Europe
Top EU farm officials back gene editing, call for efforts to assuage concern about ‘unintended impacts’
The European Commission’s top agriculture civil servant said [October 1] he supports controversial gene-editing technologies, but called for more “assurances” ...
Neonicotinoid insecticide ban, dry weather threaten Europe’s ‘fragile’ sugar industry
The European Union is heading for a significant drop in sugar output this year after fields were devastated by pests ...
Viewpoint: Global food security threatened by Europe’s anti-GMO ‘food bullying’
The Farm to Fork program in Europe is designed to regulate food production in the E.U. as well as promote ...
Viewpoint: Food safety could be jeopardized in the EU if fungicides that kill cancer-causing toxins are banned
There are many countries that some Europeans will never visit, yet they eat food from these places every day. –For ...
Bayer, BASF, Corteva pledge $16.5 billion to help EU farmers cut pesticide use
Crop protection companies active in the European Union, including including BASF SE, Bayer AG, have pledged to spend $16.5 billion ...
Viewpoint: UN’s ‘hand-in-glove’ alliance with anti-pesticide groups cripples response to Africa’s ravenous locust swarms
In a year devastated by locust plagues, the COVID-19 pandemic, and massive flooding that displaced over a hundred thousand people ...
‘Ecocide’? Green groups blast France for lifting neonicotinoid pesticide ban to save sugar-beet growers
France has moved to reverse a ban on a class of pesticides only weeks after it came into force, reigniting ...
Viewpoint: US farm productivity shows Europe why rejecting biotech crops was a mistake
Over the past two decades, Europe has decided to go its own way in agricultural policy. While both North and ...
Viewpoint: Farm to Fork failure—How Europe’s ‘obsession’ with organics undermines the global sustainable farming movement
Europe’s quest to confront climate change and achieve carbon neutrality is being undermined by “Big Ag”? That’s not my claim. It’s the ...
‘Steadily increasing’ GMO acceptance in Europe fuels efforts to revise biotech restrictions
Since 1996 till 2018, the global area cultivated with GM crops has increased 113-fold, making biotech crops one of the ...
EU blocks Austria’s planned glyphosate ban, rejecting claim that weedkiller harms human health
The European Commission has blocked Austria from implementing a planned ban on the controversial weedkiller glyphosate, a document seen by ...
Viewpoint: Europe can’t produce enough food if it cuts use of farm chemicals but opposes gene editing
Europe is asking its farmers to use fewer pesticides and less fertilizer, while still producing the same amount of food ...
Viewpoint: Europe must abandon ‘fear of progress’ to defeat anti-science chemophobia
A site like European Scientist has one hope: that the 2020s will be the decade of renewal for European scientific ...
GMO herbicide-tolerant canola poses no hazard to human health, EU food safety officials find
Following the submission of application EFSA‐GMO‐RX‐002 .... from Monsanto Company, the Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms of EFSA (GMO) was ...
132 research institutes press Europe to embrace CRISPR crops
The European Sustainable Agriculture through Genome Editing (EU-SAGE) network and its members from 132 European research institutes and associations urge ...
Video: Debating Europe’s pro-organic Farm to Fork Green Deal—Sustainable agriculture or recipe for disaster?
One of the unpleasant lessons of the COVID pandemic is how little prepared we’ve been for an event that was, ...
Podcast: Europe suspends GMO rules to speed COVID vaccine; genes and coronavirus; Keto diet fights Alzheimer’s?
Europe has suspended some of its oppressive GMO regulations to speed development of a COVID-19 vaccine, drawing accusations of hypocrisy ...
EU environmental groups say proposed pesticide rules would ‘water down’ protection for pollinators
EU countries .... expressed their preference for a way of regulating potentially bee-harming pesticides that has been contested by environmental ...
Podcast: Homeopathic ‘drug’ passes peer review; EU: GMO crops bad, GMO medicine good; Wine industry wants CRISPR
Research validating a homeopathic 'drug' for erectile function was published in a peer-reviewed science journal. Europe's Green Party opposes genetic ...
Europe’s young farmers want to use latest sustainability tools—including gene editing
Young farmers’ organization, the European Council of Young Farmers (CEJA), took a generally positive but cautious view on the Commission’s ...
European Union suspends some GMO regulations to fast-track COVID-19 vaccine
The EU’s stance on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has been criticized by the Consumer Choice Center, which has labelled it ...
Support for crop gene editing in UK, Europe grows as legislators aim to expand sustainable farming
Asked about the potential for biotech and gene editing in the Farm to Fork strategy (F2F), the EU’s new flagship ...
Despite Europe’s strict GMO rules, biotechnology can still help farmers feed the continent
The EU has recently laid out a series of targets to dramatically reduce the amounts of chemicals used in European ...
Viewpoint: Organic food represents a ‘reactionary’ ideology that doesn’t support health or sustainable farming—and should not be subsidized
The health and environmental benefits claimed by organic agriculture are based on shaky scientific foundations ...
European Food Safety Authority rebuffs activist criticism of its safety assessment of insect and herbicide resistant GMO crops
The Risk “Assessment of genetically engineered organisms in the EU and Switzerland” (RAGES) project (2016‐2019) evaluated the risk assessment of ...
Green Party defends Europe’s simultaneous ban on gene-edited crops and use of biotech in medicine
[Editor's note: In June a faction of Germany's Green Party argued it was time the EU revised its strict regulation ...
Could success of Europe’s only cultivated GMO crop help ease public fear of biotechnology?
Within the spirit of breaking the taboo around [GMOs], we had decided to start working on a manuscript a few ...
