Federation of Consumer Organizations (Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo) has recently released the results of a consumer ...
Viewpoint: MIT turns blind eye to misinformation on agricultural biotechnology and vaccines promoted by ‘infamous crank’ computer scientist Stephanie Seneff
How long before academics who spout anti-vaccine nonsense related to COVID-19 get a level of accountability academics who spouted anti-vaccine ...
Viewpoint: The case for the UK Parliament to approve CRISPR-based precision breeding — and why regulators should not throw GMOs under the bus
If you had the power to cut food prices and carbon emissions and improve animal welfare in a single stroke, ...
Heat-tolerant wheat: How we can increase yields of this staple crop despite rising temperatures
Wheat now provides 20% of the calories consumed by humans every day, but its production is under threat. Thanks to human-induced ...
Viewpoint: Plant-based foods need tighter environmental and regulatory scrutiny
So far, research on meat substitutes has emphasised commercialisation, technological enhancements and lowering costs, with little attention paid to regulatory ...
Why biodiversity is so essential to pollinator health
Biodiversity is essential for effective crop production and the health of our natural resources. It sustains the ecosystems that underpin ...
Next generation climate-sensitive agriculture: Slew of CRISPR crops are in development that limit buildup of carbon in the atmosphere
There is a push to use CRISPR to make agricultural technologies that pull carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air and store ...
Viewpoint: LEGO’s ‘The Organic Garden’ — Exclusive promotion of organic farming provides a misleading picture of agriculture
My brothers and I loved playing with LEGOs growing up. We would make little farms and towns. We had houses ...
Unlike most of the rest of the world, the European Union uses 30-year old ‘precautionary principle’ to regulate GMOs and gene editing, effectively banning them. Here is a primer
The European Union (EU) has been at the forefront of the debate around genetically modified organisms (GMOs), with the region implementing a ...
Dietary bogeyman? Is oxalate the root of dozens of food-related diseases — as alternative medicine advocates claim?
You will hear oxalate demonized by Sally K. Norton, who has just published a book about her theory. It’s called Toxic ...
Viewpoint: Rejecting CRISPR-edited crops is ‘one of the biggest shortcomings of the European legal system’
Some countries, such as the United States, Canada or Japan, are beginning to regulate CRISPR, which is postulated as one ...
Podcast: Preventing crop damage from pests, diseases, and weeds? Here’s why South African farmers ‘can’t afford to overlook biotech seeds’
On this week’s episode of Farmer’s Inside Track, Chantel Arendse, the lead for plant biotechnology at CropLife SA, joins us ...
Video: Darling 58 American chestnut tree — Tik Tok video addresses deploying genetic modification to restore one of America’s most ecologically valuable keystone species
A genetically modified American chestnut tree is being reviewed for deregulation! The public comment period is open until 12/27/22 ...
European Council of Young Farmers: Why the European Parliament should approve use of CRISPR and other New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) in plants
Based on the strong belief that there is no single pathway to sustainability in agriculture, new genomic techniques (NGTs) – ...
‘Making sci-fi a reality’: CRISPR gene editing can dramatically lower cost of cell-based lab-grown meat
Most companies are trying to create lab-grown meat with little to no genetic engineering, which despite shifts in attitude is ...
427,000 global deaths a year? Study claims bee decline stunts yields of fruits, vegetables and nuts
The global decline of bees and other pollinators is stunting yields of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Scientists estimate that the ...
Survey on consumer acceptance of CRISPR and other plant-breeding biotechnologies: Would consumers pay higher prices for tastier and fresher grapes?
Since genetically engineered crops were first introduced in the mid-1990s, they have faced considerable barriers to market acceptance. In these ...
Will climate change lead to future food crises?
All the world organizations have already grasped the importance of this climate change, and they have rolled up their sleeves ...
