Kenyan Policy Makers Vouch for Commercialization of Bt Cotton

Kenyan policy makers have promised to fast-track Bt cotton growing in the country. This is after participating in a study tour of India’s Bt cotton program from September 17-22, 2018, together with other senior government officials from various regulatory and cotton value chain players. India’s cotton sub-sector actors led by Dr. P. G. Patil, Director…

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Bill Gates: GMO Seeds Can Help Farmers Adapt to Climate Change

In a conference call during the Global Climate Action Summit held in San Francisco on September 12-14, 2018, Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said that the power of innovation should extend to climate change. Gates believes that innovation will be key to confronting climate change, helping those affected by it,…

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China’s adoption of GMO cotton launched 25-year decline in ‘hazardous’ pesticide use

China has experienced large and sustained reductions in pesticide use as a result of adopting GMO cotton, according to the largest-ever scientific study on the impacts of Bt cotton use in that country. The study, lead-authored by Wei Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute, examines cotton pest severity and insecticide use at a county scale…

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GMOs Are Not Agriculture’s Future – Biotech Is

As we face our global food security challenges, are gene-editing techniques replacing the decades-old “genetic modification” as the go-to tool? Peter Beetham, a plant scientist and CEO of the agricultural biotech firm Cibus, writes in Scientific American about how this “new revolution in plant breeding” is ushering in a new era of agriculture innovation: As…

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Biotech crops could soften impact of climate change, Gates Foundation says

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) just released its 2018 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report. Two alarming facts immediately stand out. First, for the third straight year …. the number of undernourished people in the world has increased …. 821 million people are undernourished; about 50 million more…

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Future food supply focus of research in The Netherlands

One of the world’s leading agricultural research institutions wants to be sure there is enough safe, sustainably produced healthy food available for the world’s growing population. Increasing potential yields is the focus of research at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Dr. Arthur Mol is Vice Chancellor and Vice Chairman of Agricultural research. “I think I’m…

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Kansas Wheat Commission to fund gene editing research at K-State

MANHATTAN, Kan. – The Kansas Wheat Commission has announced that it is putting its support behind a technology being advanced at Kansas State University and that one researcher says will bring “many new discoveries” in improving wheat. The university has been working with wheat gene editing since 2014, and recently published findings of a study…

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Scientists Use CRISPR-Cas9 to Accelerate Breeding for Modified Starch in Cassava

Cassava’s increasing economic importance but difficulty to improve genetically are what motivated scientist Herve Vanderschuren from Institute of Molecular Plant Biology in Switzerland and colleagues to utilize genome editing to accelerate breeding for modified starch in cassava.  Cassava plays a big role as a staple food and a highly favored commodity in the multibillion starch…

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NAICC: Are GMOs Really Safe?

A few months ago, I talked about some questions concerning genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that we hear from our friends and neighbors. Consumers have a lot of fear and animosity toward GMOs, and those who think GM crops are unsafe and harmful fail to understand why farmers would plant such crops. However, a lot of…

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