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: Erratic weather from climate change is biggest threat facing Kenyan crops. Gene-editing technology could help, farmer says
How do farmers define sustainability on their farms? Find out how Kenyan farmer Felix Kili views the issue, and how ...
Viewpoint: ‘Depression and now anarchy’ — How rejecting agricultural technology and vanity of ‘green’, organic farming led to Sri Lanka’s collapse
The anarchic scenes in Sri Lanka are enough to make the blood of any world leader run cold. President Gotabaya ...
Viewpoint: Solved! Busting pro-organic, anti-GMO myths
Over the years, we have experienced a massive increase in the consumption of organic foods, with many people painting conventional ...
Viewpoint: Will Biden and the ‘progressive left’ muster independence to embrace agricultural gene editing and its carbon-capture potential?
Carbon capture has often been touted as an alternative to dealing with climate change that does not involve laying waste ...
Viewpoint: Organic milk requires expensive feed and labor. Not even huge subsidies can save this supposedly sustainable market from scams and inefficiency
US organic dairy export volumes have consistently fallen since 2017. Since that year, organic fluid milk exports have fallen 76%, ...
Viewpoint: Why Rwanda and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa need to embrace genetically modified crops
According to the recent publication “Plant biotechnology: A key tool to improve crop production in Rwanda” intensive and appealing discussions ...
Dicamba drift: Court upholds judgement against Bayer but orders new trial to assess damages
Monsanto Co. and BASF Corp. are liable for the herbicide dicamba’s damage to a farmer’s peach orchards, the Eighth Circuit ...
How genetically engineered crops could super-charge efforts to address climate change
You can create a stable carbon capture system by genetically engineering plants to grow more extensive roots and pump more carbon ...
World Economic Forum: How genetically engineered crops can fight climate change
Food systems account for over one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Any successful strategy for reaching the ambitious — and critical ...
Facing rising pesticide and labor costs, Bangladesh poised to approve sustainable insect-resistant Bt GMO cotton
With Bangladesh likely to approve commercial cultivation of genetically modified Bt cotton varieties sourced from an Indian company soon, seed ...
Holy grail for agricultural science? What role could artificial intelligence (AI) play in growing more food?
We need to merge artificial intelligence with synthetic biology, a field of science that involves redesigning organisms to have useful ...
Mmmm, kelp burgers! Would you swap meat for seaweed?
Consider, if you will, the possibility that we left our most promising resource behind in the ocean. Will you swap ...
Climate change-fighting rice? Plants trap carbon dioxide as they grow — and CRISPR gene editing can optimize this process
Can gene-editing technology CRISPR create new crops that help fight climate change as they grow? That’s what a group of ...
Viewpoint: Why Europe’s proposed Green Deal Farm to Fork strategy will be a disaster for Africa
Agricultural programs funded by the EU have in the past mainly focused on the technologies that Europe wanted to promote ...
‘43% lower yields’: Challenging common wisdom, organic farming is ‘less efficient, more expensive, and worse for the environment’
Consumers are misled about the alleged benefits of organic farming. Organic food is thought to be healthier (it isn’t) and ...
Should California ban the neonicotinoid pesticide imidacloprid? Here are arguments pro and con
Should imidacloprid be banned? Here's an argument for and against banning the pesticide in California ...
CRISPR is already transforming medicine. Next up? Addressing climate change challenges
The advent of CRISPR allowed us to create new molecular tools for potentially skipping the slow aspects of plant tissue ...
Road to sustainable GMO salmon production: AquaBounty’s endless slog through broken US regulatory system
AquaBounty's transgenic salmon is the first GM animal protein approved for human consumption in the United States and Canada ...
Viewpoint: ‘Farmers don’t need nitrogen fertilizers at all’? — Why easy solutions to cut down on chemical fertilizers don’t work
Clover, it turns out, can be used to fix nitrogen and boost yields in pasture forages for dairy cows. Who ...
Viewpoint: GMO technology is ‘no threat’ to indigenous Ethiopian crops. Here’s why
Should we be worried about losing our indigenous crops because of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)? The answer is an outright ...
Glyphosate: A timeline of the controversial weedkiller’s history and legal troubles
How did we get here? The timeline below includes some of the more significant events, starting with Monsanto's founding ...
CRISPR runs through it: From targeting diseases to transforming farming, gene editing has ushered in a science revolution
CRISPR continues to create new avenues for exploration and reinvigorate old studies ...
What role can genetics play in ‘designing’ more sustainable crops, livestock and trees?
Genome engineers have deployed CRISPR tools in species from viruses and bacteria to plants and trees including species used in ...
A single kilo of saffron is worth up to $10,000. Here’s the genetic history of the world’s most expensive spice
When and where was saffron first domesticated by our ancestors? In a review in Frontiers in Plant Science, researchers conclude that ...
Rice enrichment: GMO crops are coming to the Philippines. Experts are optimistic
Last year, the Philippines approved Golden Rice–a genetically modified variant of rice–to combat malnutrition and vitamin A deficiency in the ...
Video: Honeybee apocalypse? Yet another scientist challenges claims that bees used mostly in agriculture are under threat. Wild bees? That’s another story
German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder challenges what she calls the ‘myth’ that honeybees are facing catastrophic health challenges ...
Viewpoint: ‘Win-win for food security’ — Why Uganda needs both biotechnology and agroecology to feed itself as climate change roils farming
Over the past decade or so, many ordinary farmers especially in developing countries including Uganda, have been thrown into a ...
