Crops & Food Archives - Genetic Literacy Project: Recent Episodes
None
Across Nigerian farms, market stalls and WhatsApp groups, one word is triggering fear, hope and fury in equal measure: Genetically Modified Organism.
To some, it is the scientific answer to hunger — cowpea that yields 20 bags instead of 4, maize that survives drought and pests. To others, it is a Trojan horse — seeds we cannot save, owned by foreign corporations, planted in a country where farmers are already being killed off their land.
The anxiety is no longer just about safety. It is about sovereignty. About survival.
Nigeria has crossed the line from GMO sceptic to GMO adopter. We are the first African country to commercialise a GM food crop with pod-borer-resistant cowpea. TELA maize is now in our fields. Bt cotton is already on our farms. Meanwhile, hybrid tomato seedlings sell for N200,000 a bag, and seedless pawpaw is quietly replacing the trees in our compounds.
But here is the fog: most of what farmers complain about is not GMO at all. It is counterfeit hybrid seed. Insecurity in Benue and Plateau has turned our food basket into a graveyard. It is a government distributing millions of bags of “improved” seed without ever explaining the difference between hybrid, certified, and genetically modified.
So, what are we really sowing? Better yields? Or a new dependency?
In this Bottom Line, we separate science from speculation, fact from fear, and ask the hard question: As Nigeria plants the seeds of biotechnology, are we also planting the seeds of agricultural colonialism?
A GMO is a plant, microorganism or animal whose genetic makeup has been altered to express desired traits, usually for higher yields. The debate around it has spread from laboratories to beer parlours because it touches everything: what we eat, who owns our food, and who controls our future.
The science on safety is contested, and that is the problem. In 2015, about 300 scientists, physicians and legal scholars wrote in “Environmental Sciences Europe” that there is a scarcity of independent, long-term feeding studies. They noted that much of the reassuring research comes from biotech companies themselves. Groups like the Centre for Food Safety argue that without epidemiological studies on humans, claims of total safety go beyond the evidence.
But other bodies disagree. In 2016, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine reviewed decades of data. They found no substantiated differences in health outcomes, including cancer and allergies, between populations that eat GM foods and those that don’t. The Genetic Literacy Project catalogued more than 280 science and health bodies worldwide, and over 3,000 peer-reviewed studies concluding that approved GM crops carry no more risk than conventionally bred crops.
Japan’s expert panels reached the same view in 2019, and the WHO considers approved GMOs on the international market safe to eat.
The picture, therefore, is not settled. It is an ongoing debate, and in developing countries where GMOs are making serious inroads, that uncertainty itself becomes a risk.
The numbers proponents cite on food security are hard to ignore. In Nigeria, farmers using approved pod-borer-resistant cowpea report harvests rising from 3 or 4 bags per hectare to more than 20, with some reporting over 80 bags from 100kg of planted seed. Pesticide spraying has dropped from multiple applications to as little as one.
TELA maize, approved for commercial release in January 2024, has shown yield advantages of up to 10 tonnes per hectare under good practice, against a national average of 6 tonnes. Field reports from our regulators cite gains of 20 to 35 per cent under pest pressure and erratic rainfall. For a country battling inflation and import bills, that looks like food security. But yield is only half the equation. The other half is control.
In practice, a shopper cannot identify a GMO by looking. The old PLU code system that reserved “8” for GM produce was dropped in 2015 and never used at retail. In the U.S., packaged foods must now carry a “bioengineered” label or QR code. Organic certification excludes GMOs by law.
In Nigeria, the National Biosafety Management Agency Act of 2015 requires labelling, risk assessment and public engagement for any approved GM product. The job falls to NBMA and NBRDA. The question is whether that promise is being kept on the ground, in the market where most Nigerians buy food.
The conspiracy dimension will not die. Social media keeps recycling claims of “terminator seeds” — GM seeds engineered to be sterile so farmers must buy new seed every season. The Genetic Literacy Project notes no such sterile GM seed has ever been commercially planted anywhere. Yet the claim persists, including a 2015 assertion by activist Vandana Shiva on GM mustard in India.
Bill Gates has also been dragged in. Africa Check and Dubawa traced viral clips accusing him of using GMOs and vaccines to depopulate Africa to two speeches from 2010 and 2015 edited out of context. Academic studies of GMO discussions online find recurring clusters linking GMOs to Monsanto, to COVID-19, to vaccine misinformation.
But debunking conspiracies does not erase a real worry: concentration. A handful of corporations dominate the global seed market. Monsanto, now Bayer, is the biggest name. Market domination does not prove sterilisation or depopulation. It does prove power.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPHas GMO reached Nigeria? Yes, and decisively. NBMA approved Bt cotton first, then pod-borer-resistant cowpea in 2019. That made Nigeria the first African country to commercialise a GM food crop. Then came four TELA maize varieties—SAMMAZ 72T, 73T, 74T, and 75T—commercialised in January 2024. Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, developed them locally under the TELA Maize Public-Private Partnership coordinated by the African Agricultural Technology Foundation.
A genetically engineered, late-blight-resistant potato is in regulatory field trials, with commercial release possible from 2025. GM tomato and GM rice remain in trials and are not approved for commercial planting. That distinction matters, because “tomato” is what comes up most in public anxiety.
Globally, GM cultivation is concentrated. Five countries — the U.S., Brazil, Argentina, India and Canada — account for roughly 91 per cent of the world’s GM crop area. Brazil has overtaken the U.S. in recent years. Since around 2012, developing countries collectively plant more GM area than developed ones, led by soybean, maize, cotton and canola. In Africa, South Africa leads, with Nigeria emerging as the next most active adopter. Ghana has moved far more slowly amid civil-society resistance.
This is where the colonialism fear enters. Beyond safety sits a Nigerian unease about a quiet inflow of new planting material. Farmers allege cereals, pawpaw, tomatoes, cassava stems and citrus arrive through commercial and donor channels. To be clear: apart from TELA maize, none of these, as commonly sold to smallholders, are approved GM varieties. What most farmers encounter are hybrids — F1 products of conventional cross-breeding, not genetic engineering. The distinction matters for diagnosis, even if the anxiety about dependency is real.
The complaint is simple and agronomic: seed saved from a hybrid tomato, maize or cassava harvest performs poorly or fails when replanted. Hybrid seed is bred to concentrate traits in the first generation. Saved seed separates in the second, losing vigour. Companies therefore advise buying fresh seed each season.
Worse, experts warn of substandard or counterfeit seed sold as certified. Professor Lateef Sanni of FUNAAB says such seed damages root formation and canopy. Professor Samuel Olakojo of IAR&T notes many farmers still plant ordinary grain that has lost genetic potential through repeated reuse, depressing yields well below the 2 tonnes per hectare Nigerian maize could deliver.
Whether the seed is a genuine hybrid or fake, the effect is the same: farmers must return to a supplier every season, at a price they do not control. In 2026, a handful of tomato seedlings sold for as high as ₦200,000 in some areas, with no guarantee of yield.
Civil-society voices call this modern imperialism. Duke Tagoe of Food Sovereignty Ghana argues seeds entering African markets remain the property of foreign corporations, not African entities. A recent scholarly paper describes the adoption of hybrid and GM systems as “agro-epistemicide”—the erosion of indigenous seed-saving knowledge in favour of perpetual dependency. It echoes colonial patterns in which imported systems displaced local ones in the name of modernisation.
Regulators push back. An NBRDA-backed op-ed argues Nigeria’s approved GM crops were developed substantially by Nigerian scientists at ABU under domestic biosafety oversight. That, they say, is capacity-building, not imposition.
I saw the dilemma in a pawpaw. After receiving one as a gift, I cut it open to find no seeds at all. Beyond taste, the question was harder: how does pawpaw renew itself in Nigeria if seedless varieties displace the seed-bearing trees in our compounds? The donor had urged uprooting existing trees for the new variety, chasing immediate gain at the expense of long-term reproduction. Many Nigerians, unknowingly, have become distributors of such non-regenerating varieties through acts of goodwill.
Tomato growers add another complaint: imported and hybrid varieties bred for other climates underperform on Nigerian soil without heavy fertiliser, amendments or irrigation. Extension guides already advise soil testing before planting such varieties. The complaint is genuine, even if it reflects ordinary breeding trade-offs rather than sabotage.
Where is government in all this? Not absent. The Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, through the National Agricultural Seeds Council, flagged off a Renewed Hope Seed Support Programme that delivered 46 metric tonnes of certified seed to 4,600 farmers in Zamfara in 2026. The Bank of Agriculture reported distributing 1.8 million bags of fertiliser and 329,000 bags of high-yielding seed to nearly 500,000 farmers in over 20 states. The Federal Government also flagged off the distribution of one million improved hybrid cocoa seedlings nationwide in mid-2026 through CRIN. The Nigerian Conservation Foundation runs seed-exchange schemes in Yobe.
Officials describe this as productivity and food security. The Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Senator Abubakar Kyari, says the 2025–2026 allocation of more than 10 per cent of the annual budget to agriculture, plus these interventions, has helped moderate food inflation.
What is missing is public education. No sustained campaign has explained the difference between certified seed, hybrid seed, and GM seed. That gap is where fear grows.
And the fear is fertilised by blood. According to Nigeria Watch, at least 12,954 Nigerians were killed in violence-related incidents in 2025, with 5,272 more between January and May 2026 — over 18,000 in 17 months. The Global Terrorism Index recorded a 46 per cent increase in terrorism-related deaths in 2025, and incidents rose from about 120 to 171.
The food-producing states bear the brunt. More than 2,200 people were killed in Plateau between 2023 and early 2026. More than 3,600 were killed in Benue in the same period. Amnesty International documented at least 2,600 deaths across 135 attacks on 50 communities in both states between January 2023 and February 2024. Over 500,000 have been displaced. The June 2025 attack on Yelwata in Benue killed more than 100. In the middle of the 2026 planting season, fresh attacks killed over 40 farmers in a month and closed village markets.
Livestock theft and grazing violence have compounded this across Kebbi, Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto and Niger, displacing an estimated one million people. On 26 November 2025, the President declared a national security emergency after attacks in Kwara, Kebbi and Niger in which over 350 people were abducted.
Is it coordinated? The Tor Tiv, James Ortese Iorzua Ayatse, calls the Benue attacks a calculated invasion and land-grab. Emeka Umeagbalasi of Intersociety alleges government inaction reflects complicity in a religious domination agenda. Whether or not that is true, the result is the same: land is being emptied, and with it, our capacity to feed ourselves.
So what should be done? For government: invest as much in public understanding as in biosafety science. Run a plain-language campaign separating certified, hybrid and GM seed. Equip NASC to crack down on counterfeit seed, which breeders already flag as a major driver of crop failure. Protect farmers with the same urgency as other critical infrastructure, especially in Benue, Plateau, Zamfara, Katsina and Kebbi during planting and harvest. Build community and national seed banks to preserve open-pollinated and indigenous varieties that farmers can save and replant. Give them an alternative to total commercial dependency.
For farmers and associations: organise collective seed verification and bulk purchase to reduce exposure to fakes. Press NASC for redress when certified seed fails. Expand cooperative seed banks like the Yobe pilot—demand in writing the origin, performance and replanting status of any new variety before accepting it.
For the public and media: treat GMO claims like any extraordinary claim. Check NBMA and NBRDA before sharing. Journalists must unpack corporate dependency, weak regulation and the link between insecurity and food. Investigate, constantly.
| | Related on the SLP Embracing biotech crops and why Nigeria’s GMO fight is far from over |
Nigeria’s seed anxiety is not irrational. Parts of it are misdirected, but the core is real. We have adopted GMOs, with locally developed varieties showing documented yield gains. What has not kept pace is public literacy about what a GMO actually is, and how it differs from hybrid and often substandard seed that traps farmers in cycles of costly repurchase.
Layered onto that is a food-belt security crisis that is real, escalating and data-backed. When farmers are killed off their land, it does not matter whether the seed is GM or hybrid. The harvest will not come.
We are at a crossroads. We can plant biotechnology and call it progress. Or we can plant it without sovereignty, without security, without knowledge — and call it survival.
The seeds we plant today will determine what Nigeria eats tomorrow. The question is not just whether they will grow. It is: who will own them when they do?
And if we do not answer that now, we may wake up to find that while we were debating GMOs, we lost the most important seed of all — the seed of self-reliance.
A version of this article was originally posted at Punch and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Punch on X @MobilePunch
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Which would make you feel worse — losing $100 to a pickpocket on a busy street or donating $100 to charity, only to find out it was a scam? For many people, it’s the latter. Being cheated by someone you decided to trust is distinctly infuriating.
Getting suckered triggers strong emotions — and not only fury. Researchers studying cybercrimes have been documenting an array of effects on the mental and physical health of victims of scams. But while it clearly pays to be skeptical, especially as online scams proliferate and grow increasingly sophisticated, research suggests there’s also a price to pay for being too wary. When the fear of getting suckered looms too large, it changes people’s decision-making and behavior in potentially harmful ways, with underappreciated implications for the law, public policy and society as a whole.
“It’s a very basic dilemma that people continuously confront,” says Carsten De Dreu, a behavioral scientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. When you extend trust to someone and they reciprocate, you both stand to gain, De Dreu says. But when people are overly afraid of being suckered, “they may not come forward, they may not start to cooperate, and hence this whole positive cycle of reciprocation and mutual benefit cannot evolve.”
The sucker in the mirrorFeeling suckered doesn’t just result from money-losing scams. Everyday experiences can evoke the same emotions. You might feel it on your daily commute after tapping the brakes to let some jerk cut in front of you. Or after you do the hardest part of a work project and your slacker colleagues get an equal share of the credit.
There’s a reason for that extra bit of irritation. “The difference between being duped and other forms of exploitation is that, when people feel duped, they see an element of themselves in what occurred,” says Kathleen Vohs, a social psychologist at the University of Minnesota. “They view their own behaviors as being somewhat complicit in what happened to them.”
Even in the relatively low-stakes context of a psychology experiment, getting suckered really sets people off. For many decades, social psychologists and behavioral economists have been investigating the mechanics of human cooperation with games of trust. In a typical setup, people have a choice between cooperating with a group of other participants to evenly share a monetary payoff or defecting. Defectors receive more money for themselves, but reduce the payout for the group — effectively making suckers out of them. In one early study, published in 1977, the researchers were taken aback by how strongly some subjects reacted. It was not unusual “for people to wish to leave the experimental building by the back door, [or] to claim that they did not wish to see the ‘sons of bitches’ who double-crossed them,” they wrote.
Such studies also suggest that the prospect of getting suckered reduces people’s willingness to cooperate. In one of the first studies to probe this “sucker effect,” researchers asked participants to rapidly squeeze two rubber balls, like the ones used to pump up blood pressure cuffs, rigged up to a mysterious box labeled FLOWMETER. Participants were told they could earn money based on how much air they and an unseen partner pumped in a 30-second period. Subjects who’d been led to believe their partner was less able to perform this task pumped vigorously, apparently willing to compensate. But those who believed they had a capable but lazy partner slacked off themselves, thereby giving up a financial gain to avoid feeling suckered.
In a 2007 paper, Vohs and two colleagues coined a term to describe this anticipatory fear of getting suckered: sugrophobia (from the Latin sugro, to suck). It’s a good thing to have, at least in proper measure. “Sugrophobia is adaptive for sure,” says Vohs. “Though, like most psychological traits, it’s adaptive in some doses — not too much and not too little.”
Too much sugrophobia can interfere with people’s ability to make rational financial decisions, for example. For one study, researchers looked at whether people were willing to invest money in a hypothetical company. Participants invested less money in a company when told the only risk was a small chance of loss due to fraud, than in another company with an identical risk of loss — but in this case due to market forces.
A 2017 study found evidence of similar dynamics in the real world in the wake of the Madoff scandal. (In the 1990s and early 2000s, investment advisor Bernie Madoff bilked wealthy clients out of billions of dollars in the largest Ponzi scheme in history.) Using court documents and federal filings by financial institutions, the researchers found that people living in areas with a high concentration of Madoff’s clients (where, the researchers reasoned, more people would be aware of the fraud and perhaps have a connection to victims) withdrew more money than people with similar economic circumstances in other areas. The people in Madoff’s area pulled a whopping $363 billion from accounts with investment advisors after the scam became public in 2008, moving a significant chunk of that money to the relative safety of banks. In doing so, many likely missed out on big returns as the stock market bounced back from the 2008 housing crisis.
Effects on healthMore recently, researchers working directly with scam victims have begun to piece together a picture of the varied health impacts — physical, emotional and psychological — of being suckered. US consumers lost nearly $200 billion to fraud in 2024, the Federal Trade Commission estimates. Many scams now begin online, and scammers are getting increasingly sophisticated at targeting particular groups, says Marti DeLiema, a gerontologist who studies financial fraud at the University of Minnesota.
Scammers offering bogus employment opportunities target younger job-seeking people on LinkedIn, for example, while those offering tech support or help investing in cryptocurrencies tend to target tech-challenged older adults. “It’s easy to be specialized now, thanks to generative AI,” DeLiema says.
“What kinds of important human experiences are we missing because people are afraid of being duped?”
— TESS WILKINSON-RYAN
People’s reaction to falling prey to a scam varies widely, says Mark Button, a criminologist specializing in cybercrime and economic crime at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. Feelings of worry and stress are commonplace, Button and colleagues found in a recent survey of more than 300 UK scam victims. In more extreme cases, victims experienced loss of sleep, digestive issues and other physical ailments. Some scam victims withdraw socially, work by Button’s group has shown. That can lead to a vicious cycle, he says: “If you’re kind of on your own, you’re more likely to become a victim.”
This psychological impact on victims generally tracks with how much of their wealth they’ve lost, research by Button and others suggests, but that’s not the only factor influencing the extent of the effects. The emotional pain can be especially acute for those who fall prey to romance scams or elaborate investment scams in which the scammer works to establish a rapport and develop the victim’s trust over months or even years.
When people cooperate, they can achieve more than any individual could alone. But the fear of getting suckered erodes the will to cooperate, which can fray the social fabric. CREDIT: HFHD / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS“You lose the thing that you’ve been looking forward to and fantasizing about for months,” DeLiema says. In addition, the financial loss can be especially devastating for older people who have less time and opportunity to rebuild their savings. “That’s going to dictate how they live the rest of their lives,” she says.
Shame also comes into play, and that means many fraud crimes are never reported, says Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, a law professor who studies the psychology of legal decision-making at the University of Pennsylvania. “People feel so bad about the interaction, they basically feel ashamed about it and therefore won’t talk about it or report it,” she says. “It’s stigmatized, because not only did something bad happen to you, but you let it happen. There’s a sort of a weakness associated with it.”
Placing the blameSucker psychology has implications for contract negotiations, divorce settlements and other areas of law where one party sees the other as trying to take unfair advantage of them, Wilkinson-Ryan argues in the 2025 Annual Review of Law and Social Science. She and others study legal decision-making by recruiting people from the general public and asking them to evaluate realistic legal scenarios.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, one common finding is a willingness to punish the offender. In one study, Wilkinson-Ryan and a colleague asked subjects to assess the fairness of proposals for dividing property after a divorce. They were instructed that whichever party was at fault in the breakup was irrelevant, as is typical under state laws. Even so, subjects rated proposals made by a cheating spouse as less reasonable than the same proposal coming from a non-cheating partner.
At the same time, researchers have uncovered a tendency to blame the victim. In a 2014 study, Wilkinson-Ryan asked people who was at fault in a hypothetical scenario in which someone had purchased a credit card with an agreement that had unfair terms buried in the fine print. Most people said the customer was to blame because they should have read the contract more thoroughly — despite many of them saying it was unreasonable to expect someone to find an unfair term buried in a long contract. The result, Wilkinson-Ryan says, is that consumers rarely challenge contracts with bad terms, even when those terms probably wouldn’t hold up in court.
On a larger scale, sucker psychology can influence public policy — and not always for the better. For example, the purported goal of checking to ensure that welfare recipients do in fact meet income requirements is to prevent people from taking unfair advantage of social programs. Such fraud prevention is good policy, says Wilkinson-Ryan. But when the cheat-detection measures end up costing more than the cheating itself, she says, they end up going against the public good.
The fear of being suckered can also be weaponized by politicians, Wilkinson-Ryan writes in her 2023 book Fool Proof. Politicians have long used sucker rhetoric to stir emotions and sway public opinion. President Donald Trump has used it again and again to rile up his base, arguing that Americans are being taken advantage of by immigrants, wasteful government programs and an ever-shifting list of foreign countries. This rhetoric “gets at a very basic, fundamental human motivation not to fall behind, not to be suckered,” says De Dreu. “And that makes it very, very motivating to act.”
It’s also very effective at overriding empathy and compassion that people might otherwise act on, Wilkinson-Ryan says. “I think you see this a lot in the immigration debates,” she says, where people who come to the US seeking humanitarian asylum or better economic opportunities are recast as criminals coming to take American jobs. “It undermines impulses that I think we otherwise value in ourselves.”
So how should we navigate the complex swirl of emotions around suckerdom in a world where scams seem to be in the air we breathe? It’s reasonable to be wary, says DeLiema, whose work now focuses on interventions that might prevent people from falling for scams. “There’s a scammer for everyone,” she says. “You think you’re immune from scams? You haven’t met the scam for you,” she says.
At the same time, Wilkinson-Ryan urges people to consider the cost of being too guarded. Healthy skepticism is absolutely sensible, she says. “It’s just a lesson that gets over-learned and transported into these areas where it eats up what would otherwise be totally reasonable, thoughtful social and moral commitments.”
If people took the time to reflect, they might decide that the experience they’re missing out on is more important than the small chance they’re being taken advantage of, Wilkinson-Ryan says. “What kinds of important human experiences are we missing because people are afraid of being duped?”
Greg Miller is a science journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Find Greg on X @dosmonos
This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all, and is reposted here with permission. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter. Find Knowable Magazine on X @KnowableMag
In today’s world, food hunger and insecurity are not due to lack of food. Right now, the world produces enough food to feed every adult and child currently alive on the planet. Yet, about 673 million people worldwide faced hunger in 2024, and 18.3 million households in the United States struggled with food insecurity in that same year.
Food waste or loss contributes greatly to this food paradox. It is estimated that a fifth of all food produced globally is lost before reaching someone’s table. Unharvested crops due to low prices, unsold food in retail stores, and uneaten leftovers in people’s homes contribute to this growing problem. In the US, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that between 30–40 percent of the food is wasted, with 31 percent of it being lost at the retail and household levels. Food losses affect more than just people; the current food production process, which includes livestock, fertilizer use in soil, agricultural machinery, transportation, and discarded food rotting in landfills also contributes to up to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Researchers believe science could help transform this dire scenario. From innovative solutions that improve food monitoring and minimize spoilage to approaches that extend produce shelf life, these technologies aim at minimizing the impact of food losses on people’s lives and the planet.
Bioagents to Tackle Foodborne IllnessesFood contamination is a major cause of food loss and waste. Microorganisms in the soil and water can contaminate produce and cereals prior to harvest, while inadequate handling and improper sanitation of equipment used for food processing can lead to contamination and cross-contamination in food facilities.
To reduce food contamination and minimize the risk of foodborne illnesses—preventable diseases caused by eating food contaminated with either pathogens or harmful substances— appropriate monitoring and decontamination of food products in the supply chain is key.
Globally, consumption of unsafe food leads to 866 million illnesses and 1.5 million deaths each year. Pathogen exposure is the primary cause of foodborne diseases, accounting for nearly 860 million cases in 2021. Even though stringent regulations and technologies have been set in place to make food safer, the burden of consuming unsafe food, as evidenced by the recent Cyclospora outbreak in the US, still calls for alternatives.
In his lab at McMaster University, biomedical engineer Tohid Didar develops microneedle patches embedded with bacteriophages to tackle food contamination and improve food safety. Geoff Shaw, McMaster UniversityFor McMaster University biomedical engineer Tohid Didar, bacteriophages hold great promise to tackle food safety issues. “I call them ‘organic antimicrobials,’” said Didar, whose team seeks to develop innovative ways to apply phage-targeted bacterial killing as a tool for food decontamination.
In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration has approved phage-based products for decontaminating food with major foodborne pathogens; yet limitations, including how to keep phages alive for extended periods, have hindered their broad implementation in the supply chain.
To make bacteriophages last, Didar’s team has developed phage-loaded microgels that hold billions of viruses and can be applied to food surfaces as either peelable patches or sprayable solutions. The team makes the microgels by mixing phages and a small molecule crosslinker to form a nanofibrous hydrogel that self-assembles within days.
Using the microgels, the researchers effectively eliminated a multidrug resistant strain of Escherichia coli from lettuce and raw meat. While these phage-based strategies worked to decontaminate food surfaces, Didar’s team is also testing approaches to facilitate their penetration deeper into the food.
Akansha Prasad, a graduate student in Didar’s lab, leads this work, which uses microneedles to deliver the viruses past the food surface. To develop an effective microneedle patch, the researchers tried out different polymer-phage combinations and used food-specific tests, such as vacuuming and tumbling, to simulate conditions frequently seen on production lines. Prasad explained that they selected real-world-inspired testing approaches as an effective way to characterize the phage patches and bring them closer to a final application.
The phage-loaded microneedle patches not only effectively eliminated E. coli contamination from meat but could also deliver a bacteriophage cocktail that simultaneously eradicated E. coli and Salmonella enterica contaminants. “When [the phage cocktail] worked, it was incredible,” Prasad recalled. “It’s just this patch that you can throw on a variety of products, and it works really well.”
Nitin Nitin, a food engineer at the University of California, Davis, is also exploring bio-based approaches to reduce food spoilage. In Nitin’s case, he has turned his attention to yeasts and their ability to deliver compounds.
Using microorganisms as delivery vehicles is not new. In the 1970s, scientists studying Saccharomyces cerevisiae described how the baker’s yeast could encapsulate both water and fat-soluble compounds depending on its biochemical composition. However, these bio-based delivery systems faced stability limitations that precluded their use as biocontrol strategies.
Scientists like Nitin are overcoming some of these limitations. Over a decade ago, Nitin became interested in exploring microorganisms as carriers of antimicrobials. To turn yeasts into sanitizer carriers, his team leverages the yeast cell wall. The fungus’ outer layer components, such as chitin and mannoproteins, increase its affinity for other microbes, while the cell wall lipid content dictates the yeast’s ability to encapsulate antimicrobials that dissolve in lipids or water. By manipulating the fungus’ growth medium either by adding salts or forcing substances through the yeast’s cell wall using a vacuum, the researchers can change the yeast’s ability to encapsulate different compounds. According to Nitin, this process does not require sophisticated equipment, expanding its potential applications. “We want to find solutions not only to the challenges in a developed economy like the United States, but in developing countries at a low cost,” he said. “We want to find technologies that people can adopt anywhere in the world.”
Food engineer Nitin Nitin has spent over a decade researching ways to minimize food waste. University of California, DavisNitin’s team has characterized the delivery of both synthetic and natural antimicrobials, focusing on yeast carriers to tackle biofilms, which are known to enhance resistance to sanitizing agents and represent a major challenge for the food industry. The researchers showed, for instance, that the encapsulation of a chlorine-binding polymer in yeast microcarriers eliminated pathogenic bacteria and fungi in biofilms more effectively than a conventional treatment using a chlorine-based sanitizer.
Nitin’s work on natural antimicrobials has focused on essential oils, which have emerged as eco-friendly alternatives to traditional decontaminating agents, such as chlorine- and ammonium-based compounds. Essential oils are blends of metabolites derived from plants. Their great diversity allows for the creation of a variety of antimicrobial preparations that target many microbes through different mechanisms. These include the disruption of microbial plasma membrane integrity and interference with key metabolic pathways. Even though scientists have studied essential oil applications as antimicrobials since the 2000s, making them a viable option for the food industry has faced challenges, including the oils’ volatility, non-specific interactions with organic matter, and high cost.
Nitin believes that yeast carriers may help overcome some of these limitations. “When bound in the [yeast] cell, they are quite stable,” he explained. “They can last for a longer period of time but still retain the efficacy to interact with the microbes and release upon contact, providing a more targeted delivery.” In a recent study, Nitin’s team showed that yeasts could encapsulate thymol, the major component of thyme oil, which has antimicrobial activities, and effectively inactivate bacterial biofilms on food-contact surfaces.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe New Frontier of Food Monitoring: Smart Packages and Artificial IntelligenceBesides preventing foodborne diseases, monitoring food is also key to keeping track of food freshness. Even though the United States implemented food product dating over a century ago to keep people informed about the status of their food purchases, the commonly used ‘best before’ date labels are known to cause consumers confusion and lead to unnecessary food waste.
Didar’s team has been working on alternatives to conventional methods of assessing food freshness by making food packaging ‘intelligent’ to provide real-time monitoring of food quality. “We can prevent the waste that happens at that final stage or have sensors that could monitor the packaging throughout the [food production] process,” he explained.
On this front, Didar’s team developed biosensors to create a lab-in-a-package system. This is a smart food packaging that combines fluorescent probe biosensors for pathogen detection with a membrane that provides the reagents needed for microbial identification. The system is placed inside a food tray similar to the foam trays used to sell meat at grocery stores, and it is designed to facilitate sampling of fluids naturally released by food. To detect the probes’ signals, producers can use portable fluorescence scanners and generate images that they can visualize on a smartphone. “Lab-in-a-package was the first time we tried to actualize these [biosensors] into continuous monitoring without the need to even open a package,” Prasad said.
Researchers are also testing machine-learning-based models to facilitate food monitoring throughout the supply chain. Nitin, who is among these scientists, believes that AI could be easily implemented into microbiology labs across the food industry as it does not require sophisticated equipment, thus simplifying data analysis. “Such tools can provide a framework where we can have quicker diagnostics [at] lower cost, something that is translatable to everybody in the world,” he noted.
Using an AI-based model, Nitin’s team showed that they could identify E. coli on lettuce homogenates within three hours, significantly reducing the detection time compared to conventional culture methods that might take several days. In a more recent study, the researchers demonstrated that they could also train AI-based models to differentiate bacterial contaminants from three types of food debris—food particles that might affect a model’s accuracy in real-world scenarios. Nitin’s team is currently working on making these machine-learning models more generalizable so they can identify more types of food debris more easily and distinguish them from microbial contaminants. “Once we have a well-trained model, we may need very little data to train it on a new pathogen or new bacterial or fungal target. That makes it a lot more efficient,” he said. His team is also training AI models to distinguish between species within a bacterial genus, creating approaches that differentiate harmful from commensal bacteria present on food and direct decontamination efforts towards pathogenic microbes.
| | Related on the SLP 41-state Cyclospora outbreak exposes widespread state-to-state communication failures |
Science to Make Food LastResearchers are also exploring how to extend the shelf life of perishable produce as another approach to address food waste. Globally, 25 percent of all fruits and vegetables are lost between harvest and retail, with this issue being more severe in the Global South, where countries lack infrastructure and face economic constraints.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), researchers led by materials engineer Benedetto Marelli are designing new technologies to preserve food using silk, an abundant natural fiber produced by arthropods like the Bombyx mori caterpillar.
Marelli’s team is particularly interested in the silk protein fibroin, a non-toxic, edible macromolecule that can be obtained from by-products of the textile industry at low cost. Previous work by Marelli showed that fibroin’s self-assembling properties can create a transparent food coating that extends fruit’s shelf life for about a week.
Using melatonin-embedded microneedles, Marelli’s team has shown how the hormone can delay the yellowing of leafy vegetables and extend their shelf life. Monika JangirNow his team is exploring fibroin-based microneedles to deliver compounds to plants, similar to Prasad’s work using microneedles to deliver bacteriophages deep into food. Compared to sprayable options, microneedles can deliver shelf-stabilizing compounds at lower concentrations into fruits and require no repeated treatments, explained Yangyang Han, a research scientist at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Center who has worked with Marelli on the technology.
Recently, Han and her colleagues showed that silk microneedles can effectively deliver physiological doses of melatonin, a hormone that regulates growth and senescence in plants.1The scientists showed that melatonin-loaded microneedle patches delayed the yellowing of Pak choi leaves and prolonged the product’s shelf life by 10 days under refrigeration and four days without refrigeration—a set of findings Han noted were “quite surprising.”
Tianxi Yang, a food and analytical scientist at the University of British Columbia, is also devising new approaches to reduce fresh produce losses.
In Yang’s case, her team combines nanotechnology with analytical chemistry to develop nanoparticle-based coating solutions with antimicrobial properties. In particular, they focus on metal-phenolic networks (MPNs), which are aggregates containing metal ions and phenolic ligands that self-assemble to form complex structures. These structures are not only antimicrobials, explained Yang, but the metal ions they contain are also often dietary micronutrients. Their inclusion on food as a coating could help address micronutrient deficiencies in different populations. “It’s not only about the food product. We are trying to bring something that can promote human health [too],” she said.
Tianxi Yang, a food and analytical scientist at The University of British Columbia, and her team have combined analytical chemistry with nanotechnology to create new approaches to reduce fresh produce losses.Sachi WickramasingheScientists first described MPNs in the early 2010s, but their application in the agriculture and food sectors has only been explored more recently. Yang’s team was among the first to test these applications. By combining MPNs with starch nanoparticles, her team found they could enhance the MPNs’ coating properties, making fresh fruit firmer for longer, delaying its ripening, and inhibiting bacterial growth. The researchers also found that MPN-based coatings may help remove pesticide residue from fresh produce, addressing public health concerns about the presence of these substances in produce and their negative impact on human health. “We call it a triple function [as] it removes pesticides, kills bacteria, and preserves produce,” Yang explained.
While many of these approaches may be ready for real-world application, challenges remain in adopting them into the food supply pipeline. As many strategies could lead to increased food costs, encouraging producers and consumers to embrace these technologies despite this is one such challenge. “The minute you introduce any sort of technology, [who] does pay the cost? Because producers would rather push it to the consumer, but the minute the consumer pays the cost, even if it’s a matter of cents driving up the product cost, a consumer probably won’t be inclined to use the technology,” said Prasad. “That is why it is a constant push and pull between not only innovating solutions, but innovating solutions in the most cost-effective manner,” she added.
Food suppliers and manufacturers will also need to find ways to reduce people’s hesitancy about consuming products that are in contact with non-food-native agents. Strategies to do this could include familiarizing consumers with concepts like nanotechnology and smart packaging and clearly showing the unique benefits these approaches bring to food.
Despite these limitations on the consumer’s end and the challenges that food waste and insecurity pose to the world, Prasad believes that people should keep an optimistic outlook. “The future of food freshness and food monitoring is still positive because we know where the change is needed, and we know what the next frontier is,” she said. “It’s just now a matter of science, and the science always comes.”
Mariella Bodemeier Loayza Careaga is a Brazilian freelance science writer, covering the biology of cells and animals. She also has a PhD in neuroscience from the Federal University of São Paulo. Find Mariella on LinkedIn
A version of this article was originally posted at The Scientist and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find The Scientist on X @TheScientistLLC
Climate change isn’t just fueling stronger storms and longer droughts — it’s also making the food on your plate riskier, as Popular Mechanics’ Darren Orf reports. A new review from researchers at Ethiopia’s Public Health Institute and Dambi Dollo University, published in the study in One Health Outlook, found that rising temperatures, shifting rainfall, and extreme weather are accelerating the spread of foodborne pathogens worldwide.
Warmer conditions favor bacteria like Salmonella and Campylobacter, while added humidity fuels mold growth that produces toxic mycotoxins in grains and nuts. Flooding washes pesticide and chemical runoff into food and water supplies, and drought elsewhere shrinks crop yields.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPA widening public health burden“Foodborne illness causes an estimated 600 million cases of illness and 420,000 deaths annually,” the study authors wrote, noting children under five bear a disproportionate share.
The researchers say food safety surveillance needs to catch up — folding climate data into disease-tracking systems and building climate-resilient food safety strategies. With the FDA already stretched thin, they argue, closing that gap will take sustained global cooperation.
| | Related on the SLP Global food security in a fast changing climate |
Read the original article here
A 26-foot tower resembling a football goalpost in Moab, Utah, pulses electrical charges into clouds — and its maker says that boosted snowfall in the La Sal Mountains 15 percent last winter, as Scott Dance reports for The New York Times. The claim, from Rain Enhancement Technologies, reflects a bigger Western bet: drought-stricken states, utilities and ski resorts are pouring millions into cloud seeding for more rain and snow.
The science is catching upCloud seeding, scattering silver iodide or newer compounds to speed precipitation, isn’t new, but a 2017 Idaho study, the SNOWIE project, published in PNAS, offered the first radar-confirmed proof it works. Utah now spends nearly $16 million yearly, crediting 6 to 12 percent more precipitation.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UP“Everybody is looking to have extra water,” said Jonathan Meyer, a climatologist at Utah State University. “That may be the new oil boom for the rest of this century.”
Startups like Recast Systems and drone-based Rainmaker are testing cheaper, less-toxic agents. But without a control cloud, the payoff is an estimate — one Western water managers say they can’t afford to ignore.
| | Related on the SLP Crops that tolerate droughts and climate change? Here’s how cactus genes could help |
Read the original article here
President Trump’s nominee to run the Food and Drug Administration once called for conservatives to build their own scientific journals and steer research funding toward right-wing policy goals, as Scientific American’s Adam Kovac reports.
In a December 2023 podcast appearance on The Tank, a show produced by the America First Policy Institute, Heidi Overton—then the think tank’s chief policy officer, now a White House aide—laid out a 20-year vision for “alternative systems” of publishing science. “We need publications and academic journals that are conservative-based,” she said. “We need research funding willing to fund these kinds of studies. That’s not happening at the NIH.”
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPA track record on vaccinesOverton, who holds a medical degree, stood at Trump’s side when he signed an executive order pushing to split the combined MMR vaccine into three shots, despite strong evidence it’s safe. She’s seen as a key ally of RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign.
“Knowledge isn’t inherently neutral,” said Stand Up for Science founder Colette Delawalla, whose group resurfaced the clip after Overton’s nomination, “this is why we must protect independent centers of thought.”
| | Related on the SLP Viewpoint: Trump poised to politicize all U.S.-supported science research |
Read the original article here
The rules governing new gene editing techniques for plants – called “new genomic techniques” (NGTs) – are being changed at EU level. Gene-edited plants will be divided into two categories, depending on the type and number of edits involved. Those with few genetic changes that could have occurred through conventional breeding techniques will be considered conventional plants, while the rest will have to follow the same strict rules as GMOs.
The new law was adopted by the European Parliament on 17 June 2026 and will apply from mid-2028.
What are GMOs?Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are organisms whose genetic material has been altered using modern biotechnology in ways that could not occur naturally through traditional breeding.
This technology has made it possible both to create novel traits in plants and to enhance existing ones, such as insect resistance or herbicide tolerance.
Farmers have been altering plants’ genetics for thousands of years using conventional techniques, such as selection and crossbreeding. This process has gradually transformed wild species into the crops we farm today.
Are GMOs currently banned in the EU?GMOs are allowed in the EU, but the rules in place since 2001 are among the strictest in the world and EU countries can ban GM crops from being cultivated on their territory.
While several GMOs are authorised for import into the EU, the only GM crop currently approved for cultivation in the EU is MON810, an insect-resistant maize variety grown mainly in Spain, primarily for animal feed.
GMOs can only be produced in the EU or imported if they pass a case-by-case scientific risk assessment, conducted by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). There are also strict rules on labelling and traceability.
What are new genomic techniques (NGTs) and how are they different from GMOs?New developments in biotechnology have led to a variety of new gene editing techniques, encompassed in the term “new genomic techniques” (NGTs).
The big difference between GMOs and NGTs is that GMOs are mostly made by inserting a gene from a different species into a plant, while NGTs allow targeted changes to a plant’s own DNA.
GMOs contain genetic material that could not have arrived there through conventional breeding, whereas NGTs accelerate changes that could have happened with traditional techniques.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPWhat are the new EU rules on new genomic techniques?The new EU rules mark a shift towards regulating based on what the final plant looks like genetically, not how it was made.
NGT-altered plants are split between two categories, with different legal obligations attached.
- NGT-1 — This category is for plants with edits that could have occurred through conventional breeding. These will be treated like conventional plants, exhibiting a limited number and type of changes. Plants engineered for herbicide-tolerance or to produce insecticidal substances cannot be treated as NGT-1 plants.
- NGT-2 — This category is for plants that have undergone more extensive or complex genetic modifications. These are covered by the existing strict GMO rules and will be subject to risk assessment, authorisation, labelling, traceability, and member-state opt-outs for cultivation.
Neither NGT-1 nor NGT-2 plants will be allowed in organic production.
Are NGTs safe?The EFSA, the EU’s scientific authority on food safety, plus several major scientific bodies, including national academies of science across Europe have concluded that plants meeting the NGT-1 criteria do not pose hazards beyond those of conventional breeding.
At the request of the European Parliament, under the new rules, plants engineered for herbicide tolerance and insecticide-producing traits are explicitly excluded from the NGT-1 category, to address concerns about agricultural and ecological knock-on effects.
NGT-2 plants – those with more extensive modifications – will be subject to the full GMO authorisation regime, precisely because the safety assessment for them is less straightforward. Full traceability and labelling will remain obligatory for NGT-2 plants and EU countries may restrict or prohibit the plants’ cultivation even if they have been authorised for cultivation in the EU, in line with the current rules on GMOs.
What advantages do NGTs offer farmers and consumers?For European farmers, NGTs will give much quicker access to improved plant varieties that are climate- and pest-resistant, give higher yields, or require fewer fertilisers and pesticides. This will reduce farmers’ dependency on imports and improve their competitiveness.
EU consumers will meanwhile benefit from a more sustainable and resilient food system as NGTs can deliver healthier products, longer shelf life and less food waste, with a smaller environmental footprint per meal.
| | Related on the SLP Crop gene editing greenlighted by European Parliament. Fight over labeling looms as measure moves to the EU Council |
Why has the European Parliament adopted new rules on NGTs?Without the new rules, all NGT-edited plants would fall under the existing GMO rules, which were written before the recent gene-editing techniques were invented.
This would mean that any plant gene edit that swapped a single DNA letter (something that regularly happens spontaneously in nature) would face the same authorisation requirements as a much more complex edit, such as inserting a bacterial gene into maize.
Without these changes, the concern was that very few NGTs would be approved for use in the EU. Europe would become a mere consumer of gene-edited plants (e.g. through imports of processed food products) without participating in developing them, losing scientific expertise, agricultural competitiveness, and economic value.
The European Parliament believes the new rules strike the right balance between enabling innovation in sustainable agriculture and maintaining strong safeguards: lighter rules for plants bred using techniques equivalent to conventional breeding, and full GMO rules for plants that have undergone more complex modifications.
A version of this article was originally posted by the European Parliament and has been reposted here. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find the European Parliament on X @Europarl_EN
American farmers are staring down what one Iowa grower calls “another farm crisis,” as President Trump’s tariffs and his war with Iran drive up fertilizer, fuel and machinery costs while crop prices stay weak, the Washington Post’s Jarrell Dillard reports.
Diversifying wasn’t enoughWendy Johnson, a fourth-generation Iowa farmer, spent 16 years diversifying her operation to avoid another 1980s-style crash. She says her profits are down by as much as 50 percent anyway. “I am afraid that we’re looking into the barrel of another farm crisis,” she said, “and we all know historically what that did to our rural communities.” New 50 percent tariffs on Canada, a key fertilizer and equipment source, plus a proposed pause on ground-beef tariffs decried by cattle ranchers, have deepened the squeeze.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPCongress is weighing $12 billion in emergency farm aid, but Republicans have tied it to Iran war funding, a pairing the National Farmers Union calls self-defeating since the war is itself driving up fuel costs. With the farm bill eight years overdue for renewal and expiring September 30, farmers warn the aid is only a “Band-Aid” without longer-term fixes to costs and market access.
| | Related on the SLP Trump’s plan to import millions of dollars of Argentinian beef to lower prices runs into opposition from ranchers and economists |
Read the original article here
The federal government is about to attempt what nutrition scientists haven’t managed: a workable definition of “ultra-processed food.” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his department is finalizing the first official U.S. definition, as Nicholas Florko for The Atlantic reports, though the wording remains under White House review.
Three systems, three different answersThat’s tricky, because researchers can’t agree either. Brazil’s NOVA system flags any food with industrial ingredients as ultra-processed; a UNC system instead asks whether a food is “no longer recognizable” as its original source; a French system weighs sugar, salt, fat, and additive risk. Flavored yogurt lands differently under each one.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPKennedy is also pushing a rule requiring companies to notify the FDA when they add new ingredients, closing a loophole behind roughly 10,000 additives already in the food supply. “If you can’t define a problem, you can’t solve it,” he said.
Yet the science behind why these foods might be harmful stays thin: a 2019 study in Cell Metabolism linked ultra-processed diets to overeating and weight gain, but no one knows which ingredient is to blame. Get the definition wrong, and it could cost as much as having none.
| | Related on the SLP Viewpoint: Tampering down hysteria on ultra-processed foods |
Read the original article here
Slap “glyphosate-free” on a bag of oats and watch it fly off the shelf, even though the herbicide is barely used on the crop, writes Michelle Miller, aka the Farm Babe, for AgDaily. A former oat grower herself, Miller says she never met anyone who sprayed glyphosate on oats in the US, where it isn’t even approved for that use.
Tennessee oat grower Kary Robinson agrees. “It’s crazy to me to think that people would think that we spray glyphosate on oats,” he told Miller, adding that doing so would simply kill the crop.
Where the fear really comes fromThe worry traces largely to Canada, where glyphosate is sometimes applied pre-harvest to dying plants, never as a growth aid, leaving only trace residues far below the EPA’s 30 parts-per-million safety limit. Viral “positive” test results, Miller notes, often stem from flawed methodology. University of Florida plant scientist Kevin Folta explains that the ELISA test such groups use was “validated mostly for water” and is prone to false positives from salts, lipids, and other compounds.
Oats, Miller writes, remain a safe food staple — no premium label or fear-based marketing ploy required.
| | Related on the SLP Glyphosate poisoning oatmeal? Independent fact checker challenges viral social media video and claims |
Read the original article here
With great fanfare, Secretary Kennedy announced the closing of the GRAS (“Generally Recognized As Safe”) loophole. But separating the rhetoric from the regulatory substance leaves me with a quandary: does the “radical transparency” he announced mean a cup half empty or half full?
Image: ACSHWhat Secretary Kennedy’s Proposal Actually ChangesStripped of the rhetoric, the proposed regulation:
“Requires manufacturers to notify the FDA when concluding that the use of a substance added to human or animal food is GRAS.”
The greater FDA visibility into ingredients, the expanded public inventory, and indeed the radical transparency all follow from that change. You can find a more detailed discussion of GRAS’ history and current regulations here. For this discussion, however, one distinction matters most: there are several routes by which an ingredient can acquire or retain GRAS status, and they do not involve the FDA in the same way.
- FDA-initiated review: The agency can reassess substances already in use when new evidence raises safety concerns.
- GRAS self-determination: A manufacturer, with outside experts, reaches its own safety conclusion, without notifying the FDA.
- GRAS notification: A manufacturer conducts its safety assessment and voluntarily submits that conclusion and supporting information to the FDA, creating a public record and allowing agency review.
The Cup Half Full – Exposing the LoopholeThe regulation is designed to close the glaring loophole in GRAS self-determination by now requiring notification. It also establishes a “streamlined time-limited pathway” for these additives, already in use, to notify the FDA of their current use. [1]
This effectively ends the practice of secret self-determination and provides basic visibility into what enters the food supply.
The Cup Half Empty – Mandatory Notification is not Pre-market ApprovalPre-market approval simply means that safety testing occurs before an ingredient enters our food supply. That path, the Food Additive Petition, requires a data safety review [2] by the FDA before the “food additive” enters the marketplace and is consumed. There are no pre-market requirements for any GRAS pathway. FDA review, if conducted at all, begins after the product hits our shelves and we start consuming the ingredient, and is at the FDA’s discretion unless it is a voluntary review by the manufacturer.
The proposal makes the FDA aware of GRAS conclusions; it does not turn GRAS notification into the premarket approval process used for food additives.
Secretary Kennedy is correct in emphasizing the proposed “radical transparency” because the new regulations do nothing to compel manufacturers to submit to the more rigorous pre-market Food Additive Petition. But another regulatory system reveals why that distinction matters. Dietary supplements can connect with GRAS law in unanticipated ways, leaving our cup emptier still. To understand that problem, we need to go back more than 60 years to review the efforts to isolate the proteins responsible for bioluminescence in jellyfish.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPFrom Jellyfish to Supplement Dietary supplements are treated more like foods than drugs. That is why supplement claims state they “support” brain health or joint flexibility; they cannot claim to cure or treat a disease. Under the 1994 supplement law, a manufacturer introducing certain “new dietary ingredients,” or NDIs, generally must notify the FDA at least 75 days before marketing and provide the basis for concluding that the ingredient is reasonably expected to be safe. That notification is not the same as formal FDA approval. Ingredients marketed in the United States before the statutory cutoff are exempt from review. But the interaction between supplement law and GRAS allowed clever counsel another potential route around NDI notification.
One of those jellyfish proteins, apoaequorin, became the signature ingredient in a highly successful dietary supplement: Prevagen.
Quincy Bioscience, the maker of Prevagen, originally tried to obtain FDA clearance as a supplement, an NDI. However, citing safety concerns, the FDA refused to sign off twice. Quincy pivoted, putting apoaequorin into a “drink,” convened their own expert panel, and voluntarily declared to the FDA that it was GRAS for food use. The FDA again voiced safety concerns, and Quincy withdrew the notification. Self-determined GRAS became Quincy’s next choice, and they quickly reverted to a pill and capsule formulation. Under supplement law, a GRAS ingredient, irrespective of pathway, requires no further review – neatly side-stepping the mandatory pre-market FDA review it had already failed.
Under the proposed regulations, Prevagen, whether safe or not, can continue to be sold until regulators once again evaluate its safety filings. Prevagen will need to join a very long line, illustrating the limitation of mandatory notification: disclosure can give regulators information without guaranteeing immediate regulatory action.
| | Related on the SLP What’s the political and health battle over GRAS–ingredients ‘Generally Recognized as Safe’ |
The Political Blind SpotPrevagen is more than an unusual regulatory history; it tests whether calls for tighter food oversight will be applied equally to the supplement industry.
Prevagen exposes a tension within the MAHA movement. Its advocates have regularly criticized food and pharmaceutical companies for conflicts of interest, inadequate transparency, and regulatory capture. Those concerns deserve scrutiny. But the same standard should apply to the supplement industry, which operates under a different, and in important respects less demanding, regulatory framework. If conflicts of interest and insufficient oversight are problems when they involve conventional food or pharmaceutical companies, they should remain problems when they involve companies aligned with the wellness movement.
A Spotlight Without a GateSecretary Kennedy’s proposal represents a meaningful structural change: replacing undisclosed self-determination with mandatory notification and creating a public record. Companies would have to show regulators what they are doing without necessarily obtaining affirmative FDA authorization before marketing. Transparency is welcome and necessary, but filing a notice in an FDA database is not the same thing as demonstrating safety to the agency before consumers are exposed.
An ingredient’s biological effects do not depend on whether it is classified as a food or a dietary supplement. Yet fragmented statutes can subject similar substances to very different regulatory pathways. If the goal is genuine consumer protection, there is a strong case for substances that present comparable risks to face comparable standards of premarket scientific evidence, whether sold in foods or supplements. Until both Big Food and Big Supplement are held to that single, proactive standard, “radical transparency” illuminates the marketplace without fully guarding its entrance
[1] While the proposal indicates that these notifications will allow the FDA “to prioritize post-market safety evaluations,” the reality is that these reviews are constrained by the FDA’s labor force, which has remained flat, and by additional funding that must come from Congress. In comparison, pharmaceutical review is paid for by the requesting manufacturer. In essence, the new regulation does require the food industry to show their work, but it is doubtful that the FDA will be able to “grade the tests.”
[2] The data may be proprietary, privately held safety data generated by the manufacturer.
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is the Medical Director at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon. He completed his MBA with distinction in the George Washington University Healthcare MBA program and has served as a consultant to hospitals. While no longer clinically active, he has had his writing featured at KevinMD and Doximity.A version of this article was originally posted at American Council on Science and Health and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find American Council on Science and Health on X @ACSHorg
South Africa’s long-running GMO fight isn’t really about ideology — it’s about whether local farmers can compete on a level field. That’s the argument Tobias Doyer, CEO of Grain SA, makes in a recent opinion piece for Daily Maverick, contending that food insecurity stems from poverty and unequal access, not agricultural biotechnology itself.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPA tool, not a threatDoyer points to South Africa’s wheat tariff decision and the risk of an El Nino-driven 2026/27 season as proof farmers need every available advantage against subsidized international rivals. Drought-tolerant GM varieties, he argues, aren’t a luxury but a survival tool.
“Access to technology is not a luxury; it is often the difference between staying on the land and exiting agriculture,” Doyer writes.
He also criticizes anti-GMO activism, noting the African Centre for Biodiversity celebrated a court ruling against Monsanto as a win, even as it leaves farmers with fewer options.
“Nobody ever became more competitive by being denied better tools,” he adds.
| | Related on the SLP Hunger and malnutrition are soaring in Africa. There is a helpful solution: GM crops |
Read the original article here
Researchers identify a genetic mechanism that coordinates flower development and fruit formation, paving the way toward tomato varieties with more reliable winter harvests.
Every tomato begins with a flower. But before a fruit can grow, an intricate sequence of events must happen in perfect order. The flower’s male and female organs must develop together, pollen must be released at exactly the right time, and fertilization must occur.
Many things can disrupt this delicate process, including genetic changes and environmental stress. Temperature extremes are a major challenge: cold can reduce pollen viability and prevent fertilization, while previous research has shown that heat can also interfere with fruit set.
Now, researchers have uncovered a genetic system that keeps this process synchronized. Their findings could eventually help scientists develop tomato varieties that produce fruit more reliably during challenging growing conditions, including colder seasons.
The study was led by Prof Naomi Ori and doctoral researcher Nave Man Hebrew University, in collaboration with researchers from the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry in Germany and Israel’s Agricultural Research Organization (Volcani Institute).
The team focused on a system involved in the plant’s response to auxin, an important plant hormone that regulates growth and reproduction. Within this system, some factors promote the response while a tiny regulatory RNA called miR167 acts as a brake, helping keep the activity of key genes in balance.
Using CRISPR gene-editing technology, the researchers altered several of these genes to understand how they influence flower development and fruit production.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThey discovered that two closely related genes, SlARF8A and SlARF8B, work together to coordinate the development of the flower’s male and female reproductive organs. One of the genes also helps control when the flower’s anthers open to release pollen—a critical step for successful fertilization.
By changing both the promoting and restraining sides of this genetic balancing system, the researchers uncovered one combination with an especially interesting result.
The gene-edited plants were able to begin developing fruit without fertilization, a natural process known as parthenocarpy, which produces seedless tomatoes. These plants began producing fruit earlier under all tested conditions. Under cold winter conditions, they were able to produce fruit when the other tomato plants produced little or none.
In winter greenhouse experiments, the gene-edited plants produced more than 18 times as many fruits as the regular plants early in the growing season. By harvest, they yielded six times more ripe tomatoes and ten times the total weight of ripe fruit.
Images of total fruits from one representative plant of the indicated genotypes 149 days after sowing. Credit: Nave ManWhile most tomatoes on the modified plants had already ripened and turned red by the end of the experiment, the majority of fruit on the unmodified plants remained green.
The gene-edited plants were also more compact, directing more of their energy toward producing fruit rather than stems and leaves.
“Our findings show how tomato plants use a carefully balanced genetic system to coordinate flower development, pollen release and the beginning of fruit growth,” said Prof. Ori. “Understanding this system may eventually help us develop crops that produce fruit more reliably when temperatures make normal fertilization difficult.”
The researchers say the findings could ultimately help extend tomato production into colder months and improve the stability of winter harvests.
Before the approach can be used commercially, further studies will be needed to determine how these genetic changes affect fruit size, flavor and overall quality, and whether they can be successfully introduced into agricultural varieties.
The discovery may be especially valuable for tomatoes grown for processing, where seedless fruit and reduced jelly content can be advantageous.
The research was supported by the German Research Foundation, the Israel Science Foundation, and the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture.
Read the original peer-reviewed publication here
Behind every significant advance in US food safety lies a public health disaster that forced Congress to act. A regulatory carve-out, the GRAS loophole, a long-standing exception intended for harmless pantry staples, remains a pathway that allows food and supplement companies decide for themselves whether new ingredients are safe. The FDA is once again under pressure to rein in GRAS. At stake is how much the public should trust an invisible self-policing system and the forces calling for change.
Image: ACSH“For far too long, ingredient manufacturers and sponsors have exploited a loophole that has allowed new ingredients and chemicals, often with unknown safety data, to be introduced into the U.S. food supply without notification to the FDA or the public.”
– Secretary Kennedy
Closing the loophole created by food “ingredients,” “Generally Recognized As Safe,” (GRAS) will be a win for the MAHA “warriors” and others when it comes to food supply, but for supplements, those same warriors are more conflicted. But before your feelings about the messenger influence your thinking, let’s first consider the message. And to do that, it is worth taking a moment to review our food supply’s regulatory history.
A Regulatory System Built on CrisesThe critical thread in understanding GRAS substances begins with the definition of adulterated and its subsequent enforcement and oversight, as food “crisis” after “crisis” prompts Congressional action. Federal oversight of our food and drug supply was established with the 1906 Food and Drugs Act, which focused on prohibiting the marketing of foods or drugs that were “misbranded” or “adulterated.”
“We saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts…gathering dirt, splinters, floor filth and expectoration of tuberculous and other diseased workers”
– Labor Commissioner Charles Neill and Social Reformer James Reynolds
In the context of 1906, Congressional concern addressed intentionally added dangerous materials and food rendered unpalatable by improper processing, the adulterants,
“any added poisonous or other added deleterious ingredient which may render [the food] injurious to health … or in part of a filthy, decomposed, or putrid animal or vegetable substance…”
There was no required proof that an adulterant was injurious, and the law additionally prohibited “aesthetic adulteration,” alterations that we now associate with marketing and palatability, such as food coloring and emulsifiers, irrespective of any health risk or benefit.
The FDA was given enforcement power to punish or interdict adulteration after the fact; its role in evaluating the safety of substances and processes before they were introduced came decades later. It took another tragedy to move the government to shift the burden of proving safety to manufacturers.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPA Sulfanilamide Disaster Prompts Action
“The first time I ever had occasion to call in a doctor for [Joan] and she was given Elixir of Sulfanilamide. All that is left to us is the caring for her little grave. Even the memory of her is mixed with sorrow for we can see her little body tossing to and fro and hear that little voice screaming with pain and it seems as though it would drive me insane.”
– Letter to President Roosevelt
In the fall of 1937, children and adults treated for sore throats began suffering kidney failure, abdominal pain, and, in some instances, convulsions. Within two months, there were 100 deaths. The culprit, a reformulation of sulfanilamide, the first commercially available antibiotic, was used in streptococcal infections that had been found safe when prescribed as a tablet or powder. A demand for a liquid form prompted one firm to find that sulfanilamide dissolves in diethylene glycol, poisonous “anti-freeze.” (No longer used.) The company’s control lab found the new formulation’s raspberry flavor, red appearance, and fragrance acceptable, and it was shipped nationwide. While selling a lethal product was not the manufacturer’s intent, it was the outcome.
The sulfanilamide preparation was removed under the older 1906 law as “misbranded,” [1]. Still, the incident prompted the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (FD&C Act), which represented a further step in the evolution of US food safety regulation, broadening food safety provisions to include adulteration resulting from unsanitary processing.
From Cranberries to ChemicalsIn the booming post–World War II era, America’s dinner tables filled with foods made brighter, sweeter, and longer-lasting by a growing list of chemical additives. Science promised convenience, but by the 1950s, doubts crept in. In 1952, responding to growing concerns, Congress established a select committee, chaired by Representative James Delaney, to investigate the increasing use of chemicals in food. Congress, as reactive then as it is today, required another crisis to act.
In 1959, traces of a weed killer, called aminotrazole, linked to cancer were found in holiday cranberries just weeks before Thanksgiving. Shoppers panicked, sales collapsed, and headlines blared warnings about what might be lurking in the nation’s food supply. Public trust wavered, and Congress responded to the Great Cranberry Scare, with Delaney’s committee’s work forming the basis for crucial legislative changes.
How GRAS Came to BeWhile much has been written about the Food Additives Amendment’s Delaney Clause,
“…no additive shall be deemed to be safe if it is found to induce cancer when ingested by man or animal.”
The legislation’s most critical shift was dramatically strengthening federal oversight by introducing premarket approvalfor new food ingredients and “food-contact” chemicals (packaging materials) to be evaluated solely on safety, with any beneficial value unweighted in the analysis. The FDA and Congress, acknowledging limited resources, required industry to bear the burden of conducting studies to support approval, echoing today’s requirement for pharmaceutical companies to bear the burden for the studies of the product’s safety and efficacy.
Yet in creating these stronger safeguards, Congress also carved out exceptions—chief among them, the category of ingredients ‘Generally Recognized As Safe.’ It was the government’s fiscal limitations and the impracticality of reviewing thousands of already-used substances that enabled GRAS regulation. To allow a focus on genuinely new or potentially risky additives, an exception to formal FDA review was made for ingredients and substances with a history of safe use, or “generally recognized by qualified experts” as safe, the GRAS exception. [2]
In 1969, the FDA removed cyclamate salts, an artificial sweetner, from its GRAS exemptions because of safety questions, prompting President Nixon to direct the FDA to reexamine the safety of GRAS substances. The FDA initiated both a review of selected GRAS substances and its approval process. In 1997, to again eliminate resource-intensive procedures, the FDA replaced GRAS “affirmation” with today’s GRAS “notification.” That exception, intended for harmless and familiar ingredients, has evolved into four distinct approval pathways.
Four Pathways to ‘Safe’Today, GRAS determinations follow one of four routes—each with different implications for oversight and public trust. Perhaps the most acceptable is the “common use in food pathway,” where some ingredients, safely consumed for generations, provide a “real-world” safety record. Examples include salt, Vitamin C, baking soda, various spices and herbs, and certain enzymes and plant extracts found in “cultural and traditional” uses.
A more “scientific” approach, utilizing studies and meta-analysis, takes one of three paths.
- FDA-Initiated GRAS Determination: The FDA conducts a scientific review. Often, reviewing existing substances already in use, responding to new scientific information, as was the case with the banning of cyclamates and trans fats. This is a potential path in addressing public health concerns prompted by MAHA and the regulatory required public comment periods.
- GRAS Self-Determination: Manufacturers undertake the process to determine that a substance is GRAS for its intended use. This self-determination pathway appears rigorous: necessitating a qualified expert panel, comprehensive safety assessment, and documentation of the entire evaluation process. However, manufacturers are under no legal obligation to notify the FDA of substances they have determined as GRAS, nor are they prohibited from using them. [3]
- GRAS Notification Program: a middle ground between the two, involves voluntary notification of the manufacturer’s self-determination. The FDA then issues a response, determining whether there are “no questions” regarding safety, raising questions, or declining to evaluate the notice at all. This pathway provides regulatory oversight, a public record of agency review, and a stronger defense in court by demonstrating reliance on federal oversight. However, this approval offers no immunity if the product later proves harmful or if key safety data was withheld.
Under US law (21 U.S.C. § 321(s)), “generally recognized” means that the safety of the substance is widely known and accepted by qualified experts based on publicly available information (e.g., published studies, historical food use). It’s a regulatory, not scientific, standard, focused on whether there is enough credible, public evidence to support safe use; it makes little distinction whether the science is cutting-edge or unanimous. These pathways vary in rigor, but the most controversial is self-determination, which critics say leaves the public and the government in the dark
Industry Influence and the 99% Claim
“Since 2000, the food and chemical industry has greenlighted nearly 99% of food chemicals introduced onto the market without federal safety review… The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for ensuring food is safe. But the industry instead is deciding what food chemicals are suitable for people to eat.”
– Environmental Working Group
Certainly, this quote raises concerns, and it is tempting to believe that industry, not the FDA, is deciding what food chemicals are suitable for people to eat.” Fortunately, it is not quite true. The “99%” is an estimate, coming from a 2011 study that drew “upon food safety experts to make informed estimates.”
No one knows how many GRAS substances are self-determined; they are not reported.
The data on GRAS ingredients that have been reviewed by the FDA can be found here. There are now 1234 chemicals on the list. Roughly 1% are pending, the manufacturer voluntarily withdrew 18%, and 1% had inadequate information to make an FDA determination. Of the remaining 80%, the FDA has reviewed the industry-supplied data and given a “no questions” notification. The source of the data, from industry rather than outside experts, makes it, in the eyes of EWG, suspect. The imbalance is not solely the result of corporate overreach; the structure of the approval system creates strong incentives to avoid the formal FDA pathway.
Both FDA-researched food additive petitions and industry-researched GRAS affirmation provide a degree of liability coverage, require detailed manufacturing, safety, and functionality data, and involve public comment. However, the differences, particularly with marketing and time to determination, significantly favor affirmation.
Despite the additional costs in time and the inability to market during a long interval, the FDA’s food additive pathways result in a non-exclusive regulation “authorizing the use of the additive by any person wishing to do so.” Why bother?
Challenges To ReformGRAS status is not permanent, as demonstrated by the removal of cyclamates and trans fats from the list. Approval can be withdrawn after an investigation prompted by changes in usage, adverse event reports, or scientific advances in toxicologic analytics or disease epidemiology. As the GAO reported in 2010,
“FDA’s oversight process does not help ensure the safety of all new GRAS determinations.”
Secretary Kennedy’s concern over the GRAS loophole is warranted.
There are two noteworthy challenges to Secretary Kennedy’s quest to eliminate the GRAS loophole.
Former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler is urging the agency to revoke the “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) status for refined flours, high-fructose corn syrup, and a range of emulsifiers and stabilizers commonly used in ultra-processed foods. Similar to his approach to tobacco regulation, he suggests flipping the script, requiring companies to prove the safety of their products before marketing them. Surely, this approach will find some MAHA “warriors” in agreement despite the fact that it is impossible to prove, with complete certainty, safety.
More covertly, GRAS Self-Determination has been used by supplement manufacturers to bypass the more rigorous FDA review of new ingredients in supplements, where there is no self-determination – manufacturers must submit data for FDA review. However, if an ingredient is first introduced as a food product, it can be GRAS self-determined, and then that ingredient, now GRAS-approved, can be freely added to a supplement without further review.
“In one case, the makers of Prevagen tried and failed twice to get FDA approval for its key ingredient, apoaequorin. After slipping it into a drink and self-certifying it, they withdrew their notice when the FDA raised concerns — yet the product is still on shelves today.” – NY Times
As the NY Times continues,
“In the run-up to the 2024 election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed to end what he called the government’s “aggressive suppression” of vitamins and dietary supplements. It’s a stance shared by several in his inner circle, many of whom have deep ties to the supplement industry. …Kennedy’s challenge is a tricky one: railing against predatory practices in mainstream food and medicine while also pushing to loosen federal oversight of alternative health products.”
Closing the GRAS loophole of self-determination will foster trust and transparency, potentially making our food supply safer. Will Secretary Kennedy apply this treatment to ultra-processed foods alone, or will he include supplements? That may tell us all we need to know about whether the goal is to Make America Healthy Again or to continue to line the pockets of some of his closest supporters.
[1] It had been sold as an elixir, which, by definition, is alcohol-based.
[2] A second exemption was granted to “Prior Sanctioned” substances, which were previously exempt from premarket approval by the FDA or USDA.
[3] This “safe harbor” against liability is lost if new information suggests safety concerns, and the FDA shows that the substance may be “injurious to health.”
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is the Medical Director at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon. He completed his MBA with distinction in the George Washington University Healthcare MBA program and has served as a consultant to hospitals. While no longer clinically active, he has had his writing featured at KevinMD and Doximity.A version of this article was originally posted at American Council on Science and Health and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find American Council on Science and Health on X @ACSHorg
Pairwise, the CRISPR gene-editing company built on row crops like corn and soybeans, is now finding its fastest growth elsewhere. As AgFunderNews’ Elaine Watson reports, the company has quietly built a licensing business spanning 25 companies and more than 30 species, from cherries and cacao to livestock and insects.
One License, Many CropsPairwise’s Fulcrum platform bundles DNA targeting, gene deletion, and base editing into one agreement, sparing licensees from stacking separate patents. “You don’t have to get multiple licenses. We’re offering one-stop shopping,” said Ian Miller, Pairwise’s chief operating officer.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPRecent partners include Mars (cacao), Sun World International (pitless cherries, a project the SLP has followed), CSIRO (livestock and aquaculture), and IITA (yam breeding in Africa). Miller also credits friendlier rules abroad, including Europe’s simplified framework for gene-edited plants: “I think there’s an understanding that in many cases, what comes out from gene editing is equivalent to conventional breeding.”
With roughly as many prospects still in talks, Pairwise is betting CRISPR’s next big payoff comes from crops the ag biotech industry has long overlooked.
| | Related on the SLP CRISPR pitless cherries are on the horizon |
Read the original article here
Across Africa, conversations about food are becoming increasingly intertwined with conversations about science as stakeholders across the value chain work to eradicate hunger, malnutrition and food inequality. Farmers are being encouraged to adopt improved seed varieties to cope with climate change, declining soil fertility, emerging pests and diseases and shifting market demands, while governments and development partners continue to invest heavily in agricultural research.
These interventions form a necessary part of securing a sustainable food future, as Africa’s population is projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. The projected population surge also means that food demand is expected to increase, driven by rapid urbanization.
With this growth comes the question of the continent’s readiness to build resilient food systems capable of feeding a rapidly growing population under increasingly unpredictable climatic conditions. Thus, informed public conversations about scientific agricultural innovation have never been more important. However, amid these discussions, one challenge continues to surface: misunderstanding.
During recent field engagements across Nigeria and Senegal as part of Dev-Afrique’s work assessing sorghum and millet systems, a striking trend surfaced across interviews with stakeholders. Farmers, agro-dealers and community members often used the terms improved seed, hybrid seed and genetically modified organism (GMO) interchangeably. To many, seeds developed by scientists or sold through formal seed systems were simply regarded as a GMO.
This confusion is consequential, as it shapes perception of risk and significantly influences adoption of improved varieties and ultimately affects the adoption of innovations built to strengthen agriculture productivity. What became evident during these visits was the uncertainty around what improved varieties, hybrids and GMOs are, and what they represent. Clarifying these distinctions then provides a foundation for understanding the opportunities and limitations associated with each innovation.
The three types of seedPerhaps the most important point is this: Not every improved seed is a GMO, and not every hybrid is genetically modified.
An improved variety is typically developed through conventional plant breeding. Plant breeders identify plants with desirable characteristics – such as drought tolerance, disease resistance, early maturity or higher yields – and carefully cross them over multiple generations until those traits become stable. While today’s breeding methods are more sophisticated than those used decades ago, the underlying principle remains the same: selecting the best plants and improving them over time.
A hybrid variety is a type of improved variety developed by crossing two carefully selected parent lines to produce first-generation (F1) seed that combines the desirable traits of both parents.
GMOs are different. GMOs are developed using modern biotechnology to modify an organism’s genetic material in ways that cannot typically be achieved through conventional breeding alone. Depending on the crop and the objective, scientists may introduce, remove or alter specific genes to achieve characteristics, such as insect resistance or herbicide tolerance. The development, approval and cultivation of GM crops are subject to biosafety regulations that vary across countries.
These are three distinct approaches to crop improvement, yet they are often treated as though they are one and the same.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPWhy the confusion mattersWhen every improved variety is automatically labelled as a GMO, farmers may reject seed varieties that could help them withstand drought, reduce crop losses or increase household incomes, simply because of misunderstanding.
Extension workers (trained agricultural advisors) spend valuable time correcting misconceptions rather than providing practical agronomic advice. Seed companies struggle to build trust in genuinely beneficial innovations. Researchers find that decades of investment in plant breeding do not always translate into widespread adoption. Policy-makers, meanwhile, are forced to navigate public debates that are often shaped more by fear than by facts. Ultimately, misinformation becomes another barrier to agricultural productivity.
This is particularly important for crops such as sorghum and millet, which are increasingly recognized for their climate resilience and nutritional value. Across much of Africa, breeding programmes have spent years developing improved varieties capable of helping farmers cope with changing weather patterns while increasing productivity. Many of these varieties are products of conventional breeding – not genetic modification – yet they are frequently misunderstood.
Why has this happened?The confusion is perhaps not surprising. Scientific terminology rarely reaches farming communities in accessible language. Media coverage often focuses on GMOs while overlooking the broader field of plant breeding. Social media has amplified both accurate information and misinformation at unprecedented speed. In many cases, the word “improved” simply becomes synonymous with “scientists changed it”, without any further distinction.
Compounding this is the fact that conversations about agricultural technologies often become polarized. Discussions quickly shift from explaining what a technology is to debating whether it should be adopted. As a result, many people never receive a clear explanation of the science in the first place.
Better seeds require better conversationsA core lesson from our work in the sorghum and millet sector is not simply about seed systems, but also communication. Improving agricultural productivity is not simply about developing better technologies. It is equally about building public understanding and trust.
Farmers deserve transparent, evidence-based information about the varieties available to them – how they were developed, what benefits they offer, what limitations they may have, and what trade-offs exist. Consumers deserve clear communication that enables informed choices rather than decisions based on misinformation or fear. Extension services, researchers, governments, seed companies, universities and development organizations all have a role to play. Agricultural communication must be viewed as a core component of innovation itself.
Scientific advances cannot deliver impact if the people they are intended to benefit do not understand or trust them. If we want African agriculture to become more productive, resilient and food secure, we must move beyond investing in scientific research and invest on scientific literacy.
Before we ask farmers to adopt new technologies, or consumers to accept them, we owe them something fundamental: clear, honest and evidence-based conversations about what those technologies actually are. Only then can Africa move beyond the labels and have conversations that truly matter.
Ify Umunna is the Director of Agriculture at Dev-Afrique Development Advisors. Find Ify on LinkedInA version of this article was originally posted at the World Economic Forum and is reposted here under fair use guidelines. Any reposting should credit the original article. Find the World Economic Forum on X @wef
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department unveiled a plan on August 17, 2026, to close a decades-old loophole that let food companies add chemicals without notifying regulators. The proposed FDA rule requires companies to notify the agency, and explain their reasoning, before using a new “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, ingredient.
Notification Isn’t ApprovalThe FDA gets up to 180 days to make a safety call, but nothing stops a company from selling the ingredient while that clock runs, notes Rachel Roubein for The Washington Post. A 2024 study found hundreds of additives already reached shelves through GRAS self-certification, no public review required.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPPeter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, agreed the rule needs teeth, since companies can still market ingredients before the FDA weighs in. The FDA says its hands are partly tied by Supreme Court rulings curbing federal power, leaving real reform to Congress. While the announcement may sound like a common-sense policy, a genuine premarket safety check for new food chemicals still doesn’t exist.
| | Related on the SLP What’s in our food? FDA proposes that food manufacturers disclose food additives and ingredients |
Read the original article here
Agriculture has always evolved through better tools.
From selective breeding and artificial insemination to precision nutrition and modern biosecurity, producers have consistently adopted innovations that improve animal health, efficiency and long-term sustainability. Now, gene editing is emerging as the industry’s next major advancement – and unlike many tools before it, it’s already influencing daily life far beyond the farm.
For swine producers awaiting access to PIC’s porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS)-resistant pig, that broader context matters.
Gene editing is no longer just a concept discussed in labs. It’s already being used to improve food production systems, reshape the grocery aisle and deliver transformational therapies for devastating diseases like cancer.
Improving food production efficiency and quality“Five or 10 years ago, having gene-edited food products on shelves was more of a vision,” says Ryan Bartlett, PhD, chief technology and commercial officer at Pairwise. “Today, these products are being produced and are on grocery store shelves.”
Pairwise, an agricultural technology company focused on CRISPR gene editing applications in plants, partners with organizations including Bayer, Corteva and Sun World to improve production efficiency in row crops and consumer-facing foods.
The vision is simple: use gene editing to solve practical problems faster than traditional breeding alone can.
“Traditional breeding could potentially get us there one day, but it may take 50 years,” says Bartlett. “Gene editing allows us to make meaningful improvements on a much faster timeline. And time is the limiting factor in everything we do as farmers.”
That accelerated timeline matters in agriculture, where producers face constant pressure to improve efficiency, sustainability and food quality.
One example is the seedless blackberry, which Pairwise helped develop after consumers repeatedly shared the same frustration: they loved the fruit’s flavor and nutritional value but disliked the seeds.
“Convenience drives consumption,” says Bartlett. “Now families can give their kids a nutritious choice without the nuisance of seeds.”
The same technology is also being used to address global food system challenges. Pairwise is also working to develop more compact yam varieties for use in African production systems, where improved efficiency could help address nutritional deficits in regions where yams are a staple.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPTransforming human healthcare outcomesOutside of agriculture, gene editing is transforming human medicine.
“In the U.S., patients now have access to approved gene therapies that treat inherited diseases, including certain forms of blindness, hemophilia and several types of blood cancer,” says Rachel Haurwitz, Ph.D., president and CEO of Caribou Biosciences. “More recently, we’ve seen the first CRISPR-based gene-edited cell therapy approved for sickle cell anemia.”
Caribou Biosciences, Inc., founded by CRISPR pioneers including Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna, is using gene editing technology to develop therapies for blood cancer.
Caribou’s own gene-edited CAR-T cell therapies are showing promising results in patients who had exhausted other treatment options, with some patients remaining cancer-free years after a single treatment.
For Haurwitz, those outcomes reinforce the broader potential of gene editing across industries.
“This is not a single-use technology,” she says. “It is a platform that can address challenges across human health, animal health, agriculture and many other fields.”
Tackling the swine industry’s challenge: PRRSFor swine producers, one of those challenges is PRRS. Traditional biosecurity, vaccination and management strategies remain essential, but PRRS continues to pose a threat due to its ability to mutate and spread aggressively.
Haurwitz sees PIC’s work as an example of gene editing solving a highly targeted, real-world problem.
“By making a specific change to a gene involved in how the PRRS virus enters cells, PIC has created pigs that are resistant to the disease without introducing foreign DNA,” she says. “That kind of precise, intentional change is exactly what makes CRISPR genome editing so powerful.”
Industry leaders believe gene editing will ultimately become another practical tool within agriculture – not a replacement for good management or breeding practices. In addition to solving operational problems for producers, gene editing represents an opportunity to meet consumer demands at the same time. The technology is a pathway for achieving reductions in antibiotic use, improved convenience, increased sustainability, enhanced nutrition and more – features that consumers are increasingly seeking out and endorsing with their purchase decisions.
With gene editing and gene therapies also leading to monumental solutions for devastating human diseases, consumers are growing increasingly familiar with gene editing and the benefits it can provide.
“I think gene editing is going to become an integrated platform across all segments of agriculture,” says Bartlett. “If we do this right, it’s going to be pretty seamless.”
The future of gene editing does not represent a technological revolution, but rather a continuation of the promise producers have always made: adopting better tools to care for animals, improve productivity and build a more sustainable future.
A version of this article was originally posted at National Hog Farmerand has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find National Hog Farmer on X @NHF_Magazine
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the Make America Healthy Again movement will be a decisive force in the November midterms, framing an enthusiastic base as leverage for Republicans even as courts have stalled key pieces of his health agenda.
As of Sunday, Kennedy was midway through a five-state tour of the South and Midwest to rally MAHA voters behind President Donald Trump’s health record.
Kennedy hit Danville, Virginia; Goldsboro, North Carolina; Nashville; Lexington, Kentucky; and Atlanta this week alone, telling the Daily Signal in an exclusive interview that he sees “incredible enthusiasm” for the administration from the movement.
His pitch lands as MAHA-aligned candidates have already reshaped two marquee Republican primaries.
In Louisiana, Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow, R-La., captured the GOP Senate nomination after MAHA PAC poured resources into ousting Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
Cassidy finished third in the May 16 open primary and failed to advance, per NBC News projections, and Letlow beat former Rep. John Fleming in the June 27 runoff.
In Iowa, farmer and businessman Zach Lahn narrowly upset Trump-backed Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, in the June 2 gubernatorial primary, running on curbing pesticide liability shields and cutting nitrate pollution in the state’s water.
In March, MAHA PAC launched a $100 million midterm fundraising push behind MAHA-aligned Republicans.
However, not every MAHA priority is moving.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPIn March, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston blocked Kennedy’s January revamp of the childhood immunization schedule and stayed his 13 appointments to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, ruling the actions likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act.
The government’s appeal is pending.
Kennedy said he expects the administration to prevail, telling the Daily Signal that changes “have to be made by the ACIP panel” and that HHS will ultimately produce more rigorous science on both efficacy and vaccine safety.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Trump has grown impatient with the pace of Kennedy’s probe into an alleged vaccine-autism link, pressing him privately to further scale back childhood shots.
Some MAHA activists also fault the administration for Trump’s February executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to protect domestic glyphosate production, which the White House framed as a matter of food-supply security.
Mark Gorton, co-president of the MAHA Institute, told the Daily Signal that MAHA voters recognize how much has been accomplished in a short window and will still turn out for Republicans this fall, calling them “perhaps one of the largest groups of potential swing voters in the country.”
A version of this article was originally posted at Newsmax and has been reposted here. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Newsmax on X @Newsmax
Paris Hilton’s mother Kathy recently tried the “Jell-O diet” to lose weight. She believed other celebrities – Oprah Winfrey, Doctor Oz, Michelle Obama and Kelly Clarkson – had endorsed it. But the diet was fake and so were the endorsements. Both had been generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
Commentators were quick to poke fun. One said:
Kathy is everyone’s grandma that you can’t keep off the internet reading crazy things.
Misleading health claims are easy to find online, not just about fake diets. Examples include misinformation about vaccines and the cholesterol-lowering drugs statins. Then there’s the growing online market for unapproved peptides.
Health misinformation – false, misleading, exaggerated or unsupported claims about health, disease and medical treatments – can have consequences.
It can delay people from seeking medical care, discourage them from following evidence-based treatment, increase preventable illness and erode trust in health professionals. This can happen if such health information is shared deliberately to mislead or with the best of intentions.
And it’s easy to think older people – like 67-year-old Kathy – are more easily tricked into believing it.
But we’re all susceptible, whatever our age.
Kathy Hilton explained what happened to her body when she went on the fake ‘Jell-O diet’.Are older people really more at risk?Adults aged 60 or older are more likely than younger adults to be exposed to deceptive or untrustworthy health content or sites, particularly via Facebook.
This includes content aimed at selling products, lacks sources for health claims or appears to be AI-generated.
The researchers concluded:
no other demographic characteristic examined – gender, income, education – had any consistent relationship with the likelihood of sharing fake news.
It’s tempting to attribute this to age-related cognitive decline. But adults aged 60 or older can distinguish true headlines from false ones, for example.
So differences in online behaviour are unlikely to be explained by ageing alone.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPSo, what’s going on?People are more likely to believe health misinformation if they follow conspiracy theories, are religious, and follow conservative ideologies or parties. Distrusting science, or being worried or anxious, also increases the risk of becoming susceptible to health misinformation.
Some people are exposed to more misinformation than others. This includes those who actively engage with unreliable content by commenting on it or sharing it. Being exposed to health misinformation repeatedly can also make false claims appear accurate.
Many of these behavioural and psychological factors apply to younger adults too.
But older adults use and interact with online health information and misinformation in different ways.
When they visit a “dodgy” health website, that’s mainly via other low-credibility sites (such as business and shopping sites), rather than through search engines or social media.
They also face challenges younger generations may not. Many join social media later in life and have had fewer opportunities to develop skills to evaluate digital information.
And even if they do end up encountering health information online, they don’t rely on it as their primary source. They often go online to clarify medical advice, answer everyday health questions or fill gaps after a consultation. For health information, most still trust doctors, pharmacists and family members.
What can we do about it?Combating health misinformation requires more than teaching people, of any age, how to spot a fake headline. Health and digital literacy programs should help people:
- choose reliable sources before engaging with questionable claims
- recognise common tactics such as emotional language, false experts and conspiracy narratives
- pause before liking or sharing.
These efforts should be tailored to different audiences and reinforced over time. A one-off checklist may improve people’s ability to detect dubious content, but is less likely to produce lasting changes in what people believe or how they behave.
Even high levels of digital literacy or experience online are no guaranteed immunity to healthy misinformation. This can make older people think they’re better than they are at spotting misleading information online. Older people might also be sceptical or cynical about various sources, but engage with it anyway.
The platforms have a role tooSearch engines and social media platforms also need to do more to help people of all ages evaluate the information they encounter.
Examples could include integrating real-time credibility indicators, such as a traffic light system of warning labels. These can be effective across different demographics, and languages.
Search engines and social media platforms could also present evidence from government websites next to online claims to allow readers to make a side-by-side comparison.
So rather than removing misleading content or adding fact-check labels after the fact, these approaches encourage users to compare information before reaching a conclusion.
Let’s not blame older peopleUltimately, tackling health misinformation is not simply about teaching people of any age to “use the internet better”. It requires helping them select reliable sources, recognise how misinformation exploits emotions and shapes beliefs, and pause before sharing.
This is while creating online environments where trustworthy health information is easier to find and recognise.
These strategies should be tailored to people’s existing digital skills, reinforcing good habits among experienced users while providing more in-built support to those with less experience.
Holly Seale is a social scientist and Professor at the School of Population Health, University of New South Wales at Sydney. Find Holly on X @hollyseale
Saiful Islam is a social epidemiologist and Senior Lecturer at the School of Population Health, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of New South Wales at Sydney.
A version of this article was originally posted at Conversation and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Conversation on X @ConversationUS
Few symbols on food labels evoke such an immediate sense of health as the “organic seal.” Its promise of “natural” production leads many consumers to assume organic foods are more nutritious and safer.
Image: ACSHThe movement’s philosophical roots trace to Rudolf Steiner, founder of biodynamic agriculture, who rejected industrial, chemical-based farming in favor of a holistic, ecological approach. However, some of his methods, such as burying manure-filled cow horns and planting by lunar cycles, have no scientific basis. These ideas fed into the growth of organic farming throughout the 20th century, formalized internationally by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements’ (IFOAM) 1980 Basic Standards and later by national legislation. In the U.S., a product can be labeled “organic” only if at least 95% of its ingredients meet standards for soil and water conservation, biodiversity, and reduced synthetic inputs.
Growing public concern over pesticides and synthetic fertilizers accelerated the movement’s spread throughout the century, explaining why “organic” still carries an ecological and ethical pedigree today. But this legitimate ecological framework has, over time, been stretched into a much broader, and largely unsupported health claim: that organic foods are more nutritious, safer, and even pesticide-free.
They are not pesticide-free. Organic farming permits crop protection products of natural or mineral origin, including vegetable oils, botanical extracts, and copper-based compounds. Copper sulfate, widely used against fungal diseases, can harm the environment and, when applied intensively, cause occupational poisoning.
Consumers are largely unaware that the real distinction between organic and conventional systems isn’t the presence or absence of pesticides, but which substances are permitted and how they’re regulated. One survey of North American consumers found:
● 48% cited health as their main reason for buying organic
● 19% believed organic products are pesticide-free
● 15% cited sustainability
● 9% cited freshness
Media coverage has often reinforced rather than corrected this gap. A 2018 interview with a nutritionist in Brazil’s Federal Council of Nutrition argued that lower pesticide use stimulates plants to produce more antioxidants, a claim that the broader nutritional evidence does not consistently support.
An Everyday Health article asserted, without evidence, that organic farming reduces the risk of allergies, lung disease, birth defects, and cancer. While true that certified organic producers use fewer antibiotics and that organic foods can’t be genetically modified, neither fact demonstrates a lower risk for chronic disease.
The most consequential of these claims comes from the NutriNet-Santé cohort, a large French prospective study that has tracked participants’ diets, medical histories, and lifestyles for over a decade. One of its analyses reported an association between organic fruit and vegetable consumption and a lower risk of breast cancer. As with any observational finding, it deserves scrutiny before being treated as causal — and the scrutiny is where this gets interesting.
Are They More Nutritious?A 2021 systematic review published in Helyon pooled data from 147 studies, including 1,779 samples and 656 comparisons, spanning 1990 to 2020 and covering macronutrients, micronutrients, pesticide residues, and bioactive compounds such as polyphenols.
The result was a wash. Roughly half of fruit comparisons showed no significant difference; vegetables were even more heterogeneous, with results favoring organic, conventional, or no effects, in roughly equal measure. Organic foods generally had higher vitamin C levels, but conventional foods frequently had higher lycopene and β-carotene levels. Even pesticide residues did not consistently favor organic foods, as some comparisons found higher heavy-metal concentrations in organic samples.
The takeaway isn’t that one system is better — it’s that nutritional composition depends on the specific food and nutrient, not on the farming category. Soil, climate, ripeness at harvest, and cultivar matter more than certification. Labeling a food “organic” tells you nothing reliable about its nutrient content relative to its conventional counterpart. One caveat tempers even this modest conclusion: the pooled studies were too heterogeneous to support more detailed statistical analysis.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe NutriNet-Santé Cancer StudiesWith nutritional composition a wash, we might ask whether consumption of “organics” changes disease risk. That question demands a stricter standard than a list of limitations; it requires a dose-response relationship: cancer risk should decline progressively as organic consumption rises.
Consider a 2018 JAMA Internal Medicine study, in which participants in the highest quartile of organic food consumption had about 25% lower relative cancer risk than those in the lowest (an absolute reduction of roughly 0.6 percentage points), while every five-point increase in an organic-consumption score was associated with an 8% lower risk. But heavier organic consumers also tended to be wealthier, more educated, more physically active, and to eat healthier diets, differences that statistical adjustment cannot fully eliminate.
That raised a sharper question: was the association driven by eating organic in general, or specifically by replacing conventional produce with organic? A follow-up study of the same cohort was designed to test that substitution.
Biological plausibility is important here. Some pesticides can damage DNA; several are recognized as endocrine disruptors even at low dietary doses; and others may alter the gut microbiome and inflammation. Organophosphate insecticides show estrogenic activity, while some herbicides interfere with androgen signaling, mechanisms proposed for hormone-dependent cancers such as breast cancer. If these mechanisms are responsible, however, we should expect a graded decline in risk as organic fruit and vegetable intake increases. Dose-response is one of epidemiology’s strongest indicators of causality.
At first glance, the substitution study — 31,179 participants, 75% women, followed for 7.3 years with 1,718 cancer cases — appeared to show exactly that. Every additional 100 g/day of organic fruits and vegetables replacing conventional was associated with a 3% lower overall cancer risk and a 10% lower risk of postmenopausal breast cancer.
However, the pattern disappears under closer inspection. When participants were divided into quintiles, there was no dose-response for overall cancer. Even for postmenopausal breast cancer, the first four quintiles had nearly identical risks; only the highest quintile showed a reduction. In other words, the widely cited 10%-per-100 g estimate was driven almost entirely by a small group of the heaviest organic consumers rather than by a gradual trend across the population.
That weakens a pesticide-mediated explanation. A threshold effect is possible, but the study cannot demonstrate one. Instead, the highest-consumption quintile may identify people who differ from everyone else in ways the models could not completely capture.
Higher conventional fruit and vegetable intake was associated with a lower risk of all cancers at the three highest quintiles. Given the broadly similar nutritional composition of organic and conventional produce reported in the 2021 review, this result argues for a simple “more fruits and vegetables, regardless of source” explanation.
The results are less consistent with the pesticide-mediated hypothesis. Eating more conventional produce does not reduce pesticide exposure; if anything, it modestly increases it. If lower pesticide exposure were the primary driver of the association observed with organic foods, a similarly protective association with conventional produce would be unexpected. What initially appeared to be a single explanation is actually two distinct ones. The data lend support to the nutritional explanation while weakening the case for pesticides as the main mechanism. Any remaining difference may instead reflect specific food choices or other characteristics of highly health-conscious consumers that the study did not fully measure.
None of this proves the association is spurious. The authors acknowledge that estimates for individual cancers are imprecise because of small case numbers and wide confidence intervals; some analyses even suggested higher, but not statistically significant, colorectal cancer risk among heavy organic consumers. Still, the proposed biological mechanism sits uneasily with the data. A process operating continuously in the body is not expected to produce a statistical step function.
Standard limitations apply:
- The cohort is disproportionately female and drawn from health-conscious volunteers, which limits the extent to which the findings apply to the wider population.
- Diet was self-reported, which invites measurement error, recall bias, and a tendency to over-report virtuous behavior.
- Consumption was measured only once, at baseline, with no guarantee patterns held steady across a mean 7.3-year follow-up.
- Residual confounding remains plausible throughout
- Even if the association were genuinely causal, it would still need to be replicated in other populations and settings before supporting any general recommendation.
Should You Buy Organic?Pharmacologist Qin M. Chen and physician Joseph S. Alpert, both at the University of Arizona, sought an answer in a 2025 review of the nutritional composition, pesticide exposure, and antibiotic and hormone use in agriculture. They acknowledged organic farming’s plausible environmental benefits, including reduced nitrate and phosphate runoff and greater preservation of insect and microbial biodiversity.
However, after reviewing four major studies, they found no consistent evidence that organic foods provide clinically meaningful health benefits over conventional foods. Reports of a 25% lower cancer risk, they noted, are just as plausibly explained by the generally healthier lifestyles of organic consumers as by the food itself. Their conclusion was blunt: organic consumption appears safe. It may modestly reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but there is no definitive evidence that it improves health outcomes or extends life expectancy.
A separate systematic review of 35 studies, including 15 clinical trials and 20 observational studies, reached the same conclusion. The trials, mostly short (days to four weeks) and at high risk of bias, found little difference in biomarkers like antioxidant capacity between organic and conventional diets, and none tracked a clinically meaningful long-term outcome. The observational studies reported associations with fertility, allergic sensitization, and metabolic syndrome. However, the same confounding problem applies: organic consumers are consistently healthier, more active, and leaner than average, which makes it very difficult to isolate the food from the lifestyle around it. What is well established is that organic diets lower urinary pesticide metabolite concentrations; what remains unestablished is whether that reduction translates into any measurable health outcome.
The central message is simple. If you have the means and prefer organic food, there is nothing wrong with buying it, whether to support a farming system you value, because of its plausible environmental benefits, or simply because you prefer it. Just don’t buy it believing it’s nutritionally superior or protective against disease; the evidence doesn’t support that, and even the cohort’s most consistent signal — that quintile-5 breast cancer finding — still awaits an explanation that survives its own data, rather than one built around it.
If you do not buy organic, or cannot afford to, keep eating fruits, vegetables, and legumes with confidence. Far more than the label on the package, regular consumption is what the evidence consistently supports.
Mauro Proença is a graduate student in Nutrition at São Camilo University in São Paulo, Brazil. In addition, he writes for “Questão de Ciência” (RQC) – a digital magazine “dedicated to defending the use of scientific evidence in public policies.”
A version of this article was originally posted on the American Council on Science and Health website and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and the original article. The American Council on Science and Health can be found on X @ACSHorg
On June 3, a three-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas, was found with fly larvae feeding on a wound. While the calf recovered, the case reopened a chapter of agricultural history that Americans had largely forgotten: New World screwworm, a parasitic fly whose larvae eat the living flesh of cattle, wildlife, pets, and occasionally people.
The United States eradicated screwworm in 1966, partnering with Mexico and other countries to eventually kill off populations throughout Central America. Yet the fly lived on in South America and managed to cross back into Panama in 2023, spreading north until it reached Texas this summer. By late July, the state had reported more than 40 cases in cattle, dogs, and other animals.
To eradicate the fly again, the government began releasing millions more flies from planes and ground stations. This counterintuitive approach is known as the sterile insect technique, now used for a variety of pests. Factories rear enormous numbers of the target insect, sterilize them, and release them into the wild. When a wild female mates with a sterile male, she produces no offspring. Flood an area with enough sterile males for long enough and the population collapses.
Now genetic engineering could make this strategy far more powerful. In June, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted emergency authorization and proposed commercial approval for NovoFly, a genetically engineered, male-only strain of New World screwworm developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and North Carolina State University. While not yet used, USDA plans to incorporate the fly into its sterile insect program as it builds out its new Texas facility. EPA is also reviewing a gene-edited fruit fly, Knockout SWD, designed to suppress Spotted-wing drosophila, one of the most damaging pests of berries and cherries.
Both products turn an insect’s reproductive biology against it. They are living insecticides that search for their own targets without the risks of chemical insecticides. If scientists and regulators can bring these systems from research facilities to the field, they could transform pest control well beyond screwworm.
Developing the trojan flyThe sterile insect technique began with what the New York Times Magazine referred to as “the single most original thought of the 20th century.” In 1937, USDA entomologist Edward Knipling proposed controlling screwworm by releasing so many sterile males that wild females would struggle to find fertile mates. His colleague Raymond Bushland later developed a way to use X-rays to sterilize screwworm pupae while still preserving their ability to fly and mate. USDA soon tested and scaled up the approach, building screwworm rearing factories, creating systems to release the insects from aircraft, and launching a massive eradication campaign. By 1966, screwworm was gone from the United States.
The method works particularly well with screwworm as the females generally mate only once. A sterile male, however, can mate several times per day, suppressing the population.
The sterile insect approach can be effective for other insects too. Programs have since targeted Mediterranean fruit fly, Mexican fruit fly, melon fly, tsetse fly, pink bollworm, codling moth, and other pests.
Regardless of the insect, there has always been a fundamental biological challenge: the females. Sterile insect programs must ensure no fertile females are released. Screwworm facilities handle this by sterilizing the females too, which requires higher levels of radiation than optimal for the males. Programs for other insects sometimes separate and kill the females. Either way, rearing and feeding them is a waste of resources and complicates operations.
Genetic engineering can now handle some of those logistical challenges itself.
Building a better bug trapThe engineered NovoFly contains a genetic switch that kills female embryos. In the breeding colony, workers add tetracycline to the insects’ diet which allows the females to survive and the colony to reproduce. The generation of insects produced for release aren’t so lucky. Without the tetracycline, the female embryos die and the batch develops almost entirely into males, which are still sterilized.
Producing only males could roughly double the number of useful insects generated by a factory and may allow a lower radiation dose, enabling the released males to be more competitive with wild flies.
The other engineered fly under development, Knockout SWD, uses genetics to handle both sex selection and sterilization. The underlying method is called precision-guided sterile insect technique, or pgSIT. It relies on two genetically engineered breeding that produce sterile offspring they mate with one another.
One line carries Cas9, a protein that acts like a pair of molecular scissors. The other carries guide RNAs, short molecules that provide Cas9 with a target in the genome. When the two lines are crossed, their offspring inherit both the scissors and the target for them. Cas9 then cuts genes required for normal female development and male fertility. The females fail to develop normally, while the surviving males are sterile.
Researchers are now trying to extend this precision sterilization approach to screwworm. The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research committed $150,000 this summer toward a project with Agragene and North Carolina State University to use CRISPR to produce sterile males without irradiation.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPReplacing spraying with egg-layingGenetic biocontrol, the broader approach that these techniques fit under, gives farmers, ranchers, and other pest managers an alternative to spraying chemical insecticides.
Putting aside the risk some insecticides pose to farmworkers and ecosystems, spraying them is expensive and a logistical pain. Consider the Spotted-wing drosophila. Unlike most fruit flies, which lay eggs in damaged or rotting fruit, Spotted-wing drosophila cuts into healthy, ripening berries and cherries and deposits its eggs inside where the larvae will be protected from insecticides once they hatch.
Growers therefore spray preventively during ripening and harvest, often spraying weekly and rotating among different insecticides to slow the evolution of resistant flies. Unfortunately, some populations of flies have already evolved resistance to several classes of insecticides—pyrethroids and spinosyxns including spinosad, a mainstay of both conventional and organic production.
PgSIT, like other sterile insect technique programs, would allow growers to spray less often by suppressing and potentially eradicating fly populations before they start damaging crops. That can save growers money and also spare bees, predatory insects, and other organisms that might otherwise be harmed by conventional insecticides.
Many of those benefits can be seen in past sterile insect programs such as one that targeted the pink bollworm. For decades, the moth was one of the most destructive pests of cotton in the American Southwest. A program that combined sterile moth releases with cotton varieties genetically engineered to produce insecticidal Bt proteins effectively eradicated the moth. Arizona’s pink bollworm population fell from more than 2 billion in 2005 to zero in 2013, and growers were able to reduce insecticide treatments against all cotton pests by 82 percent, saving more than $500 million. Beneficial insects recovered as well, further helping farmers control pests with fewer sprays.
Genetically engineered insects could extend this success to pests that remain impractical to control with conventional sterile releases. Researchers have developed and studied self-limiting diamondback moths, a pest of cabbage, broccoli, and other brassicas, whose female offspring die after engineered males mate with wild females. A similar system for fall armyworm, one of the world’s most destructive crop pests, has been widely tested and even approved for commercial use in Brazil. Just this August, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) announced a nearly $2.5 million grant, matched by the Almond Board of California, to develop male-only navel orangeworms, the most destructive pest for California’s tree nut growers. And USDA is supporting further genetic-control research on various fruit flies, the spotted lanternfly, and other agricultural pests.
Some female-lethal systems could provide a second benefit: reversing the spread of insecticide resistance. Unlike pgSIT males, which are sterile, males in these systems can father surviving sons. If the males carry insecticide- or Bt-susceptible genes, their sons reintroduce susceptibility into the wild population even as their engineered sisters die and reduce their population, as several studies have demonstrated with the diamondback moth. It is a distinct strategy from sterile-insect control, but one that could help preserve the useful life of both chemical insecticides and insect-resistant crops.
Driving a population to collapseGenetic biocontrol’s potential extends far beyond farms. Government agencies, including around the US, still rely heavily on insecticides to suppress mosquito species that transmit dengue, Zika, West Nile virus, and other diseases. Repeated spraying is expensive, often misses breeding sites, exposes non-target insects, and selects for resistance.
Researchers have already adapted pgSIT to Aedes aegypti, the mosquito species that primarily spreads dengue and other viruses in urban areas. Other self-limiting engineered mosquitoes have reduced local Aedes populations in field trials.
Gene drives occupy a more powerful and less reversible branch of the same research. Rather than disappearing when releases stop, they bias inheritance so that an engineered trait can spread through a population. In one landmark experiment, a CRISPR drive targeting a gene required for female development spread through large indoor populations of the mosquito species that transmits malaria and caused them to collapse within several generations. Yet no insect gene drive has been released. Because they are designed to persist and spread, they require a different level of ecological assessment, regulatory oversight, and public consent than self-limiting systems, which has slowed progress.
Nonetheless, gene drives and other types of genetic control could eventually be applied to other pests that make people sick. Researchers are developing the genetic tools that would be needed to control ticks. The work remains perhaps a decade or more behind mosquitos, according to Dr. Gulia-Nuss who leads a lab focused on ticks and mosquitos at University of Nevada, Reno. Ticks’ longer life cycle and need to feed on a live host make sterile release less practical. But once genome engineering techniques are better established for them, it may be possible to develop gene drives to suppress their populations—perhaps first for cattle fever ticks, which have shorter lifecycles, but eventually for the species that carry Lyme disease and cause alpha-gal syndrome.
Engineering the needed research and regulationsThe original screwworm campaign succeeded because the Department of Agriculture supported it from research through scale-up. It funded the initial research, but also worked to improve the sterile insect technique and to conduct the actual rearing, dispersal and monitoring of the flies.
The next generation of genetic biocontrol needs a similar level of institutional commitment. NovoFly grew out of decades of USDA research and collaboration with North Carolina State. PgSIT emerged from university research supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and other public funders. Private companies can build upon this foundational research to develop products. But they need the government as a partner in developing insect factories and studying ecological impacts.
Public R&D will remain critical to improving genetic biocontrol and also extending it to more species. Many are too difficult to genetically engineer and study in field trials for companies to take the risk to invest in them.
Regulators play a critical role as well. EPA’s review of NovoFly and Knockout SWD could establish a clear pathway for other companies to follow, helping unlock financing and interest in the field. It lays out many of the key questions regulators must know: How often do females survive the production process? How often are released males fertile? What steps are being taken to ensure breeding lines can’t escape? How well do released males compete with wild males? How far do they disperse? Wherever possible, EPA should make it clear what evidence it needs, what types of studies are needed to establish it, and what protocols must be followed for deployment.
The return of the New World screwworm has brought with it an old lesson. Pest control doesn’t have to involve spreading a poison and hoping it reaches the target. Sometimes the best insecticide for the job is one that hatches and flies away, leaving little trace and no descendants.
Scientists with the U.S. government invented that approach nearly a century ago. Genetic engineering can now make it cheaper, more scalable, and useful against many more pests. Realizing that promise will require patient research, support for operational scale-up, and regulations designed to let innovations move as quickly as the insects they’re designed to stop.
Dan Blaustein-Rejto is the Director of the Food and Agriculture program at Breakthrough Institute. Follow Dan on X @danrejto
A version of this article was originally posted at The Ecomodernist and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Breakthrough Institute on X @TheBTI
When CRISPR technology first hit the scene in 2012, many saw its promise in tackling stubborn genetic diseases in humans. Yet this gene-editing technique also offers scientists the ability to quickly, precisely, and cost-effectively alter genetic traits in crops, providing the potential to grow hardier stock while increasing yield and improving nutrient density.
“This kind of gene editing allows you to make changes that you’d actually find in nature,” says Tom Adams, chief executive officer at Pairwise, an agricultural biotechnology company that is leveraging CRISPR to develop improved fruit and vegetable varieties. “It’s something that can help us bring value to the food industry, changing the way different traits are deployed to address different problems.”
For the better part of a century, food innovation has largely occurred after crops have been harvested. But increased use of emerging technologies, like CRISPR and artificial intelligence (AI), could push innovation to the very plants themselves. Instead of adding vitamins and minerals through fortification or formulating products to improve taste or texture, today scientists are working on groundbreaking techniques with the power to achieve these goals before a seed is put in the ground. As these technologies continue to evolve, however, it is incumbent on the food industry to answer some critical questions. How will the use of emerging agricultural technologies (agtech) change the way foods are developed? What impact might they have on current supply chains? And how can we best ensure that all food industry stakeholders, from grower to consumer, will benefit from agtech adoption?
Boosting the Right TraitsZachary Lippman, Jacob Goldfield professor of genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, says there have been remarkable breakthroughs in crop innovation over the past five years. Genome sequencing has provided pangenomes, or “the DNA blueprint not of a single species, but many varieties or genotypes within a species and related species.” Those pangenomes, he says, offer scientists the ability to look at how genomes have adapted over time, identifying the genes, or combination of genes, responsible for beneficial or attractive traits like heat tolerance, crop yield, or improved flavor. Today’s agtech researchers can leverage the pangenomes to target specific genes for editing. However, Lippman cautions, even with this knowledge, it’s difficult to know where “to point [CRISPR] and with what strength you should shoot.
“Gene-editing technology is a big bazooka, if you will, that we use to try solve a problem,” he says. “Do you edit the gene? Do you edit the DNA that regulates the gene? You need to think about any changes you make in the context of networks instead of this gene is responsible for this and that gene is responsible for that so you can get to the trait you want to get to.”
Numerous studies and pilot projects have shown that it is, indeed, possible to deploy such a bazooka in specific applications. But it takes time and precision. Lippman’s own research has improved tomatoes, altering their genetics in ways that help them ripen more quickly as well as have single plants produce more fruit. Pairwise made headlines a few years ago for developing a mustard green without its telltale bitterness, and it has also produced high-yield seedless blackberry plants that can be grown at higher density. And then there’s the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) for Sustainable Increases in Crop Yield project, which is leveraging gene editing to “remedy inefficiencies in photosynthesis” to improve crop yields.
“This kind of gene editing allows you to make changes that you’d actually find in nature.”
Tom Adams, Pairwise
Adams says he sees these advances as merely “the tip of the iceberg.” In time, he and other stakeholders could translate the trait alterations achieved in one plant to others—which can accelerate agricultural improvements.
“If you can get more fruit in a year and a half, as opposed to in three to five years, it makes a big difference in what you think about putting in the ground—and where you put those plants in the ground,” he says. “It could open up more local production for different ingredients, increasing our yields and expanding our supply chains.”
There is significant potential to improve and increase different ingredients in the food supply through agtech, agrees Donald Ort, Robert Emerson professor of plant biology and crop sciences at the University of Illinois and deputy director of RIPE. But he says that, to date, much of the work has been done in academic laboratories. And those results do not always translate well to the real world—particularly to commodity agriculture.
“Academia and commodity agriculture often have different goals—and we aren’t always so well versed in each other’s businesses,” he says. “Historically, food companies have been much more interested in product development. For us to really scale these new technologies will require companies to have the ability and will to invest in modeling to understand how these traits work and then the engineering to skillfully edit them.”
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPCrop-Level SpecificationsToday, food manufacturers specify functional and compositional needs for ingredients like protein content, oil stability, starch viscosity, micronutrient levels, and more. Ingredient companies then work to identify specific supply chains that can provide them or, instead, add those traits during processing.
With advances in plant genetics, most can see a future where food companies will ask for those traits to be provided at the crop or seed level. Lyle DePauw, director of crop innovation at Cargill, says food and ingredient companies are already making investments in agricultural technologies. And, unsurprisingly, their customers are starting to query where, when, and how gene editing could help them attain specific requirements.
“Sometimes companies are asking for improved nutrition. Others want improved flavor. People are also interested in greater sustainability. But these things, most of the time, could be achieved through supply chain or crop innovation. There are different approaches we can use to meet those customer needs, and we need to determine the best one,” he explains.
“We can leverage these technologies to not only produce a safe, reliable, and healthy crop, but also a profitable crop for farmers.”
Robert Saik, Agricultural Consultant
There is excitement about emerging technologies, says DePauw, but as ingredient companies like Cargill look at new ways to provide customers with specific crop traits, it is important to understand that innovators can still “only move at the speed of biology.” It is imperative that food companies understand that—and be willing to think about longer-term investments when applying new agtech.
“When there’s a set of wants, I get one growing season to learn something, reset, and then do it again,” he says. “So as these new asks are coming in, we take the view of ‘now, near, next.’ What solutions do we have ready to go today? Where are we close—with something in pilot phase? And then what are the farther out projects? That’s where the dreaming comes into play and we start thinking about how to prepare our teams to address [projects] for 2036, not 2026.”
Getting the Market ReadyToday, food companies rely on extensive processing steps, including protein fractionation, oil hydrogenation, micronutrient fortification, and chemical starch modification, to create the ingredients they use in product manufacturing. Crop innovation could potentially reduce the need for such extensive processing—if consumers accept it.
“There is an interesting dynamic today, with the Make America Healthy Again movement, of trying to reduce processing,” says Adams. “There’s definite potential for that with these new technologies—you could modify some of the nutritional content of grain crops that get used in ingredients all over the place and provide simpler labels by creating, from the crop itself, the starch, oil, and protein profile you want without chemical processing.”
While there are examples already out there—high-oleic oilseed crops that reduce the need for hydrogenation and ultra-high-protein soybeans that simplify protein extraction—it will take time to expand those kinds of ingredient portfolios. In addition, says Robert Saik, an agricultural consultant and author of Food 5.0: How We Feed the Future, there is the matter of consumer acceptance to consider. While he says that the European Union has “softened” its stance on gene editing, the ghosts of transgenic technologies and “genetically modified” labels still haunt the industry. It will require education to help consumers understand the advantages of future crop improvement methods.
Long-term thinking is a must when it comes to understanding and evaluating the impact of emerging agricultural technologies on ingredients, according to Cargill’s Lyle DePauw. Photo courtesy of Cargill“The reality is, when you say people are against genetically modified organisms (GMOs), there are only eight crops that fall into that category in the system,” he says. “CRISPR and gene editing is advancing where we may not need transgenic crops anymore … but people are still ignorant of what genetically modified means in food and the only way to combat that ignorance is educating people. They need to understand how CRISPR can help alter output trait technology in a way that helps us feed all the people we need to feed in the future.”
DePauw believes that food companies should “get in front of” misinformation, helping consumers embrace new ingredients before they become more mainstream. “We can go back to the fundamentals to improve nutrition and flavor in many of these plants with our knowledge of genetics, plant breeding, food science, and genetic engineering to reduce downstream processing,” he says. “But people have emotions about some of these tools. And we need to help consumers understand the value in using them to advance crops faster and meet the needs they are asking us to meet.”
The Intellectual Property QuestionThere is another issue for food companies that may be considering new and evolving agtech: intellectual property (IP) rights. Lippman says that CRISPR and other gene-editing technologies can help better meet consumer demands in the future—perhaps even at reduced costs—but only if those applications are not locked into IP battles.
“CRISPR has become more democratized over the past decade but there’s a continuing fight over licensing for some of these techniques,” he says. “Unfortunately, there are advances that we won’t be able to get out of the research realm, even though they are technically products that can benefit the food industry, because we don’t have the licensing rights to sell and distribute them.”
Pairwise has worked to alleviate some of these concerns with its Fulcrum Platform, which offers customers a Pairwise-developed suite of gene-editing tools and is designed to help save some developments from languishing in the laboratory. “There’s more than one CRISPR protein,” Adams explains. “Because we worked to create a better enzyme, we were able to create a CRISPR tool that is free of intellectual property issues. We also added the bells and whistles to help companies do different types of editing without a lot of restrictions on it, which can help spur new products.”
The Future of AgtechWhen asked what the future of agtech might look like, Saik says he foresees greater “convergence” across a variety of promising applications. AI will be a great equalizer, he adds, combining with sensors on the input side of agriculture to shape more efficient, productive farming operations and then CRISPR on the output side to enhance crop traits.
“We need to understand that any technology has to benefit the whole system or else, no matter how intriguing, it will not and cannot be effective.”
Kamesh Ellajosyula, Olam Food Ingredients
“We can leverage these technologies to not only produce a safe, reliable, and healthy crop, but also a profitable crop for farmers,” he says.
At some point, it is likely, even probable, that food companies will be able to successfully select for traits like pest resistance, heat tolerance, nutrient density, and more—and those selections could occur at the seed level instead of at the processing plant. These technologies have the power to become a significant competitive advantage for food companies, ultimately transforming product formulations and supply chains.
How, exactly, it will do so, however, remains an open question. But it’s one, says Kamesh Ellajosyula, chief innovation and quality officer at Olam Food Ingredients (ofi), that food and ingredient companies can guide by embracing strategic partnerships and investments moving forward. Greater adoption and application of these promising technologies, he adds, depends on it. “Any technology scale-up requires a lot of collective effort, which you can only gain through strong partnerships,” he says.
“You need to make sure the technology you adopt works for the farmer, that it works for the processor, [that] it works for the company formulating and manufacturing the food product, and that it works for the consumer. As we move forward and we see more advances coming, we need to understand that any technology has to benefit the whole system or else, no matter how intriguing, it will not and cannot be effective.”
Kayt Sukel is a book author, magazine writer, and public speaker who frequently covers scientific topics. Find Kayt on her website: kaytsukel.com
A version of this article was originally posted at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find the Institute of Food Technologists on X @IFT
The average human life expectancy in India has risen to over 68 years, a substantial jump from the baseline of approximately 32 years recorded at independence in 1947. This critical advancement has been driven by systematic, technology-backed modernisations, including optimized irrigation networks, high-yielding seeds, resilient fertilizers, and targeted crop protection products.
Driven by the Green Revolution, the nation successfully broke free from the shackles of chronic food deficits to feed its millions, achieving sustained self-sufficiency and commanding massive productivity surpluses in global food production. Crucially, this low-input, highly productive agricultural system now positions the nation to double its current agricultural exports from a stagnant $50 billion to its true $100-billion global trade potential within the next three years. Critics who attack this legacy frequently rely on outdated historical baselines.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPHighly toxic, first-generation chemicals marketed in the sixties and early seventies – such as endrin, lindane, and hexachlorocyclohexanes (HCH) – were systematically banned and purged from the domestic market decades ago, leaving exceptions like restricted DDT use strictly confined to public health vector control. India has achieved a critical milestone under its global commitments, moving to completely replace DDT in public health with safe, modernized alternatives.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
What happens when you want to run a campaign, but you have very limited data and evidence? One strategy more increasingly used is to hire an activist NGO like Lighthouse Reports to fabricate an investigation they can funnel through their tried and tested noise machine. What happens if the budget has been cleared but there is no story? No problem. Lighthouse Reports has experienced spinmeisters capable of communicating insignificant research like it was a groundbreaking exposé. Just pay the Dutch NGO enough and they’ll deliver?
[On July 22, 2026], Lighthouse Reports released its latest investigation entitled Big Food vs. The People. The subtitle claims to “expose Big Food’s 239 lawsuits against life-saving policies”. There was no actual “report” but a web-page with a collection of clever graphics and links to connected articles from their ten freelance partners (all “copublished” in a coordinated fashion yesterday). What they based this communication campaign on is a dataset they claim to have built that breaks down the industry lawsuits.
A simple visit to the dataset, something most readers, editors and food science activists don’t bother to do, would show some curious things. The 239 industry lawsuits were gathered over 15 years and 193 (81%) were from Mexico where the government had imposed an indiscriminate series of food and drink taxes and bans. If the lawsuits in Colombia and Brazil were removed, then only 11 lawsuits (6 in the US, 4 in India and 1 in the UK) would be able to be considered … over 15 years. Lighthouse Reports was trying to sell an ultra-processed nothing burger.
Why wasn’t the Lighthouse Reports investigation then entitled Big Food vs. The People in Mexico? This would allow analysts to address the peculiar situation where the Mexican government’s food and drink regulations had become unreasonable and unfairly punished some companies and products with high taxes on obscure categories like “non-essential foods”.
The Lighthouse Reports NGO is not interested in an open discussion on food law or the rights of food producers and manufacturers to participate in the Mexican economy. They were interested in producing a report that would delegitimize the food industry, portray a local situation as a global phenomenon and then blast it across their global network of activist reporters and angry anti-capitalist academics.
Capitalist exploitation, health decline, poverty, big business profits… those are the stories they wanted to sell. The fact that there wasn’t enough legitimate news to create the intended outrage didn’t matter. Lighthouse would just feed it through their tried and tested noise machine.
The Lighthouse Campaign Noise MachineLighthouse Reports’ strategy is very simple.
- Get funding from a special interest group via a complex web of pass-throughs,
- assemble a group of hungry, freelance reporters with clear anti-capitalist political biases,
- produce a minimalist investigation,
- ensure a large budget to produce effective graphics,
- pay off your network of angry freelancers to coordinate a series of articles on the launch day,
- try to amplify the noise and let the special interest groups then take over the campaign.
The last article looked at how the Lighthouse Reports Poison PR investigation was a mercenary assault on behalf of the US litigation industry trying to create outrage to time with the bellwether cases against Syngenta on paraquat. The actual evidence they had was very thin, and only enough to bankrupt a small communications consultancy, but the Lighthouse Reports activists, along with their network of angry freelance journalists did what they were paid to do.
But if the Lighthouse network of activists, academics and reporters are merely a group of activist journalists for hire, shouldn’t the NGO be transparent on who was funding them, for how much, and what other levels of cooperation and coordination was shared?
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPFollow the MoneyThe Lighthouse Reports Poison PR investigation was motivated by the interests in the US litigation industry and (officially) funded with an $800,000 grant from the Oak Foundation to try to handicap conventional farming and the crop protection industry. Who funded this latest campaign and how much did the activists receive? In the interest of journalistic integrity and transparency, Lighthouse Reports has again chosen to not provide those details, requiring more Firebreak forensic foundation research.
This is important because the Lighthouse Reports NGO has identified itself as a collaborative investigation organization. In other words, they are mercenaries producing reports for the special interest groups operating from the shadows. Once we establish the groups behind this latest publication, we can better understand the objective of Big Food vs. The People.
The main work and resources went into the creation of the dataset of lawsuits in the six countries. There was actually no investigative report published, just a series of articles and postable graphics built around the dataset. Lighthouse reports attributes the work on the dataset to the following NGOs and institutions.
What do these organizations all have in common (or rather, with whom)?
El Poder del Consumidor, a Mexican consumer association, is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and is a partner group of Michael Bloomberg’s regranting body, Vital Strategies.
The Global Center for Legal Innovation on Food Environments acknowledges their interests very clearly:
It doesn’t go unnoticed that the three main countries in the Lighthouse Reports research, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, are also the key focus countries for the Global Center. The Global Center for Legal Innovation on Food Environments is situated in the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law which is situated in the Georgetown University Law Center where the Bloomberg funding is passed through. As a project under an academic fiscal sponsor, The Center does not have to declare their funding or be held accountable.
The Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) is a Bloomberg Philanthropies regranting body, developed as an initiative of another well-known Bloomberg NGO, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. It is interesting to see how the Bloomberg flotilla of NGOs developed to fight tobacco and nicotine products are now exercising the same deceptive funding obfuscation on food policy campaigns.
ACT, the Brazilian health policy NGO based in São Paulo, is the last partner mentioned in the groups listed behind building the dataset. Once again, its main funders are Bloomberg Philanthropies, Vital Strategies and GHAI (the last two merely regranting the funds from the Bloomberg flagship).
This is a typical Bloomberg strategy of creating a large number of NGOs to pose as independent organizations while they are simply taking funds from Bloomberg Philanthropies and redistributing them among themselves. Outside of tobacco and nicotine control, Vital Strategies now has a food policy division that is working on implementing bans and higher food taxes. Is it just a coincidence that two of Vital Strategies’ main areas of operation on food policy are Colombia and Brazil? Their policy strategy is to increase taxes on “unhealthy” food and demand front of package labelling.
Michael Bloomberg’s Money, Michael Bloomberg’s InterestsBloomberg Philanthropies has put aside $435 million to establish the Bloomberg Food Policy Program to wage war on ultra-processed, sugary food and drinks. Compared to Michael Bloomberg’s $2 billion for his war on nicotine, this may seem like small beer, but in any policy campaign arena, $435 million can buy a lot of influence. It can certainly buy a lot of journalists.
“Bloomberg Philanthropies is supporting the enactment and evaluation of policy that aim to move people toward healthier diets in cities and countries around the world. The program focuses its work in Brazil, the Caribbean (Jamaica & Barbados), Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, and the United States, all of which have high rates of obesity and are taking action.”
The key areas of initial operation for the Bloomberg Food Policy Program is, once again, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia and that should come as no surprise now that these areas were reflected in the Lighthouse Reports research. In essence, the various Bloomberg entities handed the research to the Dutch NGO as a finished product (along with the financial contribution … for the noise machine).
Like nicotine and tobacco control campaigns, Michael Bloomberg is stuck in a single-minded strategy on food policy: ban products and increase taxes. It doesn’t matter if it has never worked, creates dangerous black markets and leads to worse health consequences. His funding of this Lighthouse Reports investigation is meant to fight back against the mounting legal challenges from the food manufacturers and producers. A kind of “flanking” in lobbying terms. The poor man must still be struggling to accept one of his greatest failures as mayor of New York when he tried to tax and ban sugary drinks. Decades later, with billions wasted, Bloomberg is still unable to see the poverty of his policy strategy or what actual good his philanthropy could have done.
Within this food and soda tax strategy lie the motives to hire the Lighthouse Reports activists. Why couldn’t the Lighthouse Reports NGO, and the lead author, Thin Wei Win, admit that their campaign was funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and that the objective was to feed into the Bloomberg strategy of increasing taxes on sugary food and drinks? Shouldn’t their network of journalists be transparent? Even the draft of the academic paper they hope to publish has no acknowledgement of Bloomberg funding or declaration of conflicts of interest. Without a proper academic structure, it is no wonder the draft remains unpublished.
This is paid-off activism, not journalism or research. Lighthouse Reports think the rules don’t apply to them so long as they win (and continue to gain further funding). There are also no demands for ethical conduct or transparency demanded on foundations like Bloomberg Philanthropies. They have created an excellent breeding ground for activist mercenaries like Lighthouse Reports to thrive. For the rest of us, yesterday was merely another day of well-amplified misinformation – more noise and nonsense.
An Afterthought
These mercenary activist media strategies are effective in spreading political campaigns but outside of their ethical repugnance, they are getting quite boring. One thing I did not understand with this latest special interest campaign is why Michael Bloomberg’s hired media gun, The Examination, didn’t pile onto the noise machine assault and amplify this investigation. Michael created and funded this “collaborative” news enterprise in part to attack the food industry. Perhaps there’s a turf war going on with the consultants running Bloomberg’s “in-house” media group, The Examination, having issues with the questionable techniques used by the Dutch activists. … Pass the popcorn.
David Zaruk is the Firebreak editor, and also writes under the pen-name The Risk Monger. David is a retired professor, environmental-health risk analyst, science communicator, promoter of evidence-based policy and philosophical theorist on activists and the media. Find David on X @Zaruk
A version of this article was originally posted at Firebreak and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Firebreak on X @the_firebreak
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, false claims about “US-run biolabs” began circulating almost immediately through Russian state outlets. Within weeks, those same allegations had travelled far beyond diplomatic chambers in Geneva and New York, eventually appearing on one of America’s most-watched cable news programs, where Tucker Carlson repeated them to millions of viewers. …
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPDisinformation is rapidly becoming a defining feature of contemporary geopolitics. It is not an incidental by-product of tension, or a collection of isolated fabrications circulating on the margins of public discourse. It has become a deliberate instrument of statecraft, and, in disarmament, it is deployed to manipulate diplomatic processes, weaken international treaties, corrode trust, and undermine cooperation. Yet the underlying architecture of these campaigns has long remained obscure, visible only in fleeting snapshots of individual allegations.
A screenshot of the Disinformation Tracker, a tool developed by King’s College London and other institutions to track the spread of disinformation related to chemical and biological disarmament.To illuminate this evolving terrain in chemical and biological disarmament, my team and I developed the Disinformation Tracker, a systematic, open resource that documents narrative patterns, actors, and amplification pathways across multiple years and geopolitical contexts.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
A viral image circulating on social media platforms claims that Heinz ketchup has been “forced to now carry a ‘contains bioengineered ingredients’ warning after being exposed for using GMOs linked to cancer.” … The claim is misleading.
The claim has been widely shared across Facebook and Instagram, accompanied by an image of a Heinz ketchup bottle alongside graphics depicting cancer cells and a syringe.
The most accurate part of the viral claim is that certain Heinz ketchup products sold in the United States may display the statement “Contains Bioengineered Food Ingredients.” However, the post falsely portrays this disclosure as a government-issued warning about health risks.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe second part of the viral claim alleges that GMOs used in Heinz ketchup are “linked to cancer.” Current scientific evidence does not support this assertion.
…
Similarly, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded, after reviewing hundreds of studies, that there is no persuasive evidence linking consumption of genetically engineered foods with increased cancer rates or other adverse health outcomes in humans.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
[A federal] court’s ruling tees up a major rewrite of the U.S.’ bioengineered labeling rule, which for the first time mandated companies to disclose when they used genetically modified ingredients. It’s also a significant win for consumer advocacy groups and the grassroots “Make America Healthy Again” movement, which has lobbied vigorously against pesticide use in foods.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPAround 70% of all GMO food ingredients were exempted from disclosure requirements under the current rule, [Center for Food Safety] said, vastly undercutting the impact of the label.
The original rule, which went into effect in 2021, also allowed companies to disclose GMO ingredients through a digital QR code instead of on-packaging text or symbols. CFS said this format was inaccessible to many consumers. While some companies have voluntarily used the USDA’s bioengineered label on packaging, “that’s the minority,” George Kimbrell, legal director for [Center for Food Safety] and counsel in the case, said in an interview with Food Dive.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
U.S. health officials on [August 10, 2026] proposed a rule change that would require food manufacturers to notify regulators before introducing new ingredients or additives into processed or packaged foods.
The proposal would change a decades-old policy that advocates have called a regulatory loophole, blaming it for allowing thousands of unvetted ingredients into the U.S. food supply.
Under the proposed rule from the Food and Drug Administration, companies would have to document and submit their safety rationale for new ingredients, giving regulators the opportunity to investigate if they see a potential risk. Currently companies can decide for themselves if an ingredient or additive is “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, and there is no requirement to notify or submit evidence to the FDA, although some firms do.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPUnder the proposal, the FDA would be expected to review new ingredient submissions within 180 days. If regulators had safety concerns they could request additional information or ask the company to delay introducing the ingredient.
…
Food industry officials contend their internal reviews of additives are as rigorous as the FDA’s own process.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
I spent nearly a decade leading FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. That role convinced me that food safety and nutrition are interdependent in so many ways, and if we want to make our population healthier, we need to support both.
… [R]ecord numbers of cases of cyclosporiasis have driven that message home broadly, including to consumers. FDA is currently investigating six cyclospora outbreaks, only one of which is currently linked to shredded iceberg lettuce.
Fresh fruits and vegetables, which nutritionists have been promoting for decades, are especially vulnerable to cyclospora contamination. …
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPWhat do these higher-risk foods all have in common? As a group, they are recommended as part of a healthy dietary pattern, and are certainly among the “real foods” being promoted by the administration for better nutrition and chronic disease risk reduction.
… Over the past 18 months, the administration has focused on chemicals rather than microbes in foods and has taken numerous steps that actively undermine microbial food safety ….
… Consumers should not be faced with a trade-off between nutrition and food safety — health is made possible when food safety supports consumer confidence in fruits and vegetables. “Real foods” are vulnerable to real pathogens.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
After the Trump administration accused the state of fast-tracking solar farms on prime farmland, New York leaders fired back last week, saying that renewables “empower our farmers to keep their land in use and in their family, while avoiding the threat of permanent conversion or abandonment.” That’s because farmers can lease a plot to solar developers and return it to agricultural use at the end of the array’s life, as the state officials explained in their 11-page letter.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UP“A recent study by Cornell found that the overwhelming majority of farmers who received solar lease payments used that income to continue or even expand farming on their land, not to exit farming or scale back operations,” the leaders wrote. “Discouraging or inhibiting property owners’ ability to independently make choices about what they can and cannot do with their land can cause financial harm and undermine fundamental property rights.”
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
To reach the experimental maize field, visitors first pass through a locked gate tucked between a railway line, a motorway and a school. The entire site is enclosed by fencing.
The location – Wetteren, on the outskirts of Ghent – is public by law, explains Hilde Nelissen, a plant biotechnologist at Ghent University. But it is not meant to be easy to access.
“You either know the code, or you’re trespassing,” she says.
Beyond the fence, neat rows of young maize plants barely rise above the soil. They look unremarkable. Yet small plots of land like this have been at the centre of one of Europe’s fiercest debates over agricultural biotechnology for years.
The maize is engineered using CRISPR-Cas9, a gene-editing tool whose co-developers were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Often described as “molecular scissors” and, in EU jargon, classified as a New Genomic Technique (NGT), CRISPR-Cas9 belongs to a new generation of breeding technologies that allow scientists to make precise changes to DNA.
Unlike traditional genetic modification – used in most genetically modified organisms (GMOs), typically involving the introduction of DNA from another species – some NGTs allow “editing” of an organism’s DNA without introducing foreign genetic material.
The EU’s GMO rules, adopted in 2001 before these techniques existed, made no distinction between them. In 2018, the EU’s top court ruled that NGTs should be regulated under the same strict rules as traditional GMOs, leaving them largely confined to research plots. Spain remains the only EU country to grow a GMO crop for the market, cultivating insect-resistant maize.
That may soon change. After years of political wrangling, the EU is set to relax its rules. Under the new framework, which will be fully implemented from 2028, plants obtained with certain NGTs and involving limited genetic changes will be regulated in the same way as conventionally bred varieties.
EU researchers, especially in Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden, are eagerly awaiting the reform.
A decade of trialsMap: Miriam Sáenz de Tejada Source: Euractiv based on Test Biotech and Commission data Created with DatawrapperScientists like Hilde are studying traits that could eventually make crops more resilient and productive – felt as increasingly urgent as extreme weather becomes more frequent. Belgium, in particular, has endured a start of the summer marked by heavy rainfall and sharp temperature swings.
Pointing to a neighbouring control plot of conventional maize surrounded by puddles, which she uses as a comparison, Hilde explains why the plants have turned pale. “They are so yellow because of [weather] stress,” she says.
Her gene-edited maize has also been exposed to the same erratic weather, but the plants are coping noticeably better.
Experimental maize in Wetteren. [Photo by Sofía Sánchez Manzanaro]A controversial technologyEU policymakers haggled for years over whether gene-edited crops should be treated differently from GMOs, and the controversy was not confined to Brussels.
Scientists like Hilde have to grow genetically modified crops behind fences, lest they be destroyed by opponents. In 2011, activists broke into the same field where Hilde is now conducting her maize experiment and destroyed a GMO potato trial, also run by Ghent University. The action was organised by the Belgian “Field Liberation Movement”.
Like similar groups across Europe, including France’s Faucheurs Volontaires, the activists protested what they saw as a technology that could disrupt ecosystems and strip farming of its “traditional” roots.
Hilde’s own trials have not escaped attention.
A few years ago, someone cut through the fence surrounding the trial site. “We could follow the footsteps to our field trial,” she recalls while walking along that very same path. “They were going around and back out, so it’s clear that they knew where it was.”
To her relief, nothing was damaged. “You can protest,” she says. “But not destroy.”
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPA farmer’s daughter For Hilde, who has spent more than two decades studying plant biology, gene-editing is anything but threatening. “If I was allowed, I would plant NGTs in my garden,” she quips.
She quickly dismisses any concerns over the technology’s safety, noting that people have unknowingly eaten genetic mutations for centuries.
Several hundred years ago, carrots were predominantly purple or white. “At a certain point society decided we like orange carrots, and they need to be straight,” she says. “That only occurred because there were changes in the DNA.”
But the scientist’s connection to farming is also deeply personal.
She grew up in Flanders, where her late father ran a mixed farm, raising cattle and growing crops. Eventually, however, he left agriculture as increasing mechanisation forced him to decide whether to invest heavily in expensive new equipment.
This decision, according to Hilde, reflects a broader transformation of European farming, which is no longer the “romantic profession” that many imagine.
“Agriculture today is machines, big infrastructure and big tractors,” Hilde says. While she would love to see more people grow their own food, she acknowledges that modern food production simply cannot rely on backyard gardens.
Hilde Nelissen, plant biotechnologist at Ghent University. [Photo by Maria Simon Arboleas]The patent debateNGTs are treated as conventional crops in countries including Australia, the US, Canada, Brazil, China and India.
In Europe, the fiercest debate surrounding NGTs was not so much whether they are safe. Despite concerns about traceability and labelling, the key sticking point was who would own the technology.
Relaxing the EU’s rules would make it easier for companies to commercialise gene-edited crops carrying valuable traits such as drought tolerance or pest resistance, many of which could be protected by patents.
Critics worry that this could strengthen the dominance of the world’s largest agricultural companies, harming farmers and small breeders, who could eventually be forced to pay royalties for traits that may also arise naturally.
These concerns nearly derailed the negotiations in Brussels.
The European Parliament pushed until the eleventh hour for stronger safeguards limiting patents on NGT plants. In the end, those proposals were dropped to preserve the broader agreement.
While keen on the technology, Hilde understands both sides of the argument.
“The scientist in me believes patents are necessary,” she said, arguing that companies investing heavily in research need a way to recover those costs.
But she draws a distinction between her professional and personal views.
“I’m not a patent lawyer; I’m a plant scientist,” she says. “Hilde the person is not in favour of patents. Hilde the scientist thinks patents drive innovation.”
Sofia Sanchez Manzanaro is an agrifood journalist for Euractiv and a journalist at the EU agri-food policy hub. Find Sofia on X @sofiamazzanaro
Maria Simon Arboleas is an agrifood and fisheries reporter for Euractiv. Find Maria on X @msimonarboleas
A version of this article was originally posted at Euractiv* *and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Conversation on X @Euractiv
This summer [2026] has seen record-breaking climate induced heatwaves scorch much of Europe, which combined with droughts and “apocalyptic” wildfires has made farming virtually impossible….So how are farmers bearing up under the pressure?
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UP[Uyen Do] adopted organic farming practices in the hope to build resilience against the climate crisis. But with the climate changing much faster than most predicted, Do says her farm is just not able to adapt quickly enough. “It’s too fast. It’s too big,” she says.
…
During the recent heatwaves, which saw several days where temperatures exceeded 30C, “the environment was so hostile that the plants are so stressed they want to die because they just can’t take it” [Luke King said].
On some farms, grass to feed animals has all but stopped growing, meaning farms are having to use animal-feed reserves that have been put aside for winter, which will have knock-on effects later in the year.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
Artificial sweeteners are in the news almost constantly.
If you believe the headlines, they are terrible blights on our health that are far worse than the sugar they replace.
This isn’t always supported by the evidence, but it’s something that we love to hear, and so it gets reported on almost weekly regardless of what the data actually shows.
The most recent furor over artificial sweeteners is a perfect example. The headlines have been claiming for months that artificial sweeteners speed up cognitive decline.
According to a recent study, there are six of these ‘dangerous chemicals’, including common ones like xylitol and aspartame, that may be causing our brains to rot more quickly.
The study has been covered by hundreds of media outlets ….
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThis is all made especially remarkable given that it doesn’t really show any issues from artificial sweeteners at all.
The study itself is a very simple piece of observational research.
…
One big thing is that food frequency questionnaires don’t really measure intake of food. They measure what people THINK they eat, but we know that we are often unreliable historians.
Most of these questionnaires ask about the last 12 months of eating, and people rarely remember their food intake for that long with any degree of accuracy.
…
As letters to the journal have noted, there are also serious questions about the biological plausibility of the claim.
Some of the sweeteners are natural substances, one is actually a very rare form of sugar, and all of them are very different molecules. It would be extremely unlikely for all of these different chemicals to have the same impact on the brain.
…
There’s also the problem of reverse causality – that is, people who were already experiencing brain declines due to diseases like diabetes or heart disease may have been more likely to eat and drink artificial sweeteners at the start of the study.
This is an issue that’s hard to correct with the sort of analysis that we see in this paper.
…
Despite decades of fearmongering when it comes to artificial sweeteners, the reality is that they are very well-tested and generally not harmful.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
The response to the current large outbreak of food-related illnesses caused by a microscopic parasite is a communications failure, not a failure of the investigation.
A few characteristics of Cyclospora make it tricky to chase down. Because it will not grow in culture, the standard playbook doesn’t apply. With most foodborne bacteria, a lab grows the organism, sequences it, and uploads the genetic fingerprint to PulseNet, the national network that flags when a case in one state matches a case in another.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has instead been working from partial genotyping, because Cyclospora‘s genome is complicated enough to defeat the sequencing methods that work for bacteria. Cyclospora contamination on produce is often sparse and unevenly distributed, and it tends to sit close to the limit of what a test can detect, which is how contaminated lettuce ends up testing clean. Investigators were left with the oldest tools in the kit: interviews and shipping records.
Important early clues widely missedDr. Mike Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (which, of course, publishes my CIDRAP Op-Eds), taught me that when cases start rolling in, the demographics of who is getting sick can hand you an important early clue. These cases skewed heavily toward adults, with the CDC putting the median age at 44 across a range from 1 to 89 years, and the relative absence of young children pointed toward something green rather than something fruit.
If you have young kids you know exactly why. They are devoted fruit eaters. (I used to joke that my daughter was going to turn into a strawberry.) But more spotty toward veggies.
That narrows things, but the hunt continues. There are other important factors, too, like understanding how a growing region is organized into blocks, when each produce item was cut and by whom, how product from different fields gets combined at a processor, how long it takes to move from a field in central Mexico to a restaurant in Michigan, and how fast a perishable product cycles off the shelf.
That knowledge does more than point at a culprit. It also helps estimate how many people could have been exposed and where. It tells you when contaminated products should have cleared the shelves and new exposures should stop, even though reported counts will keep climbing for weeks afterward. Because molecular typing cannot deliver the clean fingerprint that is available in a bacterial outbreak, it is also central to deciding whether a case in one state belongs with a case in another. Trace-back is a supply chain exercise as much as an epidemiologic one.
Michigan went through ingredient-level food histories from 190 people who had eaten at Taco Bell before falling ill, and 90% of them had eaten iceberg lettuce. The FDA’s trace-back investigation followed the paper backward, converging on one supplier and then on a single independent farm in central Mexico that Taylor Farms says accounts for less than 1% of the US iceberg supply. The recall came July 17.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UP9 states in the outbreak, but 41 affected overallThis is the largest documented Cyclospora outbreak in US history, and the coverage has that part right. What has reached the public is a scary number that keeps going up.
It misses the fact that, while cyclosporiasis—which is what a Cyclospora infection is called—has now been reported in 41 states, the outbreak is only in nine. The numbers being reported measure different things. The CDC and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have included 1,947 confirmed cases in the nine-state Taco Bell outbreak, which epidemiologic and trace-back evidence links to iceberg lettuce, while the CDC separately reports more than 4,000 confirmed domestically acquired cases nationally since May.
In addition, thousands of samples from patients are still awaiting CDC confirmation, plus several hundred more in travelers who got sick abroad. Some states count probable and confirmed cases together, so their totals run higher still. Stack all of it, as plenty of coverage has, and you get a single national outbreak that doesn’t exist.
Consider what happened when the CDC added four states to the outbreak on July 24. It read as though the outbreak had spread, but investigators think those patients may have gotten sick around the same time as the patients in the original five states, and simply took longer to connect to the same source.
Stack all of it, as plenty of coverage has, and you get a single national outbreak that doesn’t exist.
Cyclosporiasis turns up somewhere every summer, following a seasonal pattern that is well established even if its exact causes are not, and outbreaks are frequently tied to fresh produce. Several states, including California and New Jersey, have said their counts this year are running in line with typical seasonal trends. North Carolina thinks its own increase is about parsley and cilantro, neither of which has emerged as a national signal, and the FDA is separately investigating a cluster of at least 72 people with no source identified at all.
Folding all of that into one running total costs us more than public calm. It hides the possibility that several outbreaks are happening at once.
Illinois, one of the four states added last week, says its July case reports are running at levels the state has not seen since 2018. Illinois is right that 2018 is the year to think about, though the important lesson isn’t the case count. That summer brought 511 cases tied to a Fresh Express salad mix served at McDonald’s, 250 tied to Del Monte vegetable trays, and a third outbreak in Texas that never had a source identified at all.
A cumulative tally is a surveillance instrument, and an important one, but it does not tell you whether you are at risk this week, which is the very thing people want to know.
Picture one person inside that count. She eats a salad at the end of June and feels fine for a week. She spends a few more days assuming it’s a stomach bug, sees a doctor in the second week of July, and gets tested only because someone thinks to request Cyclospora testing, which many routine stool tests and gastrointestinal panels don’t include. The lab confirms toward the end of the month. Her interview comes after that. Whether she belongs to this outbreak or to the ordinary summer background data may not be settled until August.
Every case on every one of those charts is carrying some version of that lag, which is why the FDA has said confirmed counts will keep climbing well after the recall.
Likely more than one wave of exposureOn July 24, the CDC finally published an epidemic curve for this outbreak, plotting the 1,947 outbreak-associated cases by illness onset rather than by report date. There are two distinct peaks: one (when the person first had symptoms) cresting around June 25 and a second (when the sickness was reported) around July 10, with a deep valley between them.
That separation is substantial enough to suggest exposure may have come in more than one wave. Working back through Cyclospora‘s usual incubation period of about a week would place those exposures near mid-June and again around the start of July. Lettuce isn’t harvested once a season and held in storage like corn or soy. It’s cut more or less continuously and eaten within days, so illness follows fairly closely behind whenever the contaminated product moved. That makes a gap this deep more consistent with separate windows of exposure than with one prolonged stretch of it.
A cumulative tally is a surveillance instrument, and an important one, but it does not tell you whether you are at risk this week.
The first of those illness peaks had risen and fallen before the CDC issued its health advisory on July 14, and before the FDA publicly named the lettuce two days later. Whether the two waves represent separate contamination episodes—one product contaminated intermittently across different harvest lots, or something else—the curve alone cannot say, and nobody else has either. It arrived the same day the outbreak grew to nine states, a week after the recall and long after the story had largely been told as one steadily rising national number.
Producing that picture is the one thing no state could have done on its own. Michigan posts case counts by date reported, updated weekly and labeled accurately as such. Others post illness-onset curves, or county maps, or twice-weekly tallies. Every one of those answers a question about a single jurisdiction, and none of them can tell you whether two states are experiencing the same outbreak, because no state can answer a multistate question using its own data no matter how carefully those data are collected. That assembly sits a level above all of them, and it took until the fourth week of July.
Too late, and then too fastThe messaging made it worse. The CDC’s Health Alert Network advisory arrived July 14, roughly 10 weeks after the CDC began receiving reports of a national rise in cases.
Days later, the FDA published notice of a Cyclospora-positive lettuce sample on Saturday, July 18, retracted it the next day, and didn’t explain the sequence until the afternoon of July 20. That sample had come from routine border screening rather than from recalled product, and the epidemiologic and trace-back case implicating Taylor Farms lettuce never rested on it. By then “false-positive” had run the news cycle, and plenty of people came away thinking the company had been cleared, in an investigation already drawing political scrutiny.
Osterholm, who I am convinced may be clairvoyant, made this argument in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997, after Texas and Houston officials named California strawberries in a cyclosporiasis cluster that turned out to be tied to Guatemalan raspberries. The obligation to warn people is real, he wrote, and it has to be weighed against a cost of being wrong that gets paid twice: once by whoever was falsely accused, and again by every future warning the public quietly stops believing. He published the same argument again in 1999, under the title “Lessons Learned Again,” after the outbreak repeated.
That second cost is not abstract. It looks like people who stop buying lettuce of any kind for the rest of the summer, growers who lose a season over it, and someone scrolling past the next recall notice because the last one seemed to get walked back. It also looks like a public that can no longer tell the difference between a point-source outbreak (in which illnesses are traced to a common food source) and the ordinary seasonal background of a reportable disease, which means every summer from here on starts to feel like an emergency.
Two right answers, one messageThere were two right answers here, and only one message going out. For someone on chemotherapy or living with a transplant, cyclosporiasis isn’t a rough week. It runs longer, relapses, and brings complications that need real clinical attention. Telling that person to skip lettuce entirely while the source was still unknown was good advice.
For most of the country, though, it wasn’t. Craig Hedberg, PhD, at the University of Minnesota, has been making that case all month, and he is right that broad avoidance guidance without a known source does more harm than good. Getting both messages out at once means deciding who you are talking to and saying so plainly.
The detective work in this outbreak happened in state health departments, and it was good. Hedberg has described what happens next: States recognize increases well before the data are compiled federally into anything officials can act on.
What it leaves behind is a patchwork whereby some states monitor effectively and others can’t, which doesn’t work for a product grown on many farms, mixed at a central processor, and shipped everywhere.
That delay is not inevitable, but it is getting harder to avoid. Someone has to gather, standardize, and assemble what the states are finding, and researchers at Johns Hopkins have documented the erosion of the federal food safety staffing, funding, and enforcement that that work depends on. What it leaves behind is a patchwork whereby some states monitor effectively and others can’t, which doesn’t work for a product grown on many farms, mixed at a central processor, and shipped everywhere.
Everyone working this outbreak has been doing the best they can with a patchwork of information, in front of a public that is understandably worried and asking every day what is safe to eat.
Nuance and details matter a whole lot here, and all of it got flattened into a single rising number. A beat to step back and take the 10,000-foot view would have gotten us communication that was more streamlined, more accurate, and far more useful to the people trying to figure out what to feed their families.
Jess Steier is a public health scientist dedicated to bridging the gap between complex scientific evidence and public understanding. Jess is the Founder of Unbiased Science, CEO of Vital Statistics Consulting, and Executive Director of The Science Literacy Lab (a 501c3 non-profit organization).
A version of this article was originally posted at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota and is reposted here. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. Find CIDRAP on X @CIDRAP
As temperatures rise, New Zealand’s dairy farmers face a growing challenge: keeping cows cool enough to remain productive.
Heat stress can reduce milk production, harm animals and lower the environmental efficiency of dairy farming. For an economy so heavily reliant on dairy exports, the stakes are significant.
Over recent years, scientists have been exploring whether gene editing can deliver dairy cattle better able to cope with warmer temperatures, while producing fewer methane emissions. There is also potential for dairy products that carry valuable functions, such as being allergy-free.
Yet, regardless of the scientific promise behind such products, they still must gain consumer acceptance. Would shoppers actually buy gene-edited milk?
Our recently published study suggests they might, particularly if the products offer clear personal benefits and are priced competitively.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPWhat we asked consumersGene editing enables specific tweaks to be made to an organism’s DNA. This can be done to promote desirable traits or remove undesirable ones – and without necessarily introducing new genetic material.
That sets it apart from traditional genetic modification technology and is seen by some researchers as a more precise approach that may prove more acceptable to consumers.
To understand how people would feel about milk from gene-edited “climate-smart” dairy cows, we surveyed nearly 1,100 New Zealand consumers. Rather than simply ask whether they supported the technology, we wanted to know the trade-offs they might make when faced with real purchasing decisions.
In a choice experiment designed to mimic supermarket shopping, they chose between conventional milk, organic milk and three forms of gene-edited milk.
These included a standard version, an allergy-free version designed to improve digestibility and a version incorporating a “COVID-protection” feature, based on research into milk carrying protective antibodies.
Because cows have not yet been gene-edited for commercial dairy production, our study did not provide participants actual gene-edited milk. Instead, they were asked to evaluate a series of hypothetical products and price points designed to reflect future supermarket choices.
They were first given information about gene editing and “climate-smart” milk before repeatedly selecting their most and least preferred options across a series of shopping scenarios.
This allowed us to examine not just attitudes towards gene editing, but how consumers weigh price, familiarity and potential benefits.
Price and benefits matter mostOverall, we found conventional milk to be the most preferred option. This wasn’t surprising. Consumers often trust familiar foods more than unfamiliar technologies, especially when it comes to products they consume regularly.
But the study also showed that consumer resistance to gene-edited milk is neither fixed, nor particularly high. When it was offered at a lower price than conventional milk, for instance, acceptance increased significantly.
Fig. 5. Logit preference estimates for different milk types at different price levels (Note: the largest 95% confidence interval was ±0.05 on the logit scale).
We also found acceptance improved when the milk offered clear and easy-to-understand consumer benefits.
Among all the gene-edited products we tested, allergy-free milk was the most popular. This suggests consumers may be more open to food technologies when they can clearly see how the product benefits them personally.
Branding a product allergy-free, for instance, is tangible and easy to understand. By contrast, broader environmental or technical claims can feel more abstract or uncertain to many consumers.
Gene edits are usually target traits such as reduced disease susceptibility and heat tolerance, but can include removing allergens and increasing quality/production. Credit: Tad S Sonstegard et alWhile some consumers found the idea of milk with COVID-protection features appealing, others may have been sceptical or fatigued by pandemic-related messaging.
Compared with allergy-free milk, the health benefit was also more complex and potentially harder to understand.
A pathway to acceptance?As climate pressures intensify, food systems around the world will likely face difficult trade-offs between sustainability, affordability and productivity.
Technologies such as gene editing may become more attractive, as they promise faster and more targeted solutions than conventional breeding methods.
Our findings suggest there may be a pathway towards greater consumer openness, particularly when innovations deliver direct and meaningful benefits, rather than vague promises of future sustainability.
At the same time, the study shows consumers still value familiarity and simplicity. Traditional products continue to hold a strong advantage, while price remains a major factor shaping purchasing decisions.
Gene-edited foods may therefore succeed not by replacing conventional foods overnight, but by gradually earning consumer trust through clear benefits, affordability and transparent messaging from producers.
For all the cutting-edge science that surrounds them, the future of these innovations ultimately depends on how well consumers believe they fit into their everyday lives.
Damien Mather is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at University of Otago. Follow Damien on Linkedin
Goetz Laible is a Honorary Associate Professor of Molecular Medicine and Pathology at the University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau. Follow Goetz on Linkedin
Kara Xiaohui Ma is an Assistant Research Fellow and PhD Candidate in Marketing, at the University of Otago. Follow Kara on Linkedin
A version of this article was originally posted at Conversation and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Conversation on X @Conversation_US
“People have been told so many times now that processed foods are bad,” to the point that they can start to seem “evil,” said Angela Zivkovic, PhD, a professor in the University of California, Davis’ department of nutrition.
New research suggests it’s not that simple. Your overall diet quality seems to matter more than whether you eat processed foods, said Xiaowen Wang, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who led the new study.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPFor the new research … Wang’s team drew on data from three studies that followed more than 200,000 U.S. adults for decades. …
The researchers analyzed the overall quality and processing level of participants’ diets. For comparison’s sake, they focused on plant-based foods rather than those that came from animals. Then, they sorted participants into four categories:
- Healthy and ultra-processed (for example, lots of whole-grain cereals and plant-based dairy substitutes)
- Healthy and minimally processed (oatmeal, fresh fruits and vegetables, home-cooked meals)
- Unhealthy and ultra-processed (fast food, packaged snacks, sodas)
- Unhealthy and minimally processed (white rice, potatoes, homemade desserts)
Overall diet quality, they found, was a better predictor of health problems than processing level.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
“Our job here at Psy Ops is to panic the enemy, to blunt his will to fight. A Psy Operator must know the customs and habits of the enemy, the current dissensions, anxieties, and fears to determine vulnerability. To engage the enemy, you must know the enemy inside out. You must fill him with fear, and not just fear of dying.”
—Quote from: The General’s Daughter (Movie, 1999)
Influencers use the same tactics as the Army’s Psyops. They learn people’s anxieties and fears to know consumer’s vulnerability. One thing most people (75%) fear is losing control. Components of packaged food, such as pesticide residues, that people aren’t in control of fits this definition. In fact, a Reuters poll this year found that 78% of people are concerned. You’re in large company if you feel that pesticides—killers of insects, weeds, fungus, rodents, worms, and bacteria—are unsafe.
The “cide” in pesticide is a suffix that means “to kill” and it’s used in suicide, homicide, and genocide. It’s just common sense that people are concerned about the use of pesticides on food they consume every day.
But are pesticides safe?Why would any scientist say they are safe? It’s certainly true that they kill weeds and bugs—so why would they be safe for us to consume? First, the amount of pesticide we consume is extremely tiny, just residues. Second, the pesticides we spray aren’t the only pesticides that are killing bugs. Plants wouldn’t be with us today if they hadn’t evolved to be able to repel or kill bugs themselves. Over millions of years of natural selection, plants developed chemicals that either taste horrible or actually kill insects, emit odors that attract bodyguards like wasps to kill the insects, or produce toxic glue. Some plants even eat the bugs that try to eat them—like Venus flytraps.
But evolution is a competitive process and insects, like caterpillars and aphids, have been evolving right alongside plants to defeat their defenses.
They’ve done a pretty good job: without the pesticides we spray to help plants out, insects would claim about 30% of crops. One estimate puts potential losses at 78% for fruit, 54% for vegetables, and 32% for cereal. For example, pesticides kill spider mites, which lay shiny, round, white or pale-yellow eggs—too small to see—attached by a sticky substance on plants, then spin fine webbing around them.
The Food Quality Protection Act requires the EPA to ensure that each pesticide used on food is safe for children, with a ten-fold safety factor (meaning the amount used is ten times less than the amount considered safe for children). Children are like the canary in the coal mine— they’re more sensitive than adults.
But still, they are poisons, and four out of five people are concerned about that. There is an option: organic produce. After all, Pew Research has found that nearly one in two (45%) Americans think that eating organic produce is healthier. Of course, some people believe all kinds of things—like eating eggs raises your cholesterol (it won’t, dietary cholesterol isn’t the same thing as blood cholesterol).
Most research has shown that organic produce (fruits and vegetables) isn’t healthier than conventional produce. Conventional and organic foods have the same amount of nutrients—fats, carbohydrates, and fiber. In fact, some organic foods may contain more heavy metals than their conventional counterparts. And organic is not pesticide-free. Even in the famously cautious EU, 134 active pesticides, such as pyrethrins, are allowed on organic produce.
A systematic review found that the belief in organic food’s superiority over conventional food is largely subjective, based mainly on fear. Playing on those fears is the same thing the Army does with enemies: psychological operations.
But still, are pesticides in fact unsafe?If, by “safe”, you mean that no one ever will ever be harmed in any way by pesticides, the answer is no. The U.S. EPA has estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 farmworkers are poisoned annually from exposure, leading to nausea, seizures, and even chronic conditions—largely due to misuse of personal protective equipment and lack of training on how to use it.
As for consumers, most issues arise from people misusing pesticides in their own gardens. What about the rest of us?
Just like pesticides, you can find articles linking water, vegetables, fruits, meat, poultry, and highly processed foods to chronic disease. “Linked” means that there is a possibility of harm, but actual causation has not been proven. Even so, just like pesticides, we can’t say any food is safe for everyone, all of the time, and under all conditions.
It’s not just the military and their psyops. Marketers know what you are afraid of—and how to keep it aroused.
Richard Williams is a Senior Affiliated Scholar, the former Director of the Regulatory Studies Program, and the former Vice President of Policy Research at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is also the author of Fixing Food: An FDA Insider Unravels the Myths and the Solutions. Follow Richard on Substack
A version of this article was originally posted at the Public Health Without Politics Blog and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article.
During the American heat dome or Europe’s summer swelter and the hottest June days on record, we no longer have to endure the media hyperbole or the activist misanthropy, blaming man (industry, capitalism, consumers…) for the planetary destruction. Now we are sometimes reminded, in a deadpan tone, that these warm days are in keeping with climate models, but it is often greeted with a reaction similar to when my doctor tells me my excess weight gain is related to my eating habits.
After two decades of well-choreographed campaigns and narrative control that merged all environmental health issues into a centralized campaign against consumption, trade, capitalism and industry, with billions in foundation funding flowing in to enrich the activist movements, within a year, the tap was literally turned off. Everything just stopped. Why?
- The activist groups did not run out of money (foundation donations often stretch from three to five years).
- They did not run out of issues (none of the policies they demanded was actually delivered).
- These forever campaigners simply ran out of legitimacy.
The elections of 2024-25 across Europe and North America delivered a blow to the environmental left with economic, social and border issues taking priority in the political shift to the right. Over the last two years, policies, procedures and funding have migrated towards more economic, industrial and jobs development and away from the intangible feel-good fluff that the activists had pushed to the center of the policy arena. Buzzwords like simplification, deregulation, rationalization quickly replaced the environmental totems of circularity, decarbonization and degrowth. The electorate’s clear message was received in the policy halls of Brussels, Berlin and Washington.
Turning the Crisis InwardThe NGOs reacted as they have always done, not by reflecting and seeking a good compromise, but by declaring an imminent crisis. But the fabricated crisis was no longer a catastrophic climate collapse or a mass ecological extinction, but rather the threat to their own existence. Ever polarizing, the activists ran a campaign claiming the far-right was on a mission to silence NGOs (and free speech). Maybe it was the perpetual polarizing and lack of reflection or compromise that had turned so many off of their issues. The Firebreak published an article how their portrayal of the good activist fighting the “bad guys” was not setting the right tone and was not even singing the right hymn to their choir.
More recently, the activists have resorted to triage to try to make it through the lean years. Two weeks ago, the smarmy Good Lobby published their recent sales pitch called: “An Advocacy Survival Guide for Civil Society” claiming that the nature of the game had changed. Correction: the audience decided to watch other more important games. Of course, Alberto has been getting too fat living high off the foundation funding hog as the hypocrite blindly attacks other forms of advocacy (lobbying) funding so maybe he should follow his own advice.
Last week, a group of 60 activist NGOs, including the ever-opportunistic Good Lobby, published an Open Letter to the European Commission. The letter was quite remarkable in that their demands for better regulation were what these same groups had been condemning only three years earlier. The NGOs were demanding to be allowed to engage in dialogue while it was not too long ago that they were gleefully kicking their industry enemies out of the European Parliament and Commission. They demanded transparency, but the NGOs are the ones who do not reveal the billionaires and other interest groups behind their foundation funding. They demanded impact assessments. Good, so does that mean Europe will revise regulations like the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive where the NGOs got their way by rejecting the need for any impact assessments?
The NGO activist groups do face a crisis situation, but the crisis is coming from within.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPLooking to the Post-NGO WorldThis is not the first decline in NGO influence, and they will be back, probably stronger and even more vengeful. What is dangerous is for other stakeholders to consider the recent shifting sands as the end of the uncomfortable decades of activist interference and use it as a chance to go back to business as usual. Rather, this is an opportunity to reshape the post-NGO world to redefine how stakeholders engage in the policy process. Here are four key changes to ensure a rational policy process in future.
- Clarify the role of foundations. With the professionalization of philanthropy (consultants creating networks of fiscal sponsorships and dark donor-advised funds), foundations have become billionaire-led activist NGOs. These groups pose as campaign organizations but as they don’t legally exist, they don’t have to declare their funding or be held accountable. The rules need to change so these groups follow the same rules of transparency and accountability as every other stakeholder group.
- Differentiate NGOs from activist lobby groups (APEs). The Firebreak has argued that most policy activist groups abuse their status as NGOs, pretending to be in the same league as humanitarian organizations or aid charities, claiming tax-free status while spending hundreds of millions on salaries, political donations and lobbying campaigns. They should be classified as Alternative Policy Enterprises (APEs), lobby groups whose millions in funding from special interests should not be tax deductible or classed differently from industry lobbyists. Meanwhile, those genuine NGOs trying to run food banks, shelters and development aid programs have to compete with these non-transparent lobbyists trying to impose their elitist dogma on society.
- Set stricter conditions for evidence in policy processes. For the last 20 years, NGO groups have done a good job discrediting industry research and excluding their evidence from the policy process. But the activist science they put forward is lower quality and designed to generate fear and doubt rather than facts and evidence. Since NGOs are no longer dictating the narrative at the present time, a clear, objective standard of scientific research and data should be established that would encompass the best available research and lab practices, regardless of its source.
- Consider environmental activist campaigns as marketing and PR activities rather than policy actions. The NGOs are communications organizations trying to shape the public narrative to enhance business opportunities (donations, funding, alternative products…). Their evidence is neither scientific nor economic but designed to persuade via the emotional triggers of fear and outrage. Some examples:
– The anti-pesticide campaigns intend to push frightened consumers into buying organic food. Organic is nothing more than a high-priced marketing concept for the affluent elite to impose on struggling consumers.
– The catastrophic climate agenda is woven into the promotion of renewables and promoting a post-capitalist neo-Marxist ideology.
– The plastics fear campaigns (microplastics, waste, endocrine disruption…) work in tandem with alternative industries like copper, steel, glass and paper manufacturers.
– The litigation industry is profiting nicely from the activist PR work in all of these fear business centers.
We need to consider the activist APEs campaigns and lobbying, not as policy engagement, but as marketing and PR for other interest groups.
The big problem for the environmental NGOs is that their marketing campaigns continue as usual, but not many people are buying them. It is time to change the business model.
David Zaruk is the Firebreak editor, and also writes under the pen-name The Risk Monger. David is a retired professor, environmental-health risk analyst, science communicator, promoter of evidence-based policy and philosophical theorist on activists and the media. Find David on X @Zaruk
A version of this article was originally posted at Firebreak and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Firebreak on X @the_firebreak
Climate change is speeding up the decline in important nutrients in our food, according to 15 leading researchers from four continents – including Prof. Asaph Aharoni of the plant and environmental sciences department at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.
“This is not a distant threat to health,” he told The Jerusalem Post in an interview. “Already today, up to two-thirds of the world’s population does not get enough essential micronutrients – including folic acid, vitamin B2, calcium, iron, and iodine – from their diet, a situation that can lead to hidden hunger,” he added.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPIn a comprehensive review published in the prestigious journal Nature under the title “Genetic technologies to enhance crop nutritional value under climate change,” the researchers presented a roadmap for protecting and improving the nutritional quality of crops in the face of climate change.
They advocated the use of advanced genetic technologies – including CRISPR gene editing – to increase the vitamin and mineral content of crops while also making them more resilient to a changing climate.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
On June 17, 2026, the European Parliament reached a historic milestone by endorsing New Genomic Techniques (NGTs), sending a powerful global signal that science-based innovation is essential for addressing climate change and strengthening food security.
For Asia, the implications could be profound.
Home to nearly 60% of the world’s population, Asia faces the daunting task of feeding billions while confronting some of the world’s harshest climate impacts.
Rising temperatures, droughts, floods, salinity intrusion, emerging pests, and global crises are placing immense pressure on agricultural systems.
According to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), countries such as Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan remain highly vulnerable to geopolitical shocks because of their dependence on imported fertilizers and natural gas from the Gulf region. The ongoing Iran conflict, the latest disruption to global fertilizer markets, underscores this vulnerability.
Against this backdrop, NGTs offer a promising tool for developing climate-resilient crops, reducing reliance on pesticides and fertilizers, and strengthening food security, particularly for smallholder farmers.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPFor decades, the European Union maintained some of the world’s strictest regulations on agricultural biotechnology, influencing policy-making far beyond Europe. Many countries in Asia and Africa adopted similarly cautious approaches.
Europe’s endorsement of NGTs therefore marks a significant shift, demonstrating that innovation and environmental sustainability can go hand in hand.
Several Asian countries are already moving ahead. China has made gene editing a national priority to enhance food security, while Japan has established enabling regulations and commercialized gene-edited foods.
India is actively exploring genome editing to develop climate-resilient crops, and countries including the Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, and Bangladesh are advancing research and regulatory reforms.
Yet technological potential alone will not be enough. Historically, biotechnology research has relied heavily on private investment and donor support.
Today, shrinking research budgets, limited technical expertise, and underinvestment in public research institutions remain major constraints, particularly in developing countries.
Realizing the benefits of genome editing will require evidence-based policymaking, sustained public investment, and long-term government commitment to translate scientific advances into practical solutions for farmers.
Europe’s decision should not be treated as a blueprint to be followed uncritically. Rather, it should encourage countries such as Bangladesh to engage in evidence-based decision-making and assess how emerging technologies like genome editing can contribute to more resilient, sustainable, and food-secure agricultural systems.
Arif Hossain is Regional Head of Asia, WePlanet International and Executive Director at Farming Future Bangladesh. Find Arif on X @arif4science
A version of this article was originally posted at Dhaka Tribune and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Dhaka Tribune on X @DhakaTribune
2026 may well be remembered as the year global agriculture began to untangle itself from decades of precautionary red tape. Earlier this year, the agricultural biotechnology landscape shifted in two places that have long defined opposite poles of the regulatory debate: the European Union, historically the home of exceedingly precautionary biotech rules, and the United States, a pro-innovation leader now eyeing a massive regulatory overhaul.
The EU Parliament recently approved a landmark framework for regulating New Genomic Techniques (NGTs). Many plants developed with CRISPR or other precise gene-editing techniques will now be treated more like conventional crops by regulators than transgenics, commonly referred to as “GMOs.” Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture is weighing a clean break from its legacy Part 340 biotechnology rules, in place since the late 1980s.
Together, these moves mark a broader retreat from process-based regulation toward more risk-based and technology-agnostic frameworks. Product-based regulations ask what a product does, what risks it plausibly poses, and whether regulation will actually improve safety—rather than focusing on the technology used in development. This is about more than administrative streamlining; it’s the key to a new wave of agricultural innovation.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPWhile the EU’s NGT reforms and the US’s potential overhaul are steps in the right direction, true modernization demands that all genetically engineered products—gene-edited and transgenic alike—be treated the same as conventionally bred crops. Continuing to differentiate between these categories as a proxy for risk conflicts with the scientific consensus that gene-edited and transgenic crops don’t pose new risks compared to conventional breeding, often making changes to a plant’s DNA with greater speed and accuracy and fewer unintended changes. Only by aligning regulations with established science will we unlock the benefits of biotechnology innovation in agriculture.
Emily Bass is Associate Director of Federal Policy, Food and Agriculture at Breakthrough Institute. Follow Emily on X @EmilyJane_Bass
A version of this article was originally posted at The Ecomodernist and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Breakthrough Institute on X @TheBTI
Over the past month, Texas and Louisiana both enacted first-in-the-nation legislation that created specific labeling requirements for food products that contain certain ingredients. For both of these proposals, the food labeling provision was but one of a broad set of policies aimed at making Texas and Louisiana “healthy again.” This article will discuss the specifics of the bills enacted and highlight the potential impacts they will have on the American food system. To read the bills, click here and here.
Background on “MAHA”
Make American Healthy Again, or “MAHA,” is the name given to the nutrition and health initiative that Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert Kennedy has spearheaded. Specifically, on February 13, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order establishing the Make American Healthy Again Commission, and designated Secretary Kennedy as the Commission’s chair. Commission members included United States Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Martin Makary, Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, and more. The Commission was tasked with the mission of “advis[ing] and assist[ing] the President on how to best exercise his authority to address the childhood chronic disease crisis.” In alignment with this mission, on May 24, 2025, the Commission released the “MAHA report” – a publication that highlights their initial findings. Specifically, the report identifies “four primary drivers” that the Commission believes caused the rise of childhood chronic disease and lays out ten next steps to developing the Commission’s comprehensive strategy. This strategy is due in August 2025.
While the MAHA report itself did not include any tangible policy actions, Secretary Kennedy has been directing the movement on several MAHA food-related priorities through his role as head of HHS. For example, FDA announced its six-pronged plan to phase out synthetic petroleum-based color dyes from the food supply, rolled out a new food Chemical Review Program, approved new natural color additives, and established a joint nutrition-focused research program with the National Institutes of Health. In addition to these agency initiatives, Secretary Kennedy has been touring the country, often accompanied by USDA Secretary Rollins, to promote the adoption of MAHA policies on the state level. Typically at these events, the governor of the state where the Secretaries were visiting would sign some type of executive order or legislative action related to the MAHA priorities. For example, in June, Secretary Kennedy visited Oklahoma for the launch of the “Make Oklahoma Healthy Again” initiative. At this event, Governor Stitt signed a SNAP waiver request asking USDA to permit Oklahoma to ban SNAP participants from using their benefits to purchase soft drinks and candy. The governor also signed an executive order that, among other things, prohibited specific state agencies from supplying meals to the public that contain artificial dyes or flavors. Additionally, the Secretary also visited Louisiana where he joined the Governor as he signed SB 14, Louisiana’s “MAHA bill.”
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPAlong with the national tour Secretary Kennedy is undertaking, a number of state legislatures took up the MAHA mantle this year and considered legislation in accordance with the MAHA priorities. Some states sought to ban artificial food dyes from being sold in the state, some sought to only ban the dyes from being present in school meals, some sought to prohibit the purchase of specific foods with SNAP benefits, some tried to define the term “ultra-processed foods,” and many tried to create nutrition related education initiatives. This article will specifically look at the Texas and Louisiana legislation but will mention proposals from other states. To learn more about food related laws passed in the states this year, click here to read NALC article “Food Law in the States – 2025 Update.”
Texas
On June 22, 2025, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 25 into law. This legislation enacts a number of MAHA policies including required nutrition training for medical professionals, physical education mandates for students, creation of a Texas Nutrition Advisory Committee, and the adoption of labeling requirements for foods that contain certain ingredients.
Labeling rules
The most groundbreaking portion of SB 25 was its labeling requirements. SB 25 created a first in the nation labeling requirement that foods containing any of the bill’s 44 listed ingredients must bear a specific disclosure. This disclosure must say the following, “WARNING: This product contains an ingredient that is not recommended for human consumption by the appropriate authority in Australia, Canada, the European Union, or the United Kingdom.” The warning must be in a prominent and reasonably visible location and have “sufficiently high contrast with the immediate background” of the food product’s packaging. Additionally, food manufacturers or retailers that sell their products in the state of Texas must include the warning somewhere on their website. The list of 44 ingredients includes azodicarbonamide, bleached flour, propylparaben, interesterified soybean oil, any “certified food colors by the United States Food and Drug Administration,” and 39 listed others.
The bill clarifies that this labeling requirement does not apply to a product not intended for human consumption; food labeled, prepared, served, or sold in a restaurant; food labeled, prepared, or served in a retail establishment; a product regulated by the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service; a product labeled with a warning or recommendation by the U.S. Surgeon General; a drug or dietary supplement; or a pesticide chemical, soil or plant nutrient, or other agricultural chemical used in the production, storage, or transportation of a raw agricultural commodity. Additionally, the bill clarifies that this section does not create a private cause of action in the case of a violation of the rule, but that the Texas attorney general might bring an action to enjoin the food’s manufacturer if it is found to have violated the labeling requirement.
These rules are deemed preempted if, under federal law, the government post-September 1, 2025, prohibits the use of the specific ingredient, imposes conditions on the use of the ingredient, or determines the ingredient as safe for human consumption. Thus, under this provision, ingredients that have been approved as safe by the federal government prior to September 1, 2025, are required to bear the disclosure. However, if one of the listed ingredients is reviewed again and determined as safe after September 1, 2025, it would no longer be required to bear a warning label. Additionally, this labeling requirement is preempted and has no effect if, after the September 2025 date, the federal government implements a law or regulation that requires an ultra-processed or processed food-related labeling statement. The warning requirement only applies to food product labels “developed or copyrighted on or after January 1, 2027.”
Impacts of SB 25
It is noteworthy to mention a few things related to the impact of SB 25. The labeling requirement only impacts food for human consumption that is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Thus, meat, poultry, catfish, and unshelled egg products regulated by the USDA will not be required to bear this label. Additionally, the provisions for requiring the disclosure on internet sales are noteworthy because they apply to both manufacturers and retailers who sell food items on their websites in the state of Texas. Therefore, online retailers who may not have a physical presence in Texas should be aware that if their website is accessible to Texas residents, it is required to comply with this rule and bear the warning statement.
However, the bill is narrower in scope than it may initially appear to be. Though the bill goes into effect on September 1, 2025, the labeling requirements will only be applied to food product labels which are developed or copyrighted on or after January 1, 2027. This means that any current food item containing any of the listed 44 ingredients will not be required to bear the warning label. Only new products or updated labels that are developed or copyrighted on or post-January 1, 2027 will require the warning. Lasty, the inclusion of language regarding preemption is notable because of the activity of the federal government on this topic. For example, Texas’ law states that if the federal government creates a rule that requires a warning label for “ultra-processed foods,” then the warning requirement created in SB 25 will have no effect. The topic of ultra-processed foods is one that the leadership at FDA has stated its intention of working on.
Louisiana
On June 20, 2025, Louisiana’s Governor Jeff Landry signed Senate Bill 14 into law. This bill included several food and nutrition related provisions. Specifically, the bill prohibits certain food ingredients from being served in schools, requires disclaimers on food items that contain certain ingredients, and mandates warnings to notify customers of seed oil use in food establishments. Additionally, this bill creates nutrition and metabolic health continuing education requirements for physicians, physician assistants, and registered nurses that practice in specific areas of medicine.
Prohibited ingredients
Under SB 14, Louisiana public schools and non-public schools that receive state funds shall not serve any food or beverage containing a prohibited ingredient to students. The bill identifies 15 “prohibited ingredients” including: blue dye 1, blue dye 2, green dye 3, red dye 3, red dye 40, yellow dye 5, yellow dye 6, azodicarbonamide, butylated hydroxytoluene, potassium bromate, aspartame, sucralose, propylparaben, butylated hydroxyanisole, and acesulfame potassium. This prohibition applies to breakfasts and lunches served during regular school hours and to foods and beverages served by the school to a student during aftercare. However, the prohibition does not extend to food or beverages sold in concession stands or vending machines. This section also includes a provision requiring public schools and non-public schools that receive state funds to purchase food produced in Louisiana to the extent practicable. These requirements become effective at the beginning of the 2028-2029 school year.
Disclosure of Harmful Ingredients
Similar to the Texas bill, Louisiana’s SB 14 creates labeling disclosures for food items that contain specific ingredients. Using a list similar to Texas, SB 14 requires that a food item with any of 44 listed ingredients is required to include a label with a quick response code (QR code), and a statement indicating that additional ingredient information can be accessed by scanning the code. The QR code will take the scanner to a web page that is under the control of the manufacturer and contains the following disclaimer “NOTICE: This product contains {ingredient}. For more information about the ingredient, including FDA approvals, click here.” This disclaimer will link to the FDA webpage that details food chemical safety. The law clarifies that the disclosure requirement only applies to food or beverages intended for human consumption. The bill further explains that the disclosure is not required on drugs or dietary supplements; alcoholic beverages; food prepared and labeled in a retail food establishment; medical food; nor a product sold at retail as a multiunit package.
Notice for Seed Oils
SB 14 also includes a provision that requires food service establishments to notify customers of food prepared using seed oils. Under Louisiana law, a food service establishment is one that prepares food for human consumption for both individual service or for a group of people, regardless of whether consumption occurs on or off the premises and whether there is compensation for the food or not. LA Rev Stat § 40:5.5. This definition includes not only restaurants, but also caterers, charities that service food, schools, and prisons. Specifically, the provision mandates a disclaimer be included on the menu or another clearly visible location to inform customers of the potential presence of seed oil in food at the establishment. The disclaimer must say, “Some menu items may contain or be prepared using seed oils.” Under the bill, a seed oil includes canola or rapeseed oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, grapeseed oil, rice bran oil, safflower oil, soybean oil, or sunflower oil. This provision, along with the provision requiring ingredient disclosure, will become effective on January 1, 2028.
Impact of SB 14
Though the labeling requirements created in Texas and Louisiana’s bills include similar components, Louisiana’s impact is much more straightforward. While SB 14 will be preempted if a federal statute, regulation, or guidance is enacted that is equivalent to or more restrictive than the requirements of the bill, it does not include the narrow conditions for preemption that Texas does, nor does it include a “grandfather clause” for pre-existing labels. Instead, the labeling requirements are simply set to go into effect on January 1, 2028, and will apply to “any food product offered for sale in this state . . . if the product contains any ingredient identified.” This means that by the start of 2028, any product containing any of the listed ingredients must bear the disclosure on its packaging. Further the manufacturer of the product must create and maintain webpages on its website for the QR code to link to.
Other state enactments
As mentioned before, Texas and Louisiana are just the latest two states to enact legislation pertaining to the “MAHA” priorities. For example, earlier this year, similar to one portion of the Louisiana bill, West Virginia, Virginia, Arizona, Delaware, Tennessee, and Utah passed legislation banning foods with certain ingredients from being served in school meals. Texas also passed a separate bill that did the same thing. Additionally, West Virginia’s bill included a general additive ban – prohibiting the sale generally in the state of foods containing specific ingredients. Though not all states passing and considering this legislation are doing so under the “MAHA mantle.” For example, before “MAHA” existed, California was the first state to enact legislation to prohibit the sale and ban from school meals foods that contain certain food additives. To read more about those laws, click here and here. Now, California is considering legislation that would give the first statutory definition to the term “ultra-processed foods.” AB 1264 has passed California’s Assembly and is currently being considered by lawmakers in California’s Senate.
A version of this article was originally posted at The National Agriculture Law Center and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Unbiased Science on X @nataglaw
Some ideas are repeated so often, we start believing they’re true – particularly when it comes to food. But there’s a lot of culinary misinformation out there that could potentially spoil your supper. Want to separate the myths from the facts? To set the record straight, we’ve debunked some of the most common foodie misconceptions.
- Strawberries are berries
… Botanists officially classify strawberries as aggregate fruit because they come from a flower with more than one ovary. The same goes for raspberries. However, pomegranates, kiwis and bananas are berries
-
The five-second rule is a thing
-
Canned food is less nutritious
-
Spinach is the ultimate iron powerhouse
-
Your ‘five a day’ is based on hard science
-
Broccoli contains more protein than steak
-
Keeping the pit in an avocado will prevent it from browning
-
If a soup is too salty, you should add a peeled raw potato
-
Subway uses fake chicken and tuna
-
Beaver secretions are used in all artificial vanilla products
-
The longer you marinate meat, the better
-
American cheese was invented in the USA
-
You shouldn’t cook tomatoes in a cast-iron pan
-
You should always sift your flour for baking
-
Turkey makes you sleepy
-
Fast food fries are vegan
-
Drinking milk prevents bone fractures
-
You shouldn’t cook with extra-virgin olive oil
-
You shouldn’t crowd mushrooms in a pan
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UP18. You shouldn’t wash mushrooms
-
Oranges are the fruit with the most vitamin C
-
Raw vegetables are healthier than cooked vegetables
-
KFC uses genetically engineered chickens
… In fact, KFC once sued three Chinese companies for spreading misinformation ….
-
The seeds are the spiciest part of a chilli pepper
-
Eating celery burns more calories than you gain
-
You should wait half an hour after eating before swimming
-
If you swallow gum, it’ll stay in your stomach for seven years
-
You should wash your chicken
This one is a real no-no. Washing raw chicken is completely unnecessary, as any bacteria it contains will be destroyed when the chicken is cooked. Furthermore, studies have shown that washing your chicken increases the chances of spreading bacteria ….
-
McDonald’s food never spoils
-
Searing meat keeps the juices in
-
MSG is bad for you
-
Eating carrots improves your eyesight
-
Sharp knives are more likely to cause an injury
-
You should drink eight glasses of water a day
-
Chocolate gives you spots
-
Adding oil to pasta water prevents it from sticking
-
Sugar makes kids hyperactive
[T]he idea that sugar causes hyperactivity was disproven years ago. In a study conducted in the 1990s, mothers who were told their children had been given a large dose of sugar rated them as significantly more hyperactive – though the kids had only been given a placebo.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
Ten years ago, when I started writing SlimeGate, many in the activist NGO world felt uncomfortable about getting into bed with these slimeball tort lawyers. While the “enemy of my enemy may be my friend”, some activists were having misgivings about cooperating with a faction of the legal profession that would use NGOs to help them extort companies, not for justice for plaintiffs, but for massive wealth accumulation, private jets and personal excess. How far were these idealists willing to look the other way in order to score a victory against industry, raise funding and enforce positive change for the environment? In the last decade, the answer became clear: Very far!
I have watched the evolution in the activist-Predatort nexus, particularly during the glyphosate saga.
- Early on, groups like Corporate Europe Observatory were using activist scientists like Chris Portier to write reports for them on the risks of glyphosate, knowing full well his services were paid for by the law firms suing then Monsanto and later Bayer.
- Then NGOs like Friends of the Earth started coordinating their glyphosate lobbying efforts with key beneficiary law firms like Wisner Baum.
- It didn’t take too long after for the US litigation industry to start paying off NGOs, reporters and filmmakers to do their bidding, via non-transparent donor-advised funds, as in the funding behind the Into the Weeds campaign.
- Funding activist scientists like Philip Landrigan and Chuck Benbrook to produce court-ready evidence was seen in the financial malfeasance of the Heartland Health Research Alliance, a non-profit set up by the US litigation industry to channel millions into fabricating research to be used in NGO campaigns and further lawsuits.
At this point no one in the civil society movement had any qualms about receiving Predatort millions via foundations functioning as pass-throughs. The passion for the planet was taken over by the passion to win, and these modern-day Machiavellians were wickedly efficient. The money was too good for any ethical introspection and without transparency or public scrutiny, activists found they could say and do whatever they liked.
But if it had only stopped there…
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPStrategic LitigationTwo years ago, the deepest moral decline of the environmental activist profession was put in evidence, and next week we will be witnessing the instigators boasting about it. The Lighthouse Reports affair showed law firms working directly with journalists, NGOs and foundations to put one of their political adversaries out of business in the hopes of advancing a lawsuit on paraquat. This is an example of strategic litigation, and one of the perpetrators is presenting it as a case study at a webinar next week to train other activists.
Strategic litigation (also called “impact litigation”) is the weaponization of the litigation industry to effect change on industries, governments and public perceptions. Born from a La Jolla conference in 2012, the brainchild of Naomi Oreskes’ tormented mind, the strategy was to circumvent the regulatory process (seen as poisoned by lobbyists) with their alternative, later referred to as adversarial regulation. This approach was built around a litigation-led campaign attacking a targeted industry or product. The goal is to use relentless lawfare assaults to effectively tobacconize other industries, destroying their reputation, market and business model (suing them out of business or into submission). There was no need to engage in the messy (albeit democratic) business of regulatory change. Some people call this extortion; Naomi referred to it as “progress” (and personally lucrative).
Fourteen years after La Jolla, it is no longer a convenient coincidence when activists, foundations and law firms have the same goals. Now these campaigns are coordinated with clear strategies and gameplans from the outset. Imagine an activist consultant working for a foundation (or developing a dark fiscal sponsorship organization from a group of foundations), coordinating a multi-pronged attack on a company or regulatory body via a group of NGOs and law firms.
The collusion can take many forms.
Dark subterfugeThese campaigns would usually go under the radar as none of these groups feel the need to be transparent or accountable. Consultants who have worked their way onto foundation boards can act like generals stealthly commanding a flotilla of NGOs. A good example was when the provincial government in Alberta, Canada had to conduct an inquiry with a forensic accounting expert to learn how far these dark forces had gone to obstruct economic affairs in the province (NGOs spent at least 1.28 billion CAD in foundation funding that had “lost its character”). The media, mostly funded by these same foundations, ignored the government’s findings.
Fiscal sponsorsThe fiscal sponsor may create its own NGO-like organization to spearhead the campaign (ensuring that the campaign group is not filed as a legal entity to avoid transparency and accountability requirements). The law firms will share their network of scientists, serving as highly-paid litigation consultants, to publish papers to raise doubt about the issue at hand. This was Glyphosate 101. These papers as well as the overall campaign are then amplified by foundation-funded media groups and investigative reporters.
Dark, donor-advised fundsDepending on the potential for payouts, law firms may fund the campaign via dark donor-advised foundation funds (as in the Heartland Health Research Alliance) or the foundations may fund multiple dead-end lawfare assaults on targeted industries, not to win but to merely extract reputational damage to feed into a larger campaign (as seen with Sher Edling or Earthjustice).
Global, transnational reachAs an added touch, this unholy alliance can foster its influence (scientists or foundation funding) into UN bodies to drive another regulatory angle (seen with IARC, the FAO, UNEP and the WHO). The UN conference mill is now captured by the foundations, activist scientists, NGOs and specialty media groups.
Strategic litigation has delivered dividends for a wide range of activist campaigns like those against glyphosate, plastics and microplastics, fossil fuels, salmon farming but the playbook is rarely openly discussed by its perpetrators. That is why next week’s webinar on Strategic Litigation will be interesting.
The Lighthouse Laser BeamThe Lighthouse Reports’ Poison PR investigation is a case study of the backhanded dealings of the NGO, media and foundation special interests covertly working with the US litigation industry in a coordinated assault on a small communications firm. It was driven by law firms attempting to create public outrage of corporate malfeasance as they launched a large number of paraquat lawsuits.
This jury priming tactic (creating anti-industry outrage) was used successfully with the release and promotion of the Monsanto Papers during the glyphosate lawsuits and attempted with Oreskes’ Exxon Knew campaign to link the fossil fuel industry with the consequences of climate change. But this story has an ethical taint that makes the perpetration of the Poison PR campaign even more repugnant.
The Lighthouse-Predatort alliance started when a group of US tort law firms, including the Miller Firm, obtained a series of documents in discovery from Syngenta related to their paraquat activities. They leaked the confidential documents to the Environmental Working Group activist and self-proclaimed “journalist”, Carey Gillam, who claimed she woke up one morning and discovered 10,000 files in boxes outside of her front door.
The Miller Firm has had a longstanding relationship with Gillam, using her to amplify the release of the Monsanto Papers during the bellwether glyphosate case, to which both parties profited handsomely. She also orchestrated a character assassination of Tim Litzenburg when he was challenging their glyphosate evidence (as not actually the main cause of the plaintiff’s cancers) so she has proven to be very efficient at hiding the knives. Gillam promptly published the leaked documents on the EWG website, calling them the “Paraquat Papers” (evidence enough that Carey had exhausted any remaining creative inspiration).
The documents themselves had limited value for the class action suits being gathered against Syngenta, but they revealed a relationship between the company and a small communications firm, v-Fluence. The firm, with 28 employees, was known for its daily Bonus Eventus newsletters that documented activist strategies and campaign events, offering ag-tech and food industry actors a window on their tactics and advice on how to manage the issues.
The story from the leaked documents was not about paraquat (the evidence of a link to Parkinson’s was very weak) nor about Syngenta (who had followed their ethical codes of conduct), but instead focused on how v-Fluence had been internally sharing some of the negative published media about activists, including Ms Gillam.
Gillam took the confidential discovery documents to Lighthouse Reports, a Dutch non-profit mercenary group producing investigative reports at the behest of any special interests that would fund the NGO’s publications. (They call it “collaborative journalism”.) In other words, Lighthouse Reports is another one of those “Reporters for Hire” groups feeding off of foundation funding to publish bespoke investigative journalism attack pieces. For their Poison PR investigation, they assembled a group of reporters from across the globe (essentially eight freelance journalists who had been sharing each others’ anti-industry hit-pieces).
Lighthouse secured funding from the Oak Foundation for this campaign, totalling at least €800,000. Oak has a clear strategy of funding campaigns against industry, promoting agroecology and attacking conventional agricultural practices. The foundation also provides a dark donor-advised funding mechanism (a funding pass-through) so we really cannot say which special interests were behind this report. Needless to say, Lighthouse Reports activists were drunk with cash as both Carey Gillam and Margo Gibbs (based in Amsterdam) had offered to fly to St Louis to personally interview the v-Fluence managing director (see mail below). They even hacked into the closed Bonus Eventus website.
Drunk with unlimited foundation funding and no accountability. Also, Carey Gillam is not employed by the Guardian but she never corrected this claim.The Lighthouse Reports investigation into this small communications firm was merely the first step in this strategic litigation exercise. Law firms from the US and Europe then started to file lawsuits against v-Fluence, demanding disclosure of all correspondence and documents. Cases were then filed against their clients, ensuring an exodus that would bankrupt the firm. The efficiency of these relentless attacks on a small firm like v-Fluence was brutal, vicious and vindictive.
Meanwhile, the network of journalists amplified the investigation for several months, hoping to snowball the claims against this small organization into a mass global outrage event as the paraquat bellwether lawsuits were being heard in the US. Domiciled in Brussels, I was on Le Monde activist, Stéphane Content’s dance card (but I ignored his correspondence as he had broken at least eight of Le Monde’s ten ethical codes of conduct).
Celebrating FailureThis was definitely not a Monsanto Papers success story. The Lighthouse Report investigation did not reveal any large exposé of corporate corruption. They spent a lot of money and made a lot of noise, but the then ongoing paraquat bellwether cases were thrown out on the basis of bad science. The judge not only dismissed the poor research, she referred to how the litigation consultant “required several methodological contortions and outright violations of the scientific standards he professed to apply”.
Unlike glyphosate, the law firms could not use outrage as a substitute for scientific evidence. The only thing the law firms, working in tandem with the reporters, activists and foundations, had achieved was bankrupting a small communications company (and a reminder, if we needed one, of how weak and cowardly industry trade associations like CropLife America have become).
Despite its failure and evidence of a tired gameplan, the Lighthouse Reports’ tactics show the dark underbelly of activist collusion with the litigation industry. See my critical analysis of the Lighthouse Reports investigation here. There was no transparency (essential for reporters) but rather a concerted effort by law firms, foundations and the journalists to hide their sources, funding and evidence. They hacked, lied and cheated to get their story out.
But their story was a nothing burger.
The intention of creating another ExxonKnew or Monsanto Papers campaign to cultivate jury outrage to augment court payouts and increase the chance of settlements (extortion) in tens of thousands of paraquat lawsuits were weak when the only case they had was a communications firm that was sharing published documents of activist tactics. If vengeance is a measure for success, then Carey should be proud.
Strategic litigation is one more weapon in the activist arsenal to spread distrust, outrage and disinformation against industry. When law firms hire activist zealots to do their dirty work, they are getting value for money. When NGOs get in bed with these slimeball Predatorts, they surrender all integrity and self-respect. It is a toxic activist tool that should only be exercised out of desperation. But now NGOs and foundations seem to use it as their main campaign strategy.
[On July 28, 20226], one of the authors of the Lighthouse Reports Poison PR publication, Thin Lei Win, will proudly present this case study at a webinar on strategic litigation. I’m looking forward to learning how she sleeps at night.
You can register for the strategic litigation webinar here.
David Zaruk is the Firebreak editor, and also writes under the pen-name The Risk Monger. David is a retired professor, environmental-health risk analyst, science communicator, promoter of evidence-based policy and philosophical theorist on activists and the media. Find David on X @Zaruk
A version of this article was originally posted at Firebreak and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Firebreak on X @the_firebreak
The message is unmistakable: Global warming is coming for your family’s dinner table, and only sweeping climate policy can save it. The message is also wrong. …
Start with coffee, supposedly on its deathbed. This year, global coffee production is expected to set yet another record — more than double the world’s output of 50 years ago. Crops on the brink of extinction don’t deliver record harvests. …
How do outlets like the New York Times get it so wrong? By inexcusably ignoring inflation — comparing coffee prices from the 1970s, expressed in the dollars of that day, with prices expressed in today’s dollars. By that standard, everything is at a record high, always.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPEven Nature’s own reporting on coffee undercuts its ominous headline detailing “how scientists are fighting to save it from extinction.” Ethiopia keeps more than 12,000 arabica plants in living gene banks for breeding heat- and drought-tolerant varieties.
“I believe we have enough gene pool to fight climate change,” Kassahun Tesfaye, the Ethiopian plant geneticist leading the effort, says. … That isn’t extinction. It is what agriculture has always been: adaptation and improvement.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
Even credentialed scientists are susceptible to the pressures of social media virality, sometimes venturing well beyond their expertise to promote popular but misleading health narratives. Last week, Dr. Rhonda Patrick of FoundMyFitness, typically a reliable source of science-backed info on nutrition, urged the public to switch to organic food to cut their pesticide exposure. With over 1.4 million followers, Patrick’s message amplified a widespread fear but ignored critical scientific context.
The simple, oft-overlooked truth is that pesticide residues in both conventional and organic foods occur at trace levels that regulatory science deems safe. Maximum residue limits (MRLs) and allowable daily intakes (ADIs) incorporate large safety factors—often 10- to 1,000-fold—below doses showing no adverse effects in rigorous toxicology testing. Consumers quite literally can’t ingest enough produce to approach these strict thresholds.
Organic production also uses pesticides, including some with higher toxicity profiles than their modern synthetic counterparts—which also help prevent far more dangerous natural contaminants like aflatoxin-producing molds, a major global cause of liver cancer.
Like many influencers before her, Patrick relied on observational studies and high-dose animal experiments to bolster her advice. These papers are frequently cited in anti-pesticide discussions, though they bear little relevance to typical dietary exposures. Likewise, detection of pesticide metabolites in urine reflects normal liver and kidney function, not toxicity.
Even among professional applicators exposed at much higher levels under strict protocols and personal protective equipment, cancer rates are often lower than the public’s very low risk—likely due to healthier lifestyles and greater fruit and vegetable consumption.
The problem with Patrick’s well-meaning but misinformed messaging is that it risks discouraging intake of nutritious produce, an actual public health priority. While organic food serves as a valid personal or local choice for those who prefer it, the evidence does not demonstrate meaningful safety advantages against conventionally grown food.
Modern agricultural tools enable abundant, affordable food supplies that have dramatically improved food security compared to historical organic practices. That’s a critical message more people need to hear.
Join Dr. Liza Lockwood and Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies as they take on a pesticide myth even some scientists fall for:
Dr. Liza Lockwood is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD
Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish
Calories alone are not enoughClimate change is not only affecting how much food we can produce, but also how nutritious that food is. In a review published in the leading scientific journal Nature, researchers from Ghent University and international partners explore how genetic technologies can help develop crops that are both more nutritious and better able to cope with climate-related stress.
More than two billion people worldwide do not get enough essential vitamins and minerals. This problem, known as hidden hunger, means that people consume enough calories but still lack the nutrients needed for a healthy life.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPFor billions of people, staple crops such as rice, wheat, maize, potatoes and cassava form the basis of their daily diet. While these crops provide energy, they often contain too few vitamins and minerals to prevent nutritional deficiencies. At the same time, a growing body of research shows that climate change is reducing the nutritional value of several major food crops.
Meeting three challenges at onceIn the Nature review, Professor Dominique Van Der Straeten (Ghent University) and international experts examine how science can help develop crops that are richer in essential nutrients while also becoming more resilient to drought, heat, salinity and other climate-related stresses. Emeritus Professor Marc Van Montagu, a pioneer in plant biotechnology, is a co-author of the study.
The researchers argue that the agriculture of the future must address three major challenges simultaneously: producing enough food, improving its nutritional quality and increasing crops’ resilience to a changing climate.
“Future crops must combine higher yields with better nutritional quality and greater resilience to drought, heat and other consequences of climate change,” says Professor Dominique Van Der Straeten.
Combining technologies for greater impactThe review discusses how new genetic technologies, including CRISPR-based genome editing, can contribute to crops with higher levels of vitamins and minerals. These technologies allow researchers to make precise changes to plant characteristics that are important for nutritional quality.
The authors stress, however, that there is no single solution. While these technologies can play an important role in tackling malnutrition, conventional breeding and other biotechnological approaches will remain equally important.
According to the researchers, the greatest progress will come from combining different scientific approaches, tailored to individual crops and local growing conditions.
Decades of Ghent University expertiseThe publication builds on many years of research at Ghent University into improving the nutritional quality of crops. Ghent University has long been recognised internationally as a pioneer in research on vitamin enrichment of food crops.
The authors hope their review will draw attention to an often-overlooked aspect of food security. As the world’s population continues to grow and the climate changes, ensuring that food provides not only enough calories but also the nutrients needed for good health is becoming increasingly important.
A version of this article was originally posted at Ghent University. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Ghent University on X @ugent
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a reputation for bashing powerful corporate interests in his quest to “Make America Healthy Again.” But one industry has eked out a win under Kennedy’s MAHA agenda: Big Agriculture.
In May, the Trump administration’s MAHA commission released a report raising questions about the health effects of two commonly used pesticides, glyphosate and atrazine. …
Major trade groups scrambled to meet with White House officials. They urged the commission in a coordinated social media campaign to take a “fact-based approach,” and sent letters to key federal departments.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPTheir efforts seemingly paid off. The Trump administration’s MAHA strategy document … did not call for restrictions on pesticides and instead said the EPA would work to ensure the public is aware of its “robust” review procedures, a marked shift from Kennedy’s past criticism of chemicals as contaminating the nation’s food supply.
…
The scientific and regulatory consensus on the safety of glyphosate is divided. … Bayer, which has faced a blitz of lawsuits over its glyphosate-containing herbicide, has stood by the chemical’s safety.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
The scientific evidence increasingly refutes the alarmist narrative that our farmland bird and insect populations are disappearing due to intensive agriculture. In fact, total bird and insect numbers in Britain have been stable for the past 30 years. Freshwater insects are thriving. Many of the NGOs behind these misleading claims of ecological collapse have built their campaigns, and their fundraising strategies, on such fear-mongering. In doing so they risk undermining the very causes they claim to represent, argue Peter Button, Daniel Pearsall and Matt Ridley.[Science] for Sustainable Agriculture reiterated its call for an urgent review of the ‘limited and highly selective’ list of indicator species used by the UK Government to determine and report the status of bird life on British farmland.It followed the publication of a new report from the UK environment department, Defra, entitled Wild bird populations in the UK and England, 1970 to 2024, which suggests that Britain’s farmland bird numbers declined sharply during the 1970s and 1980s, and that while the rate of decline has since slowed, “populations have continued to decline at a fast rate, declining by 11% in the five years since 2019.”
Predictably, the Defra report was greeted by media headlines claiming that Britain’s farmland bird populations have plummeted by more than 60% since 1970, and reinforcing a popular narrative that modern intensive agriculture is driving an ecological crisis in our wildlife.
It also prompted calls from RSPB, one of the principal authors of the Defra report, for more taxpayers’ money to be channelled into ‘nature-friendly farming’.
Yet a closer look at the evidence reveals a very different picture. The government’s biodiversity assessments are based on a narrow and outdated list of just 19 bird species – a snapshot frozen in time over half a century ago.
The farmland bird index no longer reflects the species diversity found on Britain’s farmland, and excludes important species such as the carrion crow and chaffinch, increasingly important farmland birds such as the herring and lesser black-backed gulls, as well as thriving birds of prey like the red kite and buzzard.
By contrast, more comprehensive datasets, covering dozens of farmland-associated species, reveal that overall bird populations have largely remained stable, even showing modest increases over recent decades.
This discrepancy matters. Not only does it call into question the reliability of official biodiversity indicators, but it also exposes the undue influence of environmental NGOs in shaping how such data are presented.
Many of these organisations have built their campaigns, and indeed their fundraising strategies, on alarmist claims that biodiversity is collapsing under the weight of intensive farming. While such rhetoric may generate headlines and donations, it risks distorting genuine conservation priorities.
Biodiversity is not static; species rise and fall in response to multiple factors including predation, disease, climate change, and competition. Focusing narrowly on productive agriculture as the main culprit ignores these complexities — and potentially diverts attention from more pressing challenges where conservation efforts could make a real difference.
Exactly the same scenario is playing out in relation to Britain’s insect populations, which we are frequently warned are in freefall and at risk of an insect ‘apocalypse’.
[A] grouping of UK environmental NGOs issued ‘The Bristol Declaration’, warning of an ‘insect declines crisis’, and calling for action in response to the ‘alarming and ongoing decline of the United Kingdom’s insect populations.’According to the declaration, the causes of these declines are ‘well-evidenced’, and include ‘pesticide and chemical use’ and ‘intensive agriculture’ alongside other factors such as habitat loss and climate change.
Very timely, then, that this should follow the publication in the journal Nature Communications of peer-reviewed research into the status of Britain’s insect populations which, virtually mirroring the more comprehensive wild bird data, concludes that while there have been changes in insect species diversity and distribution over the past three decades, there has been ‘no Great Britain-wide decline since 1990.’
The paper, led by scientists at Rothamsted Research but also involving representatives of some of the NGOs behind The Bristol Declaration, reveals a complex picture. While overall insect numbers have been stable since 1990, localised shifts and community restructuring are widespread, driven largely by urbanisation, landscape simplification, and climate change.
The paper suggests that this more nuanced understanding of the changes taking place in Britain’s insect populations is at odds with the pervasive narrative of general insect collapse. The authors emphasise the importance of local context and species-specific responses.
Using machine-learning models to examine more than 1200 insect species across nine major groups – ranging from butterflies and moths to bees and hoverflies – the scientists tracked the changes in distribution and identified the traits that mediate these responses.
Notably, two traits emerged as particularly influential: habitat breadth, which determines how species respond to changing landscape diversity; and voltinism – or the number of generations produced in a year – which influences how insects adapt to rising temperatures and altered seasonal cycles.
The study’s findings challenge the simplistic notion that all insects are uniformly declining. One of its most critical insights is the interplay between species traits and environmental drivers. By understanding how traits like voltinism and habitat breadth mediate responses to environmental changes, conservationist scientists can better predict which species are likely to thrive and which are vulnerable, with significant implications for the development of more evidence-based conservation and land use policies.
Above all, the study directly contradicts and confronts the NGO-led narrative that our insect populations are disappearing at an alarming rate, or that a move away from high-yield agriculture would be beneficial to insect numbers.
In fact, by requiring more land to meet our food needs, a greater emphasis on lower-yielding, so-called ‘nature-friendly’ farming may actually make things worse.
Nor is this Nature Communications paper alone in challenging claims of an ‘insect decline crisis’ in the UK.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPAnother comprehensive study led by researchers at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) and published in December 2023, found that freshwater invertebrate biodiversity in England has improved significantly since 1989.
In one of the largest and most wide-ranging analyses of long-term monitoring data in the world – spanning over 30 years – the researchers analysed more than 223,000 freshwater records collected by the Environment Agency between 1989 and 2018, examining species such as dragonflies, snails, mayflies, shrimp and worms. On average, the number of invertebrate families at each site showed a 66% increase. Pollution-sensitive species like mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies saw particularly strong recoveries, with diversity increasing by 300%.
The improvements in the study were observed across all river types and regions, from urban lowlands to rural uplands, and the researchers concluded that water quality improvements have been the key driver in reversing biodiversity decline.
So, the scientific evidence indicates that prospects for our freshwater insects, singled out for concern by NGOs in The Bristol Declaration, are getting better, not worse.
Policymakers and the mainstream media must take heed.
If policy decisions and public opinion are guided by selective evidence and fear-driven NGO narratives, the danger is not just misinformation but the misallocation of scarce resources needed for nature protection.
The competing demands on our finite land resources are ever-intensifying. By promoting a lower-yielding, land-sharing approach to farm policy, while at the same time demonising intensive agriculture and campaigning against new technologies such as genome editing which hold such promise to reduce farming’s environmental footprint, these NGOs are working against the conservation and biodiversity causes they claim to represent.
Of course, an arable field contains fewer insects than an equivalent area of scrubland or forest because it contains fewer plant species by definition. But that’s not the comparison that matters. What counts is whether ten acres of lower yielding farmland has more or fewer insects and birds than eight acres of high yielding land plus two of “spared land” if they produce the same tonnage of harvested crop.
The scientific evidence increasingly points to land-sparing – focusing high-yield agriculture on our most fertile land and leaving more land for intact nature and biodiversity conservation – as the most efficient, cost-effective and sustainable way to meet our food needs, achieve conservation goals and mitigate climate change. Releasing more land for nature is also likely to make it more accessible for public enjoyment of the countryside – a win-win-win for food security, biodiversity and the public good!
Peter Button recently retired as Vice Secretary-General at the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), based in Geneva, an intergovernmental organisation whose mission is to provide and promote an effective system of plant variety protection, with the aim of encouraging the development of new varieties of plants for the benefit of society. Find Peter on X @PeterJohnButton
Daniel Pearsall is an independent consultant specialising in communication and policy development in the farming, food chain and agri-science sectors. He runs a small livestock farm in Scotland. He co-ordinates the Science for Sustainable Agriculture initiative. Find Daniel on X @PearsallDaniel
Matt Ridley is a science writer and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, with Alina Chan. He has been a journalist and a businessman and served for nine years in the House of Lords.Find Matt on X @mattwridley
A version of this article was originally posted at Science for Sustainable Agriculture and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article. Find them on X @SciSustAg
[1.] Many people think genetically modified fruit is a recent invention, but the first GMO fruit hit the market in the 1990s. 2. Despite the hype, most of the fruit in your grocery store isn’t genetically modified.
-
A major misconception about GMO fruit is that it’s drenched in pesticides—but that’s not always true.
-
Studies show that GMO fruits are just as safe as their non-GMO counterparts.
-
One of the most well-known GMO fruits is the Arctic apple, which was modified to resist browning when sliced. It doesn’t mean it’s fake—it simply has a gene turned off that slows oxidation.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UP6. Every fruit you eat today—GMO or not—has been genetically altered through selective breeding over thousands of years.
-
For many developing countries, genetically modified crops have been a lifeline.
-
As of 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires all genetically modified foods to be labeled under the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard.
-
GMO technology has the potential to transform both farming and global health.
-
At the heart of the GMO conversation isn’t just biology—it’s belief.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
Today, the creed lighting up meetings, conference stages and supermarket shelves is regenerative agriculture (RA).
…
It has become less about agronomy and more about allegory – a story people want to believe, a sermon sprinkled with slogans, attracting investors, consultants and opportunists as eagerly as earthworms to compost.
And in Malaysia, where oil palm remains the country’s most important crop, the gap between regenerative rhetoric and estate reality could not be wider.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe truth is that oil palm’s most pressing problem is not the absence of regenerative practices but the long stagnant and recent declining yields.
Annual palm oil yields in Malaysia sit at around 3.5 tonnes per hectare, barely half the six to eight tonnes achieved in good plantation plots.
…
It is, then, a tale of two regenerations. On one side is the ideological kind: vague labels, carbon credits, consumer halos and PowerPoint promises.
On the other is the agronomic kind: the gritty, often thankless work of site-specific diagnosis, better planting materials, timely and adequate fertilisation, mechanisation and evidence-based research and development.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
The future of the avocado could look very different, thanks to Westfalia Fruit’s innovative precision breeding programme in South Africa.
At its research and development hub in Tzaneen, the global avocado company has planted more than 140 avocado varieties from around the world in a dedicated orchard, with up to three trees of each cultivar. This ‘genetic library’ is a cornerstone of Westfalia’s ambitious “Orchard of the Future” – a 50-hectare site where researchers are breeding the avocado varieties of tomorrow.
…
By pairing traditional cross-pollination with tools such as DNA markers and AI-driven analysis, Westfalia is fast-tracking a process that once took decades. The focus is on selecting superior traits, from improved flavour and texture to larger fruit size and resistance to pests and disease.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UP“We might one day create novel types such as those with vibrant skin colours, unique and distinctive flavours, very large sized varieties; the possibilities are almost endless, creating choice for customers and consumers,” said Matthew Churchill, Global Brand Manager at Westfalia Fruit.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
Rice is perhaps the world’s most important foodstuff — it feeds more than half the global population. But it is also one of the most climate-damaging crops.
Rice is usually grown in waterlogged paddy fields, which creates oxygen-starved soils that release methane — a greenhouse gas that is far more potent than carbon dioxide.
Techniques and technologies exist to change this, if farmers and governments can work together.
…
Methane from rice comes largely from the way it is grown — flooding paddy fields cuts off oxygen from the soil, creating the anaerobic conditions in which microbes thrive and release methane. The longer a field is submerged, the more methane builds up.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPOne technique, alternate wetting and drying, tries to break that cycle. The water level is allowed to drop 15cm below ground level before it is topped up, measured using a perforated tube inserted into the field. Allowing the soil to dry periodically reintroduces oxygen, disrupting the methane-producing microbes. This can reduce water use by about a third and lower methane emissions by 30-70 per cent without significant losses in the rice yielded ….
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
For years, Kenyan farmers have been complaining of expensive and poor quality livestock feed that is eating into their profits.
They say the feed weakens livestock, reducing milk production from animals.
The Association of Kenya Feeds Manufacturers (Akefema) said the low supply of raw materials have contributed to the high cost of feed.
…
Prices of maize and soybeans, key feed ingredients, have been rising over the years and increased by 30 per cent just last year alone.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPChairperson Joseph Karuri said the challenges are worsened by erratic weather patterns in different parts of the country.
“The result of all these challenges is unaffordable feed and loss of livelihoods that have affected the national food security,” he said.
…
He said most food secure countries that have a competitive livestock sector have embrace GMO maize and soya bean meals in production of feed.
…
But locally, production of GMOs has been affected by misinformation.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
A new review paper by researchers at Bayer Crop Science, titled Beautiful and delicious mutants: The origins, fates, and benefits of molecular sequence variation in plant evolution and breeding, explains how genetic mutations in plants are not just accidents of nature – they are the foundation of agriculture itself.Published in the scientific journal Plant Physiology, the paper argues that plant mutations — whether spontaneous or engineered — are at the heart of food security and agricultural innovation.
From chance to choice
For most of human history, crop genetic improvement has relied on luck. A farmer might notice a barley plant with larger seeds or a tomato with fewer cracks and save those seeds for the next season. Without realising it, they were harnessing mutations — random DNA changes that happened to produce useful traits.
Each generation of plant has natural mutations in its DNA which help to drive the processes of evolution and natural selection. Some of these changes will make the plant more or less successful in its environment, but humans have been able to harness this to benefit the development of agriculture. Over thousands of years, this slow process of selection and human intervention helped transform bitter wild almonds into sweet ones, sprawling teosinte grasses into compact, high-yielding maize plants, and tough wild apples into crisp dessert varieties.
But chance alone could only take us so far – it is slow and unpredictable. In the mid-20th century, scientists began deliberately inducing mutations with radiation and chemicals, hoping to accelerate the discovery of beneficial traits. This “mutation breeding” produced thousands of new crop varieties, from malting barley and high-yielding rice to colourful chrysanthemums. These ‘mutant’ varieties remain staples in our diets and gardens today.
In the Bayer paper, the authors emphasise that these older methods of inducing mutations are not fundamentally different from natural ones — the DNA changes are physically indistinguishable. The only difference is whether they occurred by chance or by human design.
Genome editing: evolution with a scalpel
The most recent chapter in this evolving story is genome editing. Tools like CRISPR allow scientists to introduce mutations at specific locations in a plant’s genome, rather than waiting for chance or using radiation. Imagine being able to edit an almond so that only its kernels lose bitterness, while its roots still produce natural protective compounds against insects. Or designing rice that can thrive in salty soils without sacrificing yield.
The paper argues that genome editing is, in many ways, just a more precise continuation of what farmers and breeders have always done: generating genetic diversity and then selecting useful traits. But unlike earlier methods, genome editing is much more precise – which saves time and reduces wasted effort by improving the chances of success in modern plant breeding programmes.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe beauty of variation
One of the most compelling aspects of the paper is the way it reframes the mutations delivered by plant breeders over the years as sources of beauty and diversity. Consider:
- Polyploidy — the doubling (or even tripling) of entire genomes — has given us plump seedless watermelons, modern octoploid strawberries which stem from natural 18th century hybridisation, and the fluffy ornamental cockscomb flower. Though technically “errors” in cell division, these mutations are agricultural treasures;
- Structural changes like inversions or translocations have shaped crop qualities ranging from the colour of wine grapes to disease resistance in wheat;
- Tiny DNA changes can have massive consequences: a single base-pair swap made almonds safe to eat, while another created carrots rich in vitamin A.
Even transposable elements — so-called “jumping genes” once dismissed as genomic parasites — have sparked major agricultural shifts, including the transformation of maize from a many-branched wild grass into the single-stalk architecture found in modern cornfields, whose global production today exceeds 1 billion tonnes.
These stories remind us that our food system is built on centuries of accumulated mutations, selected and refined by both natural forces and human intervention.
The perception problem
But if mutations are so central to agriculture, why do they carry such a negative reputation? The paper notes that in popular culture, “mutants” are usually monsters, and in medicine, mutations are often linked to cancer or genetic disorders. Rarely do we hear about mutations as the reason we enjoy juicy peaches or seedless bananas.
This perception gap matters. Genome editing, despite producing the same types of DNA changes found in nature, is often regulated and debated as though it were fundamentally different. A CRISPR-edited tomato with enhanced nutrition may face more regulatory hurdles than a variety created decades ago by exposing seeds to radiation — even though both contain mutations of the same kind. This is why in plants genome editing is usually referred to as precision breeding. It allows a breeder to do something they could try to do with traditional techniques, but more precisely, and with far fewer of the unplanned mutations which come with every generation of conventional breeding methods.
The paper suggests that our focus should shift from how a mutation arose to what it does. Does it make food safer, more nutritious, or more resilient to climate change? If so, does the process by which that change occurred really matter?
Mutations for a changing world
As the global population grows and the climate becomes more unpredictable, the stakes of crop improvement are rising. Plant breeders need access to tools that can help them develop crop varieties to withstand drought, resist pests, and thrive in a range of soil type and conditions, all while satisfying consumer preferences for taste, nutrition, and shelf life.
Random mutation, whether natural or induced, will always play a role. But targeted genome editing allows us to guide the process more deliberately. Instead of hoping for a beneficial mutation to arise, we can recreate known combinations of genes in new crop varieties or even design entirely new traits.
The challenges of feeding a growing global population and doing so more sustainably are vast and traditional plant breeding is a time-consuming process of incremental improvement. Genome editing reduces the time it takes to develop new, better, and more sustainable varieties of crops.
Importantly, the authors also stress that no single approach is sufficient. Genome editing complements — rather than replaces — existing practices of conventional breeding, germplasm conservation, and farmer knowledge. The goal is not to abandon this diversity of methods, but to expand the toolbox available to tackle agriculture’s greatest challenges.
Beyond the lab: ethics and equity
While the paper focuses mainly on the science of mutations, it hints at broader questions. Who decides which mutations are desirable? How do we ensure that genome editing benefits smallholder farmers as well as large-scale agriculture? And how do we balance innovation with the preservation of traditional crops and farming practices?
These are not just technical questions but cultural and ethical ones. Food is deeply tied to identity, tradition, and trust. If mutations are the raw material of agriculture, society must decide how to use them responsibly.
But it is vitally important that those decisions, and the public conversation surrounding then, are based on a solid understanding of how these newer forms of breeding relate to the spontaneous and human-induced mutations which have underpinned the development of agriculture and food production for thousands of years.
A celebration of mutants
The review paper is, at its heart, a call to rethink how we view mutations. Far from being aberrations, they are the sparks of novelty that have given us the diversity of crops we depend on. Every mouthful of bread, fruit, or vegetable is, in some sense, a celebration of mutants — beautiful, delicious, and essential.
If history is any guide, the crops of the future – and with it our ability to feed a growing population in the face of a changing climate – will continue to be shaped by both chance and choice, by a combination of natural variation and human ingenuity.
Dr Anthony Hopkins joined the British Society of Plant Breeders (BSPB) as head of policy in January 2024. He was previously chief crops adviser at the National Farmers’ Union. Find Anthony on LinkedIn
A version of this article was originally posted at Science for Sustainable Agriculture and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. Find Science for Sustainable Agriculture on X @SciSustAg
Studying the effects of coffee is particularly challenging. Isolating for a beverage with over 1000 compounds is so tricky that all studies tend to be population effect studies or literary reviews.
Improvements in isolation techniques have, however, helped scientists dive deeper into the ways certain coffee compounds are affected by the way we prepare our coffee ….
Kim Y, eta al (2019) show coffee consumed at the rate of 3 to 4 cups (80-100mg of caffeine each) daily does reduce all-cause mortality …. Meta-analyses and literature reviews show that coffee consumption benefits the full range of cardiovascular health, cognitive disorders, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, inflammation, cancer, and heart disease.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPTo gain the benefits of coffee-drinking, how it is roasted and brewed are more important than whether you’re using organic or conventional beans. … Using a medium roast and brewing it for three minutes is the most effective way to extract its beneficial compounds.
…
All-day coffee drinkers experience fewer health benefits than morning drinkers, possibly because they are more likely to ingest more than the recommended four cups a day.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here