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: ‘We are paying for genetic engineering bashing by groups that have used fear to put forward organic-centric diet’, says Canadian agri-food professor
About 15 per cent of all calories on Earth come from wheat. Corn covers a lot of calorific ground as ...
GMO cowpeas cut chemical spraying by 3/4 in Nigerian trials, but ‘environmentalist’ opponents lobby for ban
Research conducted by the Cornell University Alliance for Science, an independent nonprofit research institute, observed that Nigeria imports an estimated ...
Sustainable meat? Debate over the benefits (or drawbacks) of cell-based beef and chicken more nuanced than critics and supporters acknowledge
In 2016 I was pretty optimistic about lab grown meat, and now I am still optimistic but more tempered. I think ...
‘Textbook case of how a government can cause a debt crisis’: Organic food mandate and agricultural chemical ban gutted Sri Lanka’s tea export market
Before 2019, Sri Lanka was self-sufficient in food. The government elected that year banned pesticides so that only organic farming ...
How genetically-engineered salmon could help preserve wild populations — if it isn’t blocked by anti-GMO activist groups
Salmon are iconic keystone species across the northern Pacific and Atlantic basins. Salmon is also a prized human delicacy. Wild ...
Viewpoint: What are the most serious hurdles blocking mass adoption of gene editing in agriculture?
Since the academic discovery of gene editing, farmers, researchers and all of agriculture have heard many promises about its potential ...
‘Consumers have finally become aware of certain realities’: Rising inflation and food crisis have cut organic produce sales in France
The increase in the prices of fuels, gas and foodstuffs has directly impacted the household budget to the point of ...
Kenyan cows produce 1/10th as much milk as those in Britain — If adopted, gene editing could dramatically improve quality and safety of African livestock
East Coast Fever (ECF) is rampant [in African countries]. ECF, which is caused by protozoan parasites spread by ticks, kills ...
Viewpoint: Guilt-tripping kids about meat consumption? Rancher mom challenges view that cell-based meat is preferable to real thing
In the latest issue of this paid subscription publication that goes to 250,000 schools across the United States, Junior Scholastic ...
Viewpoint: Europe’s organic-centered farm policy is a blueprint for what the United States should not do
The EU's "farm to fork" strategy has been in the works for some years; it represents the overall sustainability ambitions of the ...
Viewpoint: Can organic farming overcome its sizable yield lag and address climate change challenges?
Organic farming isn’t more climate-friendly than conventional agriculture when looking strictly at emissions. In a comparative analysis of the environmental impacts of ...
The Fate of Food review: How technology will shape food of the future
To take a look at what the future of food might look like, we talked to experts to come up ...
‘GMO debate controlled by non-scientific groups to the detriment of global hunger’, writes Harvard economist
Activists who mistakenly believe that GMOs are dangerous to consume have teamed up with pesticide and insecticide sellers to restrict ...
Battling climate change with carbon-sucking poplar trees
Is old-fashioned photosynthesis up to the task of managing the enormous amount of carbon (roughly 36 billion tons per year) ...
Precision fermentation: New genetic modification process could make anything from fossil-free biofuels to animal-free milk and cow-free cheese
Known as precision fermentation, the process is a hot topic because it can be used to make anything from fossil-free ...
How gene editing can tailor crops to consumer preferences
Is there anything better than a perfectly sweet summer strawberry? Alas, many commercial berries look better than they taste. But ...
Fertilizer-reducing genetically modified barley trials greenlit in the UK
Defra has approved field trials of genetically modified barley that scientists say could reduce the need for synthetic fertilisers. The ...
Insect-resistant GMO cowpea trials wow Nigerian farmers with jumping yields and lower costs — but other farmers remain hesitant
Last August, the farmers were given cowpea seeds genetically modified (GM) to resist the destructive pod-borer insect pest and improve ...
Renewable bioplastics offer sustainable alternative to petroleum-based products
Most plastics today come from petroleum. About three-quarters of every barrel of oil goes to make gasoline, diesel and jet ...
‘Gene edited crops are necessary to sustainably feed the world’ — German agroecology and organic advocate challenges his own community
Urs Niggli, long-time director of the Research Institute for Organic Farming FibL and now President of the Institute for Agroecology, ...
Vitamin-A enhanced Golden Rice seeds distributed for planting for the first time in the Philippines
Finally, a rice that is infused with vitamin A will soon be served on the tables of Filipino households. After ...
‘From 12 chemical applications to 2’: Ghanian scientists urge final approval of breakthrough pesticide-reducing GMO cowpea
More than 100 science activists have in a letter to the National Biosafety Authority, urged it to approve Ghana’s first ...
Podcast: A decade after CRISPR’s discovery, medicine and farming are undergoing dramatic revolutions
In 2012, the discovery of the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 revolutionised scientists’ ability to modify DNA. Ten years on, host Alok ...
‘Almost all crops today have been changed from their original form’: National Academies of Sciences says GMOs just most recent form of food genetic modification
People have been changing plants for thousands of years. Humans started farming more than 10,000 years. Agriculture began in Mesopotamia, ...
Plant microbiome: Key to weaning agriculture off chemical inputs?
All plants interact with bacteria and fungi in the soil. Some plants are especially good at it. Understanding what drives ...
Viewpoint: Environmental Working Group’s scaremongering Dirty Dozen list of ‘pesticide coated’ fruits and veggies loses influence
The Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen shoppers guides to avoiding pesticide residue used to be a huge splash in ...
With animal feed and food prices soaring across Africa, Kenya relaxes GMO import ban
The persistent high cost of animal feeds and supply chain difficulties will continue to make eggs and milk expensive, manufacturers have said ...
