Food & Agriculture Features Archives - Genetic Literacy Project: Recent Episodes
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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
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
Public health relies on data – whether it is tracking the effectiveness of a given year’s flu vaccine, monitoring blood lead levels around the country or estimating the prevalence of diabetes. This data forms the basis for decisions such as whether a community should expand screening for diabetes and which communities are at greatest risk of severe flu-related illnesses.
But in January 2025, at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, webpages and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – and from many other federal agencies – began to disappear. In total, at least 200 CDC datasets and more than 8,000 webpages from across the government were taken down.
Though many of these resources were subsequently restored in the months that followed, the speed and scale of the removals make a full accounting difficult. Even now, more than a year after so much data from federal agencies was removed, researchers like me are discovering new mechanisms through which this same data remains at risk.
Most recently, for example, more than 6,000 webpages on energy conservation were removed from federal websites while a heat wave ravaged the U.S. through Fourth of July celebrations.
I am an infectious disease epidemiologist who studies how respiratory pathogens affect communities around the world and how data is used to monitors these impacts. Every day, health departments, practitioners and researchers have to make decisions on where to direct resources, which conditions to monitor and even which research questions to prioritize. Without high-quality data to support them, these decisions run the risk of becoming mere guesses.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPInterruptions in data collectionCollecting data, in partnership with state, tribal and local public health experts, is among the most important functions of the CDC. In fact, nearly 80% of the the agency’s funding goes toward these collaborations to produce critical data that the entire public health system rests on.
A January 2026 study highlighted a troubling trend that began in early 2025. Among CDC data that had previously been updated monthly, nearly half – 46% – had unexplained pauses in such updates.
The vast majority of these pauses – about 90% – are related to data on vaccinations or impacts of common respiratory viruses, such as influenza, COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. Considering the outsize roll these pathogens play in driving severe respiratory illnesses, such as pneumonia, these pauses are alarming.
It’s not just respiratory disease data that is affected. The CDC also suspended updates for data on HIV incidence and prevalence, as well as on whether a person knows they’re infected. The agency’s website previously cited staffing reductions as the cause.
It’s unclear which of these datasets have resumed collection. Some data, such as estimates of HIV incidence and prevalence, had still not been updated as of July 6, 2026, though a banner on the webpage states that “CDC is updating these data.” And other data, such as that on emergency department visits for respiratory diseases, appears to have been updated again.
However, the lack of clear statements from the CDC on the status of different data sources makes it difficult to monitor where they stand.
The CDC partners with state, tribal and local public health experts to collect a wide range of health-related data. Courtney Hale/E+ via Getty ImagesData loss via staff cutsWidespread staff cuts starting in early 2025 across the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the CDC, crippled much of the agency’s data collection and dissemination.
Some of the agency’s data is publicly accessible. But to access some particularly sensitive CDC datasets, researchers must also apply and go through a vetting process. If federal workers who do that vetting are terminated, the data effectively becomes inaccessible.
That’s what happened in the case of the Pregnancy Risk Assessment and Monitoring System, the gold standard data source on maternal and child health in the U.S. In January 2025, the CDC quietly stopped processing data access requests. Then, months later, on April 1, the team that oversaw this program was terminated.
Pregnancy Risk Assessment and Monitoring System data from before 2016 remains available, but the only way researchers can access data from 2016 onward is to submit individual requests to the 46 participating states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico or the Northern Mariana Islands. This is an enormous burden for both researchers looking to work with this data and for the state, local and territorial health departments, which may be ill-equipped to process these requests.
Without staff to maintain and manage data collections, those collections can become inaccessible.
Later in 2025 the administration conducted more targeted terminations in offices tasked with planning future data collections. In October 2025 two critical teams were fired: one in charge of planning the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which has collected key health and nutrition metrics continuously since 1999, and the other in charge of managing the National Death Index, which compiles death record information.
The nutrition database, much of which is publicly accessible, informs policies and decision-making related to food labeling, dietary guidelines and many other topics. The death index, access to which is highly regulated, is a crucial resource for health and medical researchers for studying causes of death.
Though staff terminations relating to both these CDC datasets were reversed within a few months, the prospect of losing access to already existing and yet-to-be-acquired data in these collections sent shock waves of concern through the public health research community.
Loss of trustFor the CDC to do its work of monitoring and protecting public health, it must build and maintain a great deal of trust, both with the people and communities providing personal health data and with the state and local health agencies often responsible for collecting it.
In my view, HHS’s removal and alteration of CDC data damages that trust. Concerns about the agency’s inappropriate access to and use of sensitive data are continuing to emerge. Health departments – as well as individuals – may hesitate to provide data to the CDC, or even seek essential health services, if they fear it will be shared in inappropriate ways without their consent.
Such data irregularities fit into a broader pattern of disrupting long-standing agency activities – for example, abruptly terminating grants to state and local health departments and disrupting health messaging on vaccines.
While the CDC and its staff continue to partner with state and local agencies to support public health in the U.S., these trends threaten to destroy hard-won trust that would be difficult to rebuild.
John Kubale is a Research Assistant Professor at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. His work includes exploring the social, biological, and environmental drivers of severe respiratory illness associated with pathogens like SARS-CoV-2, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza. Follow John 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 @ConversationUS
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
“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.
Long-debunked myths about organic farming and food safety are surging again on social media, fueled by selective studies and fear-driven algorithms. On this crossover episode of Talking Biotech and Facts & Fallacies, Cam English is joined by geneticist and farmer Dr. Kevin Folta to explain why these claims—e.g., switching to organic food reduces disease risk—keep returning and why they harm consumers and farmers.
Even experts who should know better amplify these false narratives about organic food’s superiority, often chasing virality rather than sticking to the evidence. The result is a familiar cycle in which weak observational data and out-of-context abstracts are presented as proof that conventional produce carries serious downsides.
These messages gain traction because most people struggle to evaluate risk accurately. Air travel, for instance, terrifies many people—up to 40 percent of travelers experience some degree of flight anxiety—even though it remains one of the safest forms of transportation. Yet many of the same people drive to the airport without a second thought, despite the fact that driving is far riskier on a per-mile basis: recent U.S. data show roughly 177 times higher fatality risk for passenger vehicles than for commercial flights. Statistical safety, however, often fails to override the visceral sensation of sitting in an aluminum tube at 30,000 feet.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe same gap appears when consumers confront pesticide residues measured in parts per billion. The residues are real, yet they sit far below levels that regulatory science deems harmful. Organic production uses its own approved pesticides, some with higher toxicity profiles than modern synthetics, while both systems operate under strict residue limits designed to protect public health.
The practical consequences are clear. Myths shape shopping habits, prompting many households to pay premiums for organic labels that deliver no meaningful safety or nutritional advantage on pesticide exposure. That added cost falls hardest on families already stretched thin. At the same time, the messaging harms American farmers—particularly the contract growers and family operations who produce the bulk of conventional fruit and vegetables on razor-thin margins. When fear reduces demand for safe, nutritious produce, those farmers absorb the economic hit.
Clearer communication remains the most effective response: placing residues in proper context, distinguishing genuine hazards from trace exposures, and refusing to let long-settled science be displaced by viral anxiety. Join Kevin Folta and Cam English as they break down the resurgence of some of the most persistent food-safety myths.
Kevin M. Folta is a professor in the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida and host of the Talking Biotech podcast. Follow Professor Folta on X @kevinfolta
Cameron J. English is the executive vice president at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish
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
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
The sante-eNews Newsletter from 2 June 2026 announced another GMO decision. The title claims that the European “Commission authorises use of safe genetically modified crop as food and animal feed”. The reader was reassured that the decision was based on “a scientific assessment by the European Food Safety Authority, which concluded that the GM soybean is as safe as its non-GM counterpart.”
I did not get excited because, like Lucy pulling the football away at the last minute, I had been conditioned to expect what came next. “The Commission’s decision only allows this GM crop to be imported for use in food and animal feed, but not to be cultivated in the EU.”
Since 2001, this pantomime has been played out on a regular basis. Companies comply with all stringent EU regulatory requirements. EFSA declares that the GM seed is safe. Approval is then sent to the European Council where the inevitable statement is then copy-pasted into Commission press releases, as was the case in June:
“The authorisation is valid for 10 years, and any product produced from this GM crop will be subject to the EU’s labelling and traceability rules. The Commission had a legal obligation to decide on this authorisation after Member States did not reach a qualified majority either in favour or against this decision.”
As the European Commission will be sued for failure to comply with global trade obligations, we get the ridiculous situation where EU farmers can’t enjoy the sustainability and yield benefits of growing GM plants that are then imported into the EU. For 25 years, the madness of this poisoned process has been allowed to continue, tainting the European Union’s claim to regulatory legitimacy. Twenty-five years is long enough. The old generation of anti-GMO fearmongers have moved on and it is time for the European Commission to take responsibility for this broken legislation and revise the 2001 GMO Directive.
Harmonise the Regulatory ProcessThe recent passing of the New Genomic Techniques (NGT) regulation has finally aligned the European rules with the global seed research regulatory approach. The NGT regulation evaluates the product (the seed traits) rather than the process (how the seed was developed). The European GMO Directive only examines the research process without consideration of the product.
It may be argued that the two-tiered approach of the NGT regulation was a fair compromise between long-warring stakeholders. If it can be shown that a seed innovation has no modification with any foreign material — if the seed could have been bred naturally or through conventional breeding — then it falls under the NGT-1 classification and requires no stringent regulatory process or labelling. If, however, there is a genetic modification, then, as NGT-2, the seed falls under the requirements of the existing GMO Directive.
But can these two regulatory frameworks coexist, or will the European seed approval process fall back into the relentless gamesmanship that has marred Europe’s ability, for decades, to enable farmers to benefit from the best agricultural technologies?
The most important question has yet to be tested. How will the European Union determine if a seed innovation can be classified as an NGT-1 and avoid falling under the more restrictive GMO Directive?
The seed research institution will file a dossier with one Member State competent authority for an NGT-1 classification. The Member State will then submit the request to EFSA for scientific analysis and approval. The dossier will then proceed to the Council for a vote on whether the seed can be excluded from the GMO Directive.
In other words, little will likely change.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPOld Conflicts in New BottlesThe NGO community was quiet during the final approval process of the NGT regulation. Only several die-hard activist MEPs submitted amendments and there was no real fight to integrate them into the final legislation. Did they give up or just move camp to the next battlefield? It appears these battles will be fought on an ad hoc basis with greater focus and intensity on the hot-button biotech issues.
Many of the gene-edited solutions will provide enormous benefits with no risks (eg, leading to reduced pesticide or fertiliser use, drought resistance or reduced spoilage). Rather than risk negative public reaction or regulator frustration, the anti-GMO NGOs would just stand to the side as the innovations would be “fast-tracked” to the farm. But where NGT innovations would challenge organic farming (eg, providing pesticide resistance or increasing yields), that would mark a line in the sand where the campaigns to block these seeds from the simpler regulatory system would intensify at the Member State level to block any qualified majority. In reality, I fear only the most clear-cut innovations will pass through the NGT-1 regulatory structure.
It is imperative then that the 2001 GMO Directive be revised to provide a more cohesive regulatory framework for seed innovations. The out-dated directive should not be used as some purgatory for approvals held up by ad hoc activist campaigns. The revision needs to harmonise the regulations on a product focus and abandon the failed process-oriented distraction. Only then can European farmers and consumers enjoy the same benefits as most of the rest of the world.
How many more times will researchers, regulators and industry try to kick the ball knowing that Lucy is still up to her old tricks?
David Zaruk is a Seed World columnist, editor of Firebreak, 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 Seed World 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 Seed World on X @SeedWorldEU
Mass tort litigation grows like weeds. Last week, the Supreme Court created the ultimate lawsuit-killer by rejecting state court claims that conflict with federal statutes.
A Litigation Boom Over RoundupImage: ACSHThe Roundup litigation craze has fed roughly 100,000 plaintiffs and their lawyers over $11 billion in settlements and verdicts since claims surrounding the world’s most widely used and highly profitable weed-killer first surfaced. It all began seven years ago with a California jury awarding a $289 million verdict against the manufacturer, Monsanto, and its parent company, Bayer. The plaintiffs suffered their share of defeats as Monsanto’s lawyers became more skillful in exposing the flaws in the causation claims presented by the plaintiffs. Some 65,000 Roundup claims remain, motivating the plaintiffs’ bar to troll for more clients, especially those claiming Roundup exposure caused their Non-Hodgkins Leukemia (NHL).
But no more. Last week, the plaintiff’s litigation tsunami crashed with a monumental Supreme Court ruling.
“There are still other claims against Monsanto that do not involve a warning. But there is no way to spin this. This is awful news.”
– Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Ronald v. Miller Jr.
A primer on the litigation trajectory and defense strategy can be found here. In short, rather than proving a lack of causation on a case-by-case basis (i.e., that Roundup doesn’t cause cancer, the prevailing scientific view embraced by most scientists, governmental agencies, and public health departments around the world), Bayer/Monsanto presented its conundrum to the Supreme Court on legal grounds. They argued that the warning sought by plaintiffs was not only scientifically flawed but also illegal under the statute governing pesticide regulation, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).
The Case Behind the RulingThe case concerns John Durnell, who brought a “failure-to-warn suit” under state common law against Monsanto for failing to include a cancer warning on Roundup’s label, which he claims caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). Durnell’s lawyers relied on a “problematic” report from IARC, a World Health Organization agency, which classified Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, as a “probable carcinogen.”
Borrowing from similar legislation governing drugs and medical device regulation [1], which preempts certain lawsuits brought under state common-law tort claims, Monsanto/Bayer claimed that compliance with FIFRA preempts state court failure-to-warn cases, thereby preventing the addition of the sought-after warning, and noted that the EPA and most international health agencies dispute the IARC report.
Why the Label Could Not Simply Be ChangedSeven of the Supremes agreed. Their reasoning was multifaceted.
- The Act requires that all pesticides be registered with the EPA. To do so, the EPA must approve the pesticide’s label, determining that it contains all warnings “necessary and… adequate to protect health and the environment…” and does not include false or misleading statements. After the EPA approves the label, manufacturers are legally required to use it as is. Any changes (including adding the warning the plaintiffs demanded) would be illegal, and the manufacturer might face liability for misbranding.
- FIFRA defines “protect health and the environment” to mean “protection against any unreasonable adverse effects on the environment,” including “any unreasonable risk to man or the environment, taking into account the economic, social, and environmental costs and benefits of the use of any pesticide.” [2]
- The statute’s purpose is to promote uniformity by conferring on the EPA comprehensive and exclusive authority to register pesticides and approve labels. Allowing each state to impose its own warning requirements would frustrate this objective and thus preempts state failure-to-warn claims because “FIFRA prohibits states from imposing any requirements for labeling or packaging in addition to or different from those required under FIFRA.”
As a result, this requirement prevents the placement of the warning that the plaintiff sought. The majority ruled that “as a matter of federal law, Monsanto must use a label without a cancer warning unless and until the EPA approves or requires a change.”
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe EPA’s Role Was the Point, Not the ProblemThe court painstakingly noted the extensive review and evaluation the EPA conducts before approving labels, both generally and for Roundup, to ensure that labels do not omit a necessary warning. The court also noted the “slew of tools” the EPA possesses to monitor subsequent scientific developments and determine whether and when to require additional warnings, including the power to suspend or cancel registration “to prevent an imminent hazard.”
Moreover, the opinion recounts the EPA’s history of evaluating glyphosate-based pesticides, beginning in 1974, when it first approved a label without a cancer warning. Again in 1991 and repeatedly in the more than three decades since, we learn that the EPA has “repeatedly re-evaluated glyphosate and has repeatedly concluded that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer.” Even following the IARC classification of glyphosate as a probable carcinogen in 2017 and 2019, the EPA re-evaluated the issue “but still adhered to its longstanding position on glyphosate,” and reiterated its position in a 2020 interim registration review. Noting that “EPA’s assessment is shared by many other regulatory bodies around the world that have likewise concluded that glyphosate is not carcinogenic…,” the majority ruled that “as a matter of federal law, Monsanto legally must use a label without a cancer warning unless and until EPA approves or requires a change.”
The Dissent’s Unlikely Duo Writing that the majority relied on a medical device case under FDA law and disregarded a Supreme Court precedent on FIFRA, the dissent vigorously objects to the decision. Authored by the ultra-liberal Justice Ketanji Jackson and joined by arch-conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, the dissent reads, to me, like an apology to the plaintiffs’ bar.
Justice Jackson laments that the decision deprives Mr. Durnell of a remedy for his claim. One wonders whether Justice Jackson forgot first-year law school, where students learn that remedies are available only to address wrongs. Since the majority clearly ruled that no wrong was committed, no remedy exists.
Next, Justice Jackson proposes a solution for the conundrum faced by Bayer/Monsanto. Given they could not augment the label with a cancer warning without running afoul of federal law, she asserts the company could have chosen not to market the product at all.
Uniform Labels, Uniform MarketsThe dissent’s two-dimensionality also fails to account for the policy rationale behind the legislation. FIFRA specifically emphasizes the importance of uniform rulings, a clearly business-based rationale. Different requirements across states create commercial obstacles and uncertainties that would frustrate business development and insurance planning, which underlie the uniformity requirement.
The EPA is charged not only with balancing product development with human health and environmental safety, but also with the product’s overall economics. This additional consideration requires the agency to weigh the agricultural, nutritional, and environmental risks and benefits of glyphosate pesticides, which enable greater cultivation and food production at lower cost.
Further, not only did the majority rule that Monsanto/Bayer had no alternative but to comply with FIFRA’s directive and omit a warning, but they also relied on the EPA’s determination that causality between the product and cancer is unproven and likely doesn’t exist, meaning a warning wasn’t necessary under any decision-making standard.
Hand Wringing over Chevron’s DemiseMany moons ago, much was written, tears were shed, and worry was wasted when the Supreme Court overruled the Chevron case, which held that deference was due to agencies making technical or scientific decisions, thereby vesting those decisions in judges without proper expertise or training. The fear was that we would have wacky judicial decisions on scientific matters.
Under the Loper Bright decision, which overturned Chevron, the court was free to re-evaluate for itself the scientific basis behind EPA’s decision, i.e., that glyphosate was not a likely human carcinogen, and no cancer warning was needed. They didn’t. Indeed, they proudly touted EPA expertise and diligence in rendering its ruling.
The decision is more than a victory for Monsanto. It reaffirms that federal statutory decisions grounded in science cannot be circumvented by artful lawyers invoking favored-state tort law and junk science. It appears that the Roundup litigation boom and the thousands of similar claims that have sprung up may finally have met their weed killer.
[1] The FDA’s Medical Device Amendment of 1976 is nearly identical to FIFRA’s preemption clause.
[2] While changes are permitted to account for new information, any changes must be approved prior to their inclusion.
Dr. Barbara Pfeffer Billauer, JD, MA (Occ. Health) Ph.D, is Professor of Law and Bioethics in the International Program in Bioethics of the University of Porto and Research Professor of Scientific Statecraft at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC.
A version of this article was originally posted at American Council on Science and Health and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and the original article. Find ACSH on X @ACSHorg
On 17 June 2026, the European Parliament adopted new rules on plants obtained by certain new genomic techniques (NGTs), including the famous genetic scissors CRISPR-Cas9, and the food and feed made from these plants. This is the most radical change in the regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the EU in the last three decades, starting in 1988 when the European Commission tabled its first proposal to regulate GMOs. Depending on the number and type of modifications of a plant’s genome, the new rules exempt certain NGT plants and their products from investment-choking GMO rules under Directive 2001/18 (NGT1) and lower the risk assessment requirements for certain other NGT plants (NGT2).
In the ongoing geopolitical biotech brawl, it is not just EU policymakers and the legislature who must catch up with technological progress by adopting new rules, but also European consumers who now need to adjust their risk perception of genetic modification or will be nudged to do so. Certain NGOs, as well as the organic sector opposed to GMOs, may now consider questioning the new legislation or any delegated acts adopted under it, particularly as regards whether a high level of protection of human health and the environment has been maintained, where the GMO requirements on risk assessment, traceability and post-market monitoring are effectively removed for plants and products developed using the new techniques. However, the path for this change has been paved long before, with decades of longitudinal data and experience gained in environmental and human health risk assessments concerning conventional genetic modification, and no new hazards have been identified.
Biases Facing Sustainability BenefitsIn fact, not only has scientific evidence overwhelmingly shown that NGTs have been regulated more heavily under the existing GMO rules than their scientific risk profiles justified, but research has also shown how the regulation is biased against new techniques. On the latter point, it is difficult to explain in any other way why conventional plant breeding or conventional techniques of genetic modification, such as ionising radiation, have not been subject to the same authorisation requirements as NGTs, despite not being technologically superior in terms of safety. One may dispute how the EU came to stretch the doctrinal logic of applying the precautionary principle to the point of undervaluing new information on evolving technologies, idealising full scientific certainty and ignoring trade-offs and foregone benefits. All of this put the question of GMOs out of the European consumers’ minds. As the Commission’s Food Safety Eurobarometer found out, very few consumers in the EU are actually afraid of GMOs – an outcome not surprising, given that European consumers almost never encounter authorised GMO products on their plates. Be it the forever-lingering trauma of a series of food crises in the 1990s or the expert confirmation bias following GMO scientific controversies in the public eye, the tide has gradually turned: policymakers have changed narratives and started to frame questions about the consumer acceptability of NGTs in different terms, namely, in terms of benefits for sustainability.
A Conservative ChangeEU policymakers have shown receptiveness to the warning that falling behind in the platformisation of gene-editing technology in the age of AI would cost the EU its future direly. At the point, when the law is too slow to respond to technological change, the line between law and technology may snap, and a technological disruption may bring about a change in legal path dependencies. However, only to a degree. Following the 2021 Commission’s study on NGTs, the Commission’s proposal went head-to-head with the political resistance to technological change brought by genome editing. In response, the Commission’s proposal was rather conservative: after all, authorisation will be avoided only if the NGT1 plant is altered by no more than 20 base pairs and does not include the trait of pesticide resistance or the production of a known insecticidal substance. In practice, for example, whenever genetic engineers insert or substitute nucleotide bases of DNA, which form complementary pairs (adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), thymine (T), and uracil (U)) at no more than three gene modification sites of a gene sequence that encodes a protein, they act like conventional breeders and escape authorisation.
Additionally, other techniques are considered equivalent to conventional breeding, such as inserting contiguous DNA from the breeder’s gene pool. It is yet unclear whether genetic engineers could produce one plant in this way, which would be considered an NGT1 type, and then modify the plant a second time and categorise the new plant again as an NGT1 type. The Commission is empowered to increase or decrease the maximum allowed number and the types of genetic modifications based on new scientific evidence, but the distinctions already rest on a thin scientific basis. The Commission can also adopt delegated acts to remove references to prohibited traits for the NGT1 type or to add new traits to the list.
For some, the extent to which NGTs may be used to modify plants without undergoing authorisation is perceived as too risky; for others, the extent is too limited to attract meaningful research and investment.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPChanging Risk Perception Under Framing ForcesConsumer research and some limited experiments with citizen deliberation have demonstrated that even if the lowering of a level of protection is only perceived, consumers consider at least three ethical imperatives shaping their risk acceptance: the imperative that the freedom of choice is not compromised, that life itself becomes not one’s property and that benefits are not only mentioned but rightly communicated and seen. These three imperatives have translated largely into technical debates in the trilogue.
The first debate concerned traceability and labelling. In the citizen jury on NGTs convened as an experiment by researchers from the University of Bayreuth in 2024, labelling was the most divisive issue among participants and provoked deep ethical resentment. In the end, a consensus was reached on a policy recommendation to list NGTs separately from GMOs on ingredient lists. However, with NGTs, the ethical dilemma and consumer preferences become a technical problem. The regulatory bias created not only tougher regulations but also resulted in NGTs falling into a de facto regulatory limbo – a factual impossibility of receiving authorisation. The GMO rules were drafted for the reality of transgenic GMOs with foreign DNA and prescribe detection, identification, and quantification (DIQ) methods for the genetic change along the authorisation dossier for placing on the market and deliberate release. For NGTs, the most challenging, if not impossible, is the identification method attributing a genomic change to a specific modification event, i.e., distinguishing between spontaneous mutation and deliberate technical intervention, such as using conventional breeding techniques or CRISPR-Cas9 scissors. The adopted NGT regulation introduces an important change regarding the requirement to provide DIQ methods: it exempts NGT1 plants from this requirement, while for NGT2 plants, it allows citing technical unfeasibility to avoid submitting DIQ methods. As a result, NGT plants and their products will likely be untraceable by analytical methods, and products will not require specific labelling, since only seeds will need to be labelled as NGT. Without technically robust traceability, labelling of credence attributes will unlikely be effectively enforced, particularly in global supply chains where EU trading partners do not impose similar traceability requirements.
The consumer may ask why not invest more in developing DIQ methods and delay relaxing or eliminating the authorisation requirements until such methods are available. Why not, for example, sequence large numbers of samples from each lot of seeds sold to farmers and build a gigantic database of DNA sequences that could help determine whether a given plant has been modified using NGTs and therefore requires labelling? Apart from the uncertainty, cost and practical impossibility of such an endeavour, it may never produce scientifically relevant results. Mutations occur continuously in plant genomes, and no parent and offspring are genetically identical. Such all-encompassing traceability would also affect conventionally bred plants and those modified through conventional genetic modification techniques. The task of identifying NGT plants appears, for now, impossible to achieve, even if one would follow raw laymen’s imaginaries. Economists also suggest that if consumers were confronted with the true cost of satisfying their ethical preferences, they would often be unwilling to pay. Research further indicates that such labels may affect consumers’ purchasing decisions when their preferences are revealed through market behaviour in the short run, but that effect also depends on the design of the label. It also suggests that when products are placed on the market without distinguishable labelling, consumer acceptance is not significantly shaped by GMO origin as a credence attribute. Given these economic and scientific constraints, technological change and the corresponding adjustment in consumer behaviour appear inevitable.
Patents and Access to BenefitsAs regards patenting, the adopted legislative text confirmed the possibility of seeking patents for NGT plants under the existing system of protection. That system comprises the protection of rights and exceptions therefrom (breeders’ exemption, farmers’ privilege), which are regulated at the international level (e.g., the UPOV Convention; the European Patent Convention) and at the EU level, with relevance to biotechnological inventions (Directive 98/44/EC). For example, traits or sequences produced naturally or by essentially biological means (crossing or selection) have been excluded from patentability since 2017 under the Guidelines for Examination at the European Patent Office (Part G – Chapter II-40).
Citizens have been particularly sensitive around the question of who owns the biotechnology and how the ownership will be licensed or enforced, particularly vis-à-vis small farmers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In the Schloss Thurnau citizen jury, for example, the jury demanded a no-patent policy regarding NGTs and an open-source-like approach with utmost transparency. In the first reading, the European Parliament also introduced amendments to exclude patent protection for NGT plants. The question of patent protection became the most hotly debated issue in the legislative process, with the Council spending considerable time resolving the deadlock. The change came only with the Danish presidency, which managed to broker the deal that accepted the patentability of NGT plants as an important component for investment-inducing rules, following several assurances from the Commission. After the trilogue, the legislative text mandated the Commission to monitor the market with regard to patenting practices and their impacts, including the exclusion of SMEs. The Commission will assess the functioning of the licensing platforms, whether they provide transparency on patents and enable SMEs to license under fair and reasonable conditions. The Commission will draft a code of conduct and ensure that SMEs have access to support and guidance on plant-related patent matters. The Commission is also bound to fulfil its reporting duties by submitting a report on the implementation and impact of the NGT regulation (an obligation which the Commission did not fulfil in relation to Directive 2001/18) and a report on the functioning of the code of conduct. Although the law is unlikely to change in the future, the Commission will prospectively examine whether legislative change or soft-law clarification is needed regarding patentability criteria for inventions relating to plant genetic information, the concept of essentially biological processes, and the conditions for compulsory cross-licensing. However, limitations on any prospective change stem from the international obligations of the EU and its Member States regarding the protection of intellectual property rights.
The third debate focuses on the benefits of NGTs and their applications. A considerable number of applications are in development pipelines and promise superior crops in terms of their sustainability impacts. For example, there are cisgenic potatoes resistant to late blight and cisgenic apples resistant to scab, which result in a substantial reduction in fungicide treatments. For crops mostly cultivated outside the EU, NGTs are used to develop bananas to slow down their browning or to prevent Panama disease in rice. The data used in the impact assessment point out that European consumers are now more willing to accept the technology. Some studies have shown that if consumers are aware of the benefits of GMOs or NGTs, their willingness to buy increases. On that note, the new rules encourage voluntary labelling that emphasises the sustainability traits of such products. In the Schloss Thurnau citizen jury, it was recommended that governments strongly support projects at schools and educational institutions to educate about NGTs/GMOs. Recent research has shown that consumers are eager to learn more about NGTs in an unbiased, well-communicated way and to understand their benefits, but extrapolating sustainability consequences from labels of single traits may be difficult for consumers. Perhaps an inspiration in this regard may be found in specific provisions of other legal acts, such as the EU AI Act’s provisions on AI literacy. Biotech literacy could offer a new way of thinking about how to shape future debates over the regulation of biotechnological inventions.
Technological Promise and InevitabilityIn 1992, the Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs wrote to the European Commission in response to its GMO directive proposal that if it turns out that – for specific categories of products – there is no need for an extended assessment, then a more rapid procedure can be agreed on at a future date. However, before this can happen, experience with assessments needs to be gathered. That day came today. From an investment perspective, it remains to be seen whether the limit on the number of genetic modifications permitted for NGT1 plants will be sufficient to provide a meaningful incentive to invest. From a consumer perspective, NGT-derived products are expected to reach the market eventually, whether in five or fifteen years, depending on the development timelines of individual products. From a market perspective, following a two-year implementation period, greater diversification of plant varieties and products can be expected, as cultivation and placing of NGT products on the market will no longer be subject to prohibitively high regulatory costs. Technology has matured, but the risk perception that shaped a high level of protection has not kept pace with the leap it has made. Technological progress has outpaced that perception and eventually made the technology inevitable.
Alexandra Molitorisová is a researcher and lecturer at the Chair of Food Law at the University of Bayreuth, within the German Research Foundation (DFG) project Innovate Food Law. Find Alexandra on LinkedIn
Aleksandra Hubar-Kołodziejczyk is a PhD candidate at the Chair of Food Law at the University of Bayreuth, as part of the Horizon Europe DETECTIVE project. Find Aleksandra on LinkedIn
A version of this article was originally posted at Verfassungsblog and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and original article.
Organic food marketing, vaccine denialism, cancer pseudoscience, climate denial, wellness culture, and conspiracy theories may look different, but they’re all built on the same strategy. More importantly, they’re supported by the same organizations, influencers, and commercial interests that profit from spreading disinformation.
Slide from Andrea Love’s 2026 CSICon Talk “Sanitizing Snake Oil Harms Public Health”I used three case studies to illustrate the central theme of my talk: that anti-science and health misinformation follows the same playbook.
First, create fear.
Your food is toxic.
Chemotherapy is poison.
Vaccines contain toxins.
Then undermine trust.
Doctors won’t tell you.
Scientists are captured.
Regulators are compromised.
Next, sell an identity.
You’re asking questions.
You know your body.
You’ve discovered what “they” don’t want you to know.
Then, sell the product.
The supplement.
The detox protocol.
The organic food.
The expensive health test.
The alternative cancer ‘treatment’.
Finally, borrow credibility from perceived experts and trusted institutions. The final step is the least often challenged, but arguably the most damaging, because this is where fringe ideas stop looking fringe and become normalized.
At the center of this is what I call institutional laundering. It’s when medical professional organizations repeat, endorse, and amplify the false marketing premises of anti-science movements. Those ideas gain legitimacy they never earned—not because the evidence changed, but because these messengers give them credibility. The consequence is that institutions whose primary responsibility is to protect public health inadvertently become vehicles for misinformation.
One of the more egregious examples is the American Academy of Pediatrics amplifying anti-GMO and organic product misinformation through its official policies and patient-facing guidance.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe AAP’s policy acknowledges that organic foods don’t provide any clinically meaningful health benefits, yet encourages parents to choose organic foods to “reduce pesticide exposure.” This reinforces the organic industry’s central marketing narrative: that pesticide residues on conventionally grown produce pose a meaningful health risk. They do not. That claim is not supported by toxicology, exposure science, or clinical evidence.
The organic farming and food industry is based on clean-food ideology, chemophobia, and the fantasy that “natural” is a scientific argument. It is born from the same wellness industry that sells detoxes, “clean” eating, supplements, and anti-chemical fearmongering, wrapped in conspiracy-lined distrust of scientific institutions and regulation.
Instead of encouraging the roughly 90% of Americans who don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables to eat more produce—regardless of how it’s grown—the AAP reinforces unfounded fears about pesticide residues. The result is backward: we discourage consumption of safe, affordable produce instead of addressing the real public health problem: that people aren’t eating enough fruits and vegetables.
More concerning is the AAP’s patient-facing information about foods containing genetically engineered (GMO) ingredients. Despite overwhelming scientific consensus and the positions of the FDA, EPA, USDA, the National Academies, the World Health Organization, and virtually every scientific body that has evaluated the evidence, the AAP tells parents that “some GMO foods may pose health risks.” It doesn’t say they do. It says they may. That single sentence manufactures uncertainty where the scientific evidence provides none.
Healthy Children explainer on GMOsLet me be unequivocal: there is no credible evidence that foods containing ingredients from approved genetically engineered crops pose a health risk to consumers. None. Suggesting otherwise creates uncertainty where the evidence doesn’t support it. Genetically engineered crops have enabled farming practices that reduce pesticide use while improving crop productivity.
And yet, the leading pediatric medical professional organization in the US has decided to ignore the scientific consensus (pediatricians are not experts in agriculture, molecular biology, toxicology, etc) and foment fear among parents.
The factual, science-based message should be: Organic is a marketing designation, not a health claim. It reinforces health inequity and chemophobia. It doesn’t improve health outcomes, is not pesticide-free, and is not a badge of scientific literacy. We should be encouraging people to eat more produce, not scaring them away from more affordable (and absolutely safe) options.
The multi-billion dollar organic product industry doesn’t simply encourage people to buy a different kind of produce. It tells the public that natural is inherently safer than synthetic and that modern agricultural science cannot be trusted. When organizations like the Environmental Working Group (EWG), Moms Across America, and Children’s Health Defense convince trusted messengers to repeat their marketing narratives, misinformation becomes far easier to normalize.
The pattern doesn’t stop with the AAP. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has directed patients to Environmental Working Group resources and described organic food as being “grown without pesticides”—a statement that is simply false. It also promotes chemophobic messaging about “reducing toxic exposures” during pregnancy—a population the wellness industry aggressively targets. ACOG has an opportunity to educate patients about real risk during pregnancy. Instead, it reinforces narratives that ignore the basic principles of toxicology and risk assessment.
ACOG’s Guidance for PregnancyThese organizations aren’t fringe. They’re leading medical professional organizations that create clinical treatment guidelines and should be educating the public. That’s why this matters.
Pseudoscience doesn’t become mainstream because evidence to support it improves. It becomes mainstream because respected institutions repeat, soften, or legitimize marketing narratives without applying the same evidentiary standards they do in other areas of science and medicine. Once that happens, the public doesn’t perceive those ideas as marketing or advocacy. They view them as medical guidance.
When a wellness influencer questions GMOs, most people recognize they’re hearing an opinion. When one of the most trusted pediatric organizations in the world suggests that genetically engineered foods “may pose health risks,” that statement carries institutional weight. It doesn’t reflect uncertainty—it creates it.
More importantly, scientists become less able to recommend these organizations as trusted sources of health information. This is one of the reasons institutional laundering is so harmful. When organizations like the AAP get vaccines right—and they overwhelmingly do—but simultaneously promote unsupported narratives about organic food or genetically engineered crops, they undermine their own credibility. We shouldn’t have to tell the public, “Trust the AAP on vaccines, but ignore what they say about GMOs.” Credibility doesn’t work that way.
This is how unsupported ideas become respectable. Not because the evidence changed. Because the messenger did.
But this is also the step too many scientists, health professionals, science communicators, and journalists overlook. Misinformation becomes mainstream when trusted institutions soften the distinction between evidence and speculation:
“Buy organic if you can afford it.”
“There’s no harm in trying.”
“More research is needed.”
“Everyone should decide for themselves.”
These statements might come from a place of empathy, diplomacy, or a desire to respect autonomy. But communication research shows us that when experts present unequal evidence as though both sides deserve equal weight, the public doesn’t hear nuance. They hear uncertainty. And uncertainty is where pseudoscience propagates.
Dr. Andrea Love, a microbiologist and immunologist, provides the facts (and the data!) on science and health topics. Follow Andrea on X @dr_andrealove
A version of this article was posted at Immunologic 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.
642 separate Bioengineered (aka, GM/GMO, recombinant DNA) events, of 42 traits, in 32 different crops or plants have received regulatory approval in one or more countries, according to the ISAAA GM approval database (https://www.isaaa.org). 225 of these events have also been approved in the US, most in the important agricultural crops of maize, soy, cotton, canola and potato. However, an Excel file from USDA Biotechnology Regulatory Services (BRS) of requests for field trial permits of bioengineered events, from April 1985 thru February 2023, has 54,905 entries. Although many of the requests were repeats or were for gene components, it is striking that, since first commercialized in 1996 (30 years ago), with unprecedented acceptance by growers, so few events and traits have been commercialized in the US.
Much of the reason cited for so few trait event approvals and commercialization is the high cost of the regulatory approval process, and based on my experience in international regulatory and government affairs, this is true. But another significant reason, especially for small market, fresh use crops is public acceptance. I am developing a program I call “Gene Gleaning”, which proposes to identify genes and gene components that have been cloned but not commercialized, or have only been commercialized in world market crops, e.g., maize, soy, cotton. The cost of regulatory approvals for small or single market crops is significantly less because international approvals may not be needed, and if already approved in the US, approval of the same gene in another crop is easier and less expensive. Consortia of universities, small and/or larger companies, possibly with regulatory consultants, could be put together to sublicense, as needed (the patents on many are expired), to re-clone and/or transform gene constructs into new crops.
This article proposes a project that highlights the benefits of such a program and also addresses an issue that many universities are now facing, including my alma mater, the University of Minnesota (UMN): financial support for research. UMN’s apple breeding program had developed the Honeycrisp apple, arguably, the most popular fresh market apple in the US; but the Honeycrisp, as well other apples, must be sprayed with insecticides for most of the growing season and are an annual entry the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) Dirty Dozen list. But not all these sprays should be needed. Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) genes, providing insect protection against all 3 major apple insect pests, have been cloned, and 2 have already been approved and commercialized in other crops in the US, so – Why Not Bioengineered Honeycrisp Apple?
Main text:Figure 1, above, shows a beautiful looking apple. No blemishes from insect damage – as the grocery shopper would expect to be produced by the grower and offered for sale by the grocer. BUT do you know WHY there is no insect damage on this apple? It is because the apple grower sprayed it with insecticides from right after petal fall in spring until just before harvest in autumn.
As a scientist, who worked with EPA, USDA and FDA, as well as regulatory agencies worldwide, I feel comfortable that the insecticides used by apple growers are safe for human consumption when used as directed. However, it is not practically possible to completely prevent overspray of the insecticides used; thus, if there are nearby apple trees that are still flowering or there are other flowering plants nearby, insect pollinators, like bees and butterflies, including Monarchs, may be killed. Additionally, any beneficial insects, like parasitoid wasps and mites, on the apple trees may be killed.
Figure 2: Activity and Phenology of Common Pests and Diseases of Apple in MN, from Integrated Pest Management Manual for MN Apple Orchards, MN DoA, September 2007.Figure 2 shows the activity of common insect pests and diseases of apples in Minnesota (MN). It indicates the extent of pesticide spraying needed to deal with insects and diseases. Although it lists a number of insect pest, there are three that cause the great majority of apple damage over the growing season. These are codling moth, a lepidopteran, plum curculio, a coleopteran, and apple maggot, a dipteran.
Figure 3: Codling moth larvae on an apple with feeding damage.Figure 3 shows a codling moth larvae on an apple with feeding damage. Preventing this damage requires insecticide spraying right after petal drop and throughout the season. (In Figure 2, see colored bars after Codling moth-Adult and Codling moth-Larva.)
Figure 4: From left, a plum curculio adult beetle; middle, ovipositor damage by female beetle on newly forming apples; right, healing scars from ovipositor damage on later season fruit.Figure 4 shows, from left, a plum curculio adult beetle; middle, ovipositor damage by female beetle on newly forming apples; right, healing scars from ovipositor damage on later season fruit. The apple flesh would show brown tunneling damage from feeding beetle larvae. Preventing plum curculio damage also requires spraying insecticides early and throughout the growing season. (In Figure 2, see colored bar after Plum curculio-Adult.)
Figure 5. Apple maggot damage on late season apples.Figure 5 shows apple maggot damage on late season apples. Preventing apple maggot damage requires spraying, from mid through late season. (In Figure 2, see colored bar after Apple maggot-Adult.)
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPDiscussion:I have worked as a plant molecular biologist (BS, PhD, NSF-Postdoc, UMN) for over 30 years. For the last half of my career, I worked in regulatory affairs (Sandoz/Syngenta, Monsanto) and had obtained US regulatory approvals for Syngenta’s BT11 insect protected maize, which used a Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) gene to prevent damage from lepidopteran insects (moths, like codling moth, and butterflies). The Bt gene product, a protein, is order specific and attacks insect species in that insect order. For BT11 maize, the primary target was the lepidopteran, European Corn Borer, Ostrinia nubilalis. There is another Bt gene that attacks coleopterans (beetles, like plum curculio), and another Bt gene that attacks dipterans (flies, like apple maggot). The Bt protein is very safe. In fact, cultures of the Bt bacteria are an approved pesticide for use on organic crops; however, like synthetic insecticide use, overspray is still a concern, and any nearby insects of the same order may be killed, e.g., Monarch butterflies are also a lepidopteran.
Bt genes for all three of these insect orders that attack apples have already been cloned, and two of the genes, for lepidopterans and coleopterans, have already been approved for use in other plants, e.g., BT11 in insect protected maize; thus, their regulatory approvals would be quick and of minimal cost. Note also that the other, less serious, insect pests – fruitworm, leafroller, apple worm and fruit moth (see Figure 2) – are also lepidopterans and could be controlled with the same Bt gene used for codling moth.
I have discussed developing bioengineered insect protected apples with university apple breeders. A commonly expressed concern is “public acceptance”. But universities, often a state’s most elite public education institution, have an obligation to teach their students, and the public, the best, most complete science about bioengineering, and change what is an incorrect public perception of this very valuable, and safe, technology. Additionally, Bt insect protected apples could save growers the costs of the insecticides as well as the labor costs to spray them, and probably be responsible for removing apples from EWG’s Dirty Dozen list.
Having read this, if any of you know, or have an opportunity to interact with, your state’s apple breeders, or, for that matter, the breeders of any fruit with insect problems during production, ask them about what I have written here, and if they would support the development of Bt apples? I would be interested in knowing how they respond and why.
An Additional note: The EWG’s annual Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen lists were published recently. The Dirty Dozen, again, includes apples. Also of note, is that all 12 have no bioengineered varieties of significance sold in the US. However, of the Clean 15, two have significant bioengineered varieties in the US – Bt sweet corn, at #2, and virus resistant papaya, at #4!
Bill Pilacinski, PhD, is a plant molecular biologist and Principal Consultant on issues related to conventional and more modern agriculture at WP Consulting, LLC. Find Bill on LinkedIn
A version of this article was originally posted on LinkedIn 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.
Eat real food. It’s the closest thing American alternative food politics has to a creed, and for the better part of two decades it belonged to the left. To eat real food was to opt out of industrial agriculture, to refuse the long ingredient list and the seed oils and the corn-fed beef, and in doing so, to register a quiet protest against the system that produced them. It was, we were told, a progressive politics—an alliance of small farmers, conscientious eaters, and environmentalists against the depredations of Big Ag.
That coalition is gone, but the phrase is not. Today “real food” is the rallying cry of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, repeated by Calley and Casey Means, endorsed by RFK Jr., and dispensed on Instagram by suburban moms warning each other about Froot Loops and Doritos. The vocabulary has barely changed—wholesome, clean, natural, traditional, ingredients your grandmother would recognize—but the political reality is far from the same.
Into this altered reality, Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg released Feed The People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make it Better, a book-length appeal to the alternative food movement to reconsider their long-running critiques of industrial agriculture. But, while Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg provide a useful new lens to understand the values of industrial food production, they stop short of defending the food system as a whole. Industrial food is good, they proffer, except for the meat and dairy products that remain fundamental to the American farm economy and diets.
While it is abundantly clear that animal agriculture has problems—high emissions compared to other foods, staggering land and water use, and, of course, animal welfare concerns—a defense of industrial food production that does not include industrial meat and dairy production raises a question. If technologically advanced, large-scale, highly capitalized modes of production provide the solutions to the problems caused by agriculture in general, why would these systems not also provide the solutions to the problems caused by animal agriculture in particular?
Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg likely wrote most of Feed the People before the sudden rise of MAHA, which is distinct from foodie environmentalism mostly in its zeal for animal-based protein. That makes their book’s inconsistencies when it comes to meat production all the more glaring. Offering a tractable alternative to anti-industrial foodie politics requires now, more than ever, an embrace of the efficiencies, innovation, and regulatory leverage available only through factory farms.
Who’s Opposed to Industrial Food?Make no mistake, Feed the People is an important book. In it, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg lay out a strong argument for a different approach to the food debate. Their “democratic hedonism” thesis, defined as “an approach to politics that sees moral value in the simple pleasures that people experience in their daily lives” (18), represents a humanist opposition to the ascetic and judgmental moralizing of alternative foodies who preach organic, farm-to-table, and wholesome.
There are, as Feed the People demonstrates, pleasures inherent to the industrial food system. According to Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg, those pleasures—whether from a late-night Waffle House run or a bodega egg sandwich—ought to be defended, and made accessible to all in a fashion that reduces their harm. But the accessibility of those pleasures depends on the large-scale, hyper-efficient food production systems that critics label as “industrial.”
Through this framework, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg lay out the absurdities of the various arguments against industrial food production. The “family farm” of foodie nostalgia accounts for a vanishingly small share of American agriculture, and the farmers markets that have proliferated in its name feed a narrow, largely affluent slice of the country. A system built on small, local producers simply cannot move enough calories at low enough prices to deliver the pleasures the authors defend. The point is not that we should reluctantly accept fast food and processed snacks as inferior substitutes for “real” or “slow” food; it is that virtually all of our food—fresh broccoli no less than Hostess Cup Cakes —is a product of the industrial food system in the first place.
In this effort, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg are doing real, important work. The myths proffered by the likes of Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, still hold sway over a large swath of the ostensibly progressive population. Debunking the progressive foodie narrative from a progressive, justice-oriented perspective is crucial to reframing the question of the future of food and agriculture for the American left.
But, while anti-industrial faux-progressivism did indeed dominate foodie politics for decades, the movement that Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg have targeted has already lost its influence. Berry, Pollan, and Waters are still wrong, but the energetic core of the anti-industrial food movement has completely migrated right-ward. And so too has the underlying debate.
Progressives can read this migration two ways. The flattering reading is that the food movement has been hijacked. The more correct reading is that food politics was never really progressive in the first place. It was a politics of purity and disgust dressed in progressive clothes, and the clothes have finally come off. MAHA, the manosphere foodies, and the suburban mom alternative eaters did not pervert the once liberal and righteous food movement—they unmasked its immanent conservatism. But, more than anything, the MAHA movement completely changed the food discourse.
As recently as 2024, the debate over industrial food was an intra-progressive argument with broadly shared premises. Everyone at the table—vegans, effective altruists, environmentalists, alternative foodies, food justice folks—agreed that factory farms were bad, that the modern American diet contained too much meat, and that the future, whatever it looked like, would involve eating further down the food chain. The disagreements were about scale, technology, and means: lentils versus cell-cultured beef, smaller dairies or ranches versus veganism. How to solve the “meat problem” was hotly debated, but almost everyone in the alternative food movement agreed it was a problem.
MAHA has rearranged that table. While MAHA glorifies the small, regenerative farmers, few MAHA voices go so far as to directly criticize or target large-scale animal agriculture in their screeds. And, there is little to no acceptance of the idea that eating meat is somehow bad for people, or the environment, let alone, the animals themselves. Instead, MAHA has reshaped American food politics around something a bit harder to quantify: health and nutrition.
No longer made up of coastal-progressives, the anti-industrial food coalition is now a more politically potent alliance of wellness influencers, anti-vaccine activists, libertarian homesteaders, and suburban parents who believe the food system is poisoning their children. Far from agreeing that meat is a fundamental problem that must be solved, many of the MAHA-inflected anti-industrial foodies laud meat—especially beef—and dairy products as the key to American health.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe Meat ProblemThe meat question remains the sub-text underlying most debates around food. This is true for Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg. While Feed the People aims to defend industrial food production, it is assuredly not defending all industrial food production.
As longtime advocates for alternative proteins, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg made their position on meat eating and production abundantly clear long before they published Feed the People. In venues like The New Republic, Wired, and Vox, the two published many pieces criticizing the meat industry and promoting its alternatives. It’s not surprising, then, that Feed the People, even after defending the varied pleasures of industrial food, provides a critique of both industrial meat production and the bogus claims of regenerative ranching, and other smaller-scale, more “farm-to-table” approaches to animal rearing.
In Feed the People, Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg are explicit that everyone should eat far less meat. They advocate for increasing taxes on meat that would help internalize the external costs of its production, and they promote improved alternative meat sources that would serve as a replacement for industrially produced meats. While they suggest that a “eat less meat, stupid” policy proposal amounts to “meat austerity,” they equate eating meat to “other bad pleasures you may also be loath to lose—booze, risky sex, dangerous sports, gambling” (93). For example, their vision for a healthy, industrial food future would include Waffle House branches with “mycelium-based steak and Impossible burgers for the patty melts,” and no red meat thanks to “improvements to animal-welfare laws and the implementation of carbon taxes on agriculture” (229).
But, meat is simply too popular, and too ubiquitous to actually replace anytime soon with alternatives. While alternative proteins like plant-based and cell-cultured meat may eat into some meat consumption, there is little evidence that it can displace even a small portion of the animal agriculture industry. Unfortunately for its critics, industrial meat production is the only way to produce enough meat and dairy products without accelerating the deforestation of wild lands or driving up food prices. Intensive and confined operations have lower emissions, use less land, and have the potential to improve welfare at a better rate than their organic, regenerative, and extensive alternatives.
Replacing industrially-produced meat and dairy with non-industrially produced meat and dairy would significantly increase land use for agriculture, raise emissions, force the conversion of wild lands into pasture, and increase the price of food. This is not the reality that Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg want—they are especially critical of the regenerative gurus who promise to replace bad factory farms with pastures and grass-fed livestock operations.
Meating the MomentAnd, perhaps more importantly, by criticizing meat production in total, Feed the People cedes the debate to the newly coalesced anti-industrial MAHA foodies. Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg essentially defend industrial food, except for the part of industrial food that is most central to the modern American plate.
For the vast majority of MAHA, meat and dairy products are central to nutrition and health. They advocate for beef tallow instead of seed oils, organ meats instead of vegetables, and ground beef and eggs instead of grains. With few exceptions, much of the cultural and political energy of the new anti-industrial food movement relies on the idea that animal products are vastly healthier than the fibers, sugars, and carbohydrates that purportedly drive inflammation, weight gain, mental disrepair, and all manner of physiological and psychological maladies.
Defending industrial agriculture means defending it against this movement, and convincing at least some of its constituents that industrial agriculture is not the problem. In 2026, that means acknowledging the carnivorous shift in American foodie identity, and attempting to channel that energy towards the most efficient forms of meat and dairy production. MAHA leaders like RFK Jr., Joel Salatin, and the like, may rage against health threats from factory farms, CAFOs, and large-scale dairies, but, for most, industrial animal agriculture is the only source of affordable meat and dairy. Centering a defense of industrial food around an overarching anti-meat politics simply is a non-starter for the vast majority of Americans, and lets the most radical anti-industrial fringe of MAHA control the debate over the future of American food and farming.
Some anti-meat activists and researchers seem to have tacitly understood this dilemma. For example, Coefficient Giving’s Lewis Bollard has, for years, advocated for marginal improvements to animal welfare standards in industrial agriculture. This approach may not save the millions of animals being born and bred to slaughter, but feasible steps to make their lives even just slightly better trump infeasible pathways to end factory farming. This was the central philosophy behind California’s 2018 passage of Proposition 12 to limit extreme confinement of hogs and chicken in gestation crates.
Since passing by referendum, Proposition 12 has been the target of failed lawsuits and campaigns, mainly from the meat industry. Most recently, this opposition took the form of the Save Our Bacon Act, which sought to ban states from imposing animal welfare laws onto meat producers. That bill died in Congress, but was given new life—to the consternation of many—when Republican legislators added the bill text to the pending Farm Bill.
Whether or not Proposition 12 survives the upcoming Senate Farm Bill vote, the effort to ban gestation crates and marginally improve the welfare of the horde of animals going through factory farms demonstrates both opportunities for and limitations to anti-meat politics. While many Americans—and, apparently, the majority of California’s voters in 2018—are appalled by aspects of industrial meat production, few Americans—around 4%, according to Pew—are actually morally opposed to the act of eating meat. If industrial meat is here to stay—whether through incremental steps like banning gestation, or more radical pathways—the only way to improve these modes of production is to embrace them. This would be drawing “democratic hedonism” to its logical conclusion. This is especially the case since both the contemporary supporters and detractors of the industrial food system seem to only agree on one thing: the importance and centrality of meat.
The Future of Industrial Food Will Include MeatTo be fair to Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg, the rise of MAHA in American food politics happened fast. And the process of writing a book is slow. But while much of Feed the People could not have been written with MAHA in mind, there was little doubt in 2023 or early 2024 that the lodestar of food politics would always be meat.
Feed the People was a project born out of the Pollan-era of anti-industrial food discourse. It speaks to progressive values and finds common ground over things like climate, corporate power, and labor. That posture made sense when the opposition to industrial agriculture was a coalition of progressives who could potentially be persuaded by appeals to “democratizing” pleasures and the reality of environmental impacts. But, it does not make sense today, when that opposition has mutated into a populist movement that has successfully captured state power, rejects basic premises of agricultural science, and wants to dismantle the food system to try to, among other reasons, increase testosterone production in teens.
Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg set out in Feed the People to defend the industrial food system from its progressive critics, and they do so with creativity and empiricism. But, they can not bring themselves to defend the part of the system—meat and dairy—upon which most Americans’ food preferences actually hinge. In doing so, they fall victim to the same kind of moralizing that is central to the critique of industrial agriculture. While the moral center of food politics has shifted from Chez Panisse to the Joe Rogan Experience, the underlying feeling has not changed: disgust at how most people eat.
A defense of industrial food requires a defense of industrial meat and dairy—not as a guilty pleasure to be taxed and surreptitiously abolished, but as one of the greatest achievements of modernity. Industrial animal agriculture feeds hundreds of millions of people affordably and can, with reforms and improvements, be made better still. That is a hard book to write, especially when the authors firmly believe the opposite.
Alex Smith is the editorial director at Breakthrough Institute. Follow Alex on X @alexjmssmith
A version of this article was originally posted at The Ecomodernist by the Breakthrough Journal 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
Have you ever eaten a green potato, or a bunch of rhubarb leaves?
Hopefully not, because these two plant parts can be toxic to humans. While they may seem edible, they contain chemicals that can make you seriously ill.
Over centuries, humans have learnt which plants are safe to eat and which are not, often by combining ancient knowledge with modern science.
The power of plantsWithout plants, we would struggle to get the nutrients we need.
Crops such as wheat and rice provide carbohydrates, the body’s main source of energy. Fruits and vegetables contain a wide range of vitamins that help us stay healthy.
Plants are also chemical factories. To survive, they produce compounds that deter insects and animals that might eat them. They may also release chemicals that protect them from disease. One example is the tobacco plant which produces nicotine, a natural alkaloid that helps protect the plant from insect attacks.
Globally, there are tens of thousands of plants that contain toxic compounds. In Australia, we have more than 1,000 native and introduced plant species that can be toxic to humans and animals, under certain conditions. However, humans only consume a small fraction of the world’s edible plant species.
What makes a plant toxic?A key principle of toxicology – the study of what makes something poisonous – is “it’s the dose that makes the poison”. This means certain toxic compounds are safe to consume, as long as you don’t eat too much of them.
Table salt is one example. You likely eat it everyday, but this substance can be harmful in excessive amounts.
And many plant compounds that sound dangerous are actually safe, when consumed in small amounts. For instance, green potatoes contain glycoalkaloids, a group of chemicals that can cause symptoms such as vomiting, fever and diarrhea when consumed in large amounts. Oxalates are a type of toxin found in rhubarb leaves. They too can make you sick, but only if you eat lots of them.
Preparation is keyAt first, humans learnt which plants were nourishing and which were harmful through years of observation and experimentation. For instance, cassava was first domesticated in South America where Indigenous communities developed processing methods to remove cyanide, a poisonous chemical found in the plant’s roots and leaves.
Many other First Nations peoples developed sophisticated ways of preparing plants that contained toxins. Some Aboriginal communities in northern Australia would soak, grind or cook cycad seeds to remove naturally occurring toxins before consumption.
This knowledge soon became embedded in each community’s culture, as it was passed down through generations.
Today, we use various techniques to reduce or remove harmful compounds from plants. For example, raw or undercooked kidney beans contain a natural toxin called phytohaemagglutinin, which can cause illness. But by soaking and thoroughly boiling kidney beans, you can easily get rid of this toxin.
Fermentation is another way to remove poisonous chemicals from plants. This is because fermentation changes the plant’s chemistry in ways that can reduce or remove toxic compounds. For example, during soybean fermentation, microbes break down harmful compounds such as phytates and trypsin inhibitors, making the soybeans safer and easier to digest.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPThe role of modern scienceIn some cases, scientists have modified toxic plants to make them safe to eat.
Faba beans, also known as broad beans, are one example. Faba beans are an increasingly important crop for Australian farmers, as they can attract high prices and help manage weeds.
Like many plants, faba beans naturally contain vicine and convicine, two compounds that generally don’t affect humans. But in people with a genetic condition called G6PD deficiency, they can trigger a serious reaction called favism. This condition can be life-threatening as it causes your red blood cells to rapidly break down.
Rather than abandoning this crop, scientists have used modern chemistry and plant breeding to develop new faba bean varieties with lower concentrations of these compounds. And farmers are already planting low-vicine varieties as part of their crop rotations.
Over millenia, humans have unpacked the complex chemistry of plants to learn what is safe to eat. But how we consume these plants, and how much of them we eat, also affects how toxic they may be.
Joel Johnson is an emerging food chemistry researcher and PhD student at CQUniversity Australia. Find Joel on LinkedIn
Mani Naiker is an Associate Professor of Chemistry in the School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences at CQUniversity Australia. Find Mani 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 @ConversationUS****
The famous Orange Bowl may still host an annual New Year’s Day football game after 91 years in celebration of one of Florida’s most vital industries — but the appellation has become largely symbolic.
In May, Florida citrus growers are usually squeezing out the last late orange and grapefruit harvest of the year. It used to be a time that marks the celebration of another successful bounty. This year, as in recent years, it’s more like a wake. Instead of counting fruit, farmers are fretting over how many seasons they can survive their losing battle with citrus-greening disease as regulators ponder whether to approve the only solution that can save the once-booming industry from near-total collapse.
The numbers are brutal. At the 1997–98 peak, Florida groves produced about 244 million 90-pound boxes of oranges. USDA’s April 2026 forecast put Florida production at 12.2 million, with final Valencia fruit yield down 46 percent. Florida’s citrus industry is fighting for its life. And losing, as is evident from these charts~~:~~
Citrus greening crisisThe crisis is most visible in places like Vo-LaSalle Farms in Volusia County, where two converted 1970s school buses—once used as fruit-loader trucks—no longer lift crates of citrus. Steve Crump, a fourth-generation grower, has shifted away from semi-load wholesale sales toward direct retail, screenhouses, and whatever tools can buy his trees a little more time. Some of those tools help. None addresses the disease.
“ When we were done, I parked the fruit loader trucks, and I thought, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever need these again,’” said Crump. “Right now, they’re still sitting where I parked them five years ago. And there’s a tree growing between them.”
Huanglongbing — known popularly as HLB or citrus greening — has been devastating the industry for decades. HLB is spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, a tiny sap-sucking insect also called jumping plant lice. It attacks the tree’s vascular system, leaving fruit small, bitter, misshapen, green, and prone to dropping before harvest, eventually killing the plant. Hurricanes, freezes, and development have exacerbated the damage, but greening is the underlying reason for the catastrophe.
Traditional measures — pesticides, removal of infected trees, even protective screenhouses — have proven insufficient at scale. Growers can inject antibiotics, pull infected trees, cover orchards under screenhouses, or replant, but those are only stopgaps. There is no cure. For many growers, the only realistic path forward is to plant trees that can tolerate or resist the disease — citrus trees that can tolerate or resist HLB.
CRISPR rescue planThis is a story of devastation and economic urgency, but also, if the cards fall the right way, of hope and scientific ingenuity. Growers have endured hurricanes, shrinking acreage, and the slow death of millions of trees, but there are shoots of hope, a science-based rescue plan.
“What we need is a tree that’s resistant or tolerant to this disease, and I thought we would have it during my career.” Said Crump. “But that was 15 years ago, and I thought by now we’d already have it. So now I’m just trying to hold on, maybe for 10 more years until there is a tree that’s resistant,” he said.
A solution is as obvious as it is complicated. The state is planting more than 300,000 citrus trees developed using CRISPR gene-editing technologythrough its Citrus Research and Field Trial Foundation program. Researchers will monitor whether trees that look promising in test groves can perform under commercial pressures — heat, storms, psyllids, poor soils, labor costs, and thin margins.
Another possible breakthrough is moving through the pipeline. Soilcea, a Florida biotech company, has developed CarriCea T1, a CRISPR-edited Carrizo rootstock aimed at HLB resistance. The company says growers have placed orders totaling more than 300,000 units and that 200,000 trees are already in nursery production, while it works with the USDA and EPA on regulatory clearance.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPFlorida citrus déjà vu?Florida has been here before.Scientists have had a promising solution for years. More than a decade ago, Southern Gardens Citrus, a U.S. Sugar–linked Florida citrus company, backed a rescue strategy using a different biotechnology, transgenic “genetically modified organisms,” or GMOs. The government reviewed the proposal as a genetically engineered biological control agent, and the EPA later treated the technology as safe. Then it ran up against headwinds — not from science but politically. Environmental activists launched a public fear campaign — “Frankenstein” GMO oranges. “Bite some before it bites you!” was their antagonistic slogan.
Even though the evidence for safety and good nutrition is unassailable, public outcry and a regulatory maze slowed deployment. Some of that anti-technology hysteria has faded, and the Florida citrus industry now has a second chance. With CRISPR, gene-edited citrus appears poised to excise that stigma and the procedural burdens attached to transgenic crops.
That promising workaround should not obscure the larger issue. The earlier GMO tools were not reckless; they were promising, carefully reviewed technologies caught in a regulatory culture that judged the process more harshly than the product and its potential risk. From a scientific standpoint, what matters is not how a genetic change is made, but what new characteristics that change confers. A plant with a precisely targeted mutation produced by CRISPR may be functionally identical to one produced by older techniques of biotechnology — or even by conventional breeding. The method tells us little about the risk. That recognition has helped to lighten regulations in the U.S., Canada, and an increasing number of other countries.
Regulatory inconsistencyThat principle is hardly radical. FDA’s 2024 guidance for foods from genome-edited plants says its voluntary engagement process is based on the “objective characteristics” of the food, especially those related to food safety. EPA has also exempted certain “plant-incorporated protectants” created through biotechnology when they pose no greater risk than traits available through conventional breeding.
However, the courts have, in some cases, moved agricultural innovation backward. A federal court vacated regulatory reforms and restored the pre-2020 regulatory framework. That means that regulators are again operating under older rules even as citrus researchers try to deploy next-generation tools against a disease that has already erased most of the crop.
The regulatory problem is not simply delay. It is incoherence. A CRISPR-edited citrus tree that modifies a susceptibility gene may move through one pathway. A transgenic rootstock engineered for the same practical purpose — HLB resistance — may face a longer, more burdensome, and more uncertain process. Yet the safety question is not whether a researcher used CRISPR, older recombinant DNA methods, or years of conventional breeding. The question is whether the resulting plant poses a new risk to health, agriculture, or the environment.
The National Academies reached a similar conclusion in their review of genetically engineered crops, finding no substantiated evidence of a difference in human-health risk between currently commercialized GE (transgenic) crops and conventionally bred crops. That does not eliminate the need for evaluation, however. It argues for evaluation based on traits, exposure, and evidence rather than breeding method.
Consequences of delay, optimism about a rescueFor annual crops, regulatory delay is expensive. For citrus, it can be an existential threat. A tree planted today may need years before it bears substantial fruit. Every lost season affects nursery decisions, grove financing, processing capacity, and whether younger growers see a future in the business.
That future is already fragile. The University of Florida estimated that the citrus industry supported about 32,500 jobs and nearly $6.9 billion in output during the 2020–21 season. Those numbers reflect the status quo ante before the latest collapse in production. Each shuttered grove means lost workers, lost packing capacity, lost processing infrastructure, and lost knowledge — the practical know-how that cannot readily be recreated after growers leave.
Critics will argue that faster approval means weaker oversight. That is a false dichotomy. A science-based system can scrutinize traits that raise real questions while clearing low-risk innovations without years of procedural delay. It can require data where data are needed, provide transparency where public confidence matters, and speed where the evidence supports it.
The citrus crisis is now a live test of whether U.S. biotechnology regulation and innovation can keep pace with an agricultural emergency. On May 15, USDA opened a request for information asking for public input on how genetically modified organisms should be reviewed under the Plant Protection Act. Comments are due June 15.
One of the core questions is whether regulation should continue to distinguish sharply between conventional, genetically modified organisms, and gene-edited crops — or continue the evolution toward a more risk-based approach. That does not mean every gene-edited plant deserves a free pass. It means the relevant question should be what changed in the plant, how the plant behaves, and whether the trait creates a plausible risk.
By next May, some of the CRISPR-edited trees now being planted may be settling into commercial groves. They will not rescue the industry overnight. No single technology will. But disease-resistant or disease-tolerant citrus is the only plausible path back to scale, and to reviving the industry. Screenhouses, antibiotics, and emergency regulatory tweaks can buy time, but better trees can change the future.
Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Scholar at the Science Literacy Project. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Find Henry on his website: henrymillermd.org
In 2000, three researchers published a peer-reviewed paper concluding that, “under present and expected conditions of use,” Roundup, a formulation of the herbicide glyphosate, “does not pose a health risk to humans.” In the acknowledgments, the authors thanked scientists at Monsanto, the manufacturer of Roundup, for their “significant contributions” to the paper.
The paper went on to be cited hundreds of times in the scientific literature, including in influential government assessments of glyphosate safety. More recently, it’s become a flashpoint in debates over the herbicide.
Herbicide manufacturers — and some regulatory agencies — say glyphosate is safe for humans when used as directed. Its proponents also describe it as crucial for modern agriculture. Many scientists and advocates say there’s compelling evidence it causes cancers and other health harms, and they accuse corporate-backed scientists of systematically downplaying the risks of glyphosate.
In the past decade, that influential 2000 paper has become one piece of evidence in glyphosate critics’ case.
Christopher Borgert, a pharmacologist and consultant in Florida, organized a group of more than 60 toxic chemical and environmental health researchers to push back on the recent retraction of a glyphosate paper published in 2000. Credit: Christopher BorgertIn 2017, a lawsuit claiming that glyphosate causes cancer surfaced documents suggesting that Monsanto scientists had not just helped with the paper, but, as one law firm put it, “substantially drafted the manuscript.” (Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, wrote that Monsanto’s involvement “did not rise to the level of authorship” and “was appropriately disclosed.”)
The paper stayed in the scientific record. Scientists kept citing it. Then, last July, academics Alexander Kaurov and Naomi Oreskes wrote a journal article arguing that the 2000 paper should be retracted. Leaving it untouched, they wrote, “signals tolerance of corporate manipulation of the scientific record.”
The two expanded on that argument in a subsequent essay for Undark, and they formally requested that the journal retract the paper.
It seems to have worked. Last fall, a co-editor-in-chief of the journal where the paper published, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, retracted it, citing methodological concerns, in addition to concerns about ghostwriting and the financial independence of the authors.
Now a group of more than 60 toxic chemical and environmental health researchers have fired back, arguing in a soon-to-be-published editorial that the journal overstepped in retracting the paper. The scientific pretext for the retraction is thin, they argue, and the evidence that the paper was ghostwritten is not definitive. “Absent substantive rebuttals based on scientific merit rather than speculative claims of inappropriate authorship and data access, this retraction decision sets a dangerous precedent for retroactive censorship,” they write.
The organizer of that response was Christopher Borgert, a pharmacologist and consultant in Florida who has worked with many corporate clients, including Monsanto and Bayer. Toxics research, he told Undark, is beset with another kind of conflict-of-interest: a system that rewards academic scientists when they identify harms from chemicals, incentivizing research that posits big risks on thin evidence. (Borgert posted the full editorial, which has been accepted at Archives of Toxicology, to his LinkedIn profile on April 17 ahead of official publication.)
This perspective is controversial in the field, to put it mildly. Borgert spoke with Undark over Zoom about ghostwriting, toxics research, and whether we’re all hopelessly beset with conflicts. This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPUndark: I want to start with a point of fact. Do you think that the 2000 paper was ghostwritten by Monsanto?
Christopher Borgert: I think that’s a question that that can only be answered with a lot of context.
The standards for what constitutes authorship have not remained static over time. In most fields of science, there was a time when it was not — I won’t say it was a standard practice, but it was not unusual, for example, to find department chairs who got their name on almost every paper that came out of their department.
UD: That’s someone getting their name on something they didn’t write. But I think the question is did someone not have their name on something they did write.
CB: I’m getting to that. That’s just an example of one extreme.
There’s a whole paragraph of disclosure listing Monsanto employees who assisted in the development of this manuscript. Now I wasn’t in the room, and I don’t know exactly how that paper came about, but just rhetorically, if we could know exactly how that paper was produced, might there be an argument that those Monsanto scientists should have moved up to the author line instead of just being disclosed? That’s possible.
But you know, EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority, looked at this very issue and said even if it was ghostwritten, it didn’t affect our evaluation because there’s been 20 years of science since then that basically has found substantially similar results. But more importantly, they said no reviewer at EFSA was confused as to the relationship between those who were the authors on the paper and the support that Monsanto provided.
You can make a judgment call, should they have been authors? And there are other papers where you say, yeah, these people maybe shouldn’t have been authors, because they just, they did technical work. It could be a difference in judgment. But that’s not a serious ethical concern.
UD: I’ll read a chunk of that fine print at the bottom of the paper: “We thank the toxicologists and other scientists at Monsanto who made significant contributions to the development of exposure assessments and through many other discussions.” The disclosure notes that Monsanto shared data, and it names “key personnel at Monsanto who provided scientific support.” I’m curious, if you took that to a typical reader, would they understand that as meaning that potentially large portions of the report were written by Monsanto staff?
CB: Well, first of all, if you mean your typical reader as a scientist —
UD: There are examples of scientists citing the paper without discussing this connection. And I would say glyphosate research is consumed by the broader public. It comes up in lots of different contexts. I’m imagining trying to explain this to someone who’s not a scientist, who’s saying, “You know, it could seem like there is a difference between ‘made significant contributions’ and potentially wrote large portions of a paper.”
CB: I can’t say because I don’t know. Those who know [paper author Gary Williams] well chuckle at the idea that someone could put words in his mouth in one of his publications. He was not the type of individual who would allow a publication to go forward that he didn’t consider to be his words.
If someone drafted sections of that manuscript describing the studies that were done, etc., etc, that doesn’t — there are only so many ways to describe that. Reading that disclosure, that wouldn’t tell me that those folks didn’t provide draft summaries of all those studies. Having been in many of the roles that I’ve been in, I would expect that. I would expect that the authors — Williams, Kroes, and Munro — were provided all sorts of written summaries of the studies that were composed by Monsanto employees.
The standards for disclosing the roles of various people have changed. Now it’s gotten very specific, and for some journals, they want to know who drafted the paper, all of these more intricate rules. But I don’t think that would necessarily constitute ghostwriting.
The idea that these three authors somehow were not the authors, did not own those interpretations for themselves, I think is a tremendous stretch.
UD: There’s an email from one of the Monsanto staffers who’s named in this 2000 paper as a discussion partner, writing to a colleague, who was also involved in the paper, that “we would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing, and they would just edit & sign their names, so to speak. Recall, this is how we handled Williams, Kroes and Munro 2000.” Would that level of involvement — if indeed that is what happened — constitute an ethical breach for you?
CB: I don’t know — If what’s described there is actually what happened —
UD: If it was, we did the writing and they would edit and sign their names —
CB: So that’s all they did, is sign the name — now, if it were the Monsanto people that were disclosed in that disclosure, I would not say that’s ghostwriting. I would say what that is — even standards at that time, they probably should have been authors. But they’ve acknowledged the contributions. Is that ghostwriting? I wouldn’t ever write a paper that way. I write my own stuff.
I think that interpretation is basically claiming to know exactly what the writer of that email meant by ghostwriting and placing a certain interpretation on it. I’m not sure you can place that interpretation on it.
UD: There’s a perception, fairly or not, that companies have an interest in minimizing the appearance of involvement, because something looks more credible to the broader public when it comes from, say, professors at a university, as opposed to people who have a very clear and obvious vested financial stake, no matter what their motives. And there’s something about that that can seem a little underhanded.
CB: I understand the argument, and that whole line of reasoning has been carefully crafted over decades.
UD: How so?
CB: Who does not have a financial conflict of interest in what they do?
UD: So this is an argument that we all have stakes in certain outcomes, and our livelihoods are all on the line?
CB: Let me read to you the disclosure that’s in our paper.
UD: Yes, I noticed it. It’s very interesting. [The disclosure notes, in part, that “the authors frankly admit, as should all scientists, that they have myriad potential conflicts of interest rooted in professional, ideological, philosophical, political, financial, sociological, interpersonal, and religious influences that motivate their engagement on all activities and issues.”]
CB: Well, it’s honest. Because most people in Western society — there are a variety of ways to make a living. I would venture to guess that most people are driven not by who writes the check, but by many of those other things that we put in our disclosure.
UD: There’s an argument that universities, public institutions, have some — imperfectly lived out, but still real — sense that they serve the public good, and there’s an openness to publishing a range of possible outcomes, because that is their ultimate interest. As opposed to companies that are fundamentally required to fulfill a bottom line, so there’s a constraint on the kinds of outcomes that are going to be published, or the kinds of outcomes that they’re going to find.
CB: I think you’re living in a pretend world.
UD: How so?
CB: To characterize academic research the way you did, that it’s the variety of interpretations that can be made, etc. etc., is an illusion.
There isn’t an even-handed incentive structure.
Our incentive structure is to report things that haven’t been reported before. That’s how you get a publication, and certainly, to get a grant, you’re not going to get much traction reporting that you did this elaborate, comprehensive study and found nothing.
If you want to succeed as an academician, which means getting papers and getting grants and keeping your graduate students and postdocs funded. You can’t do that. I’m not an academic primarily, but I talk to people who have had marvelously successful academic careers in toxicology, who will tell you exactly what I just told you.
UD: Do you think that glyphosate, at the kind of levels of exposure experienced by farm workers and consumers, is harmful to human health?
CB: Can’t answer the question.
UD: Why not?
CB: I’m sorry. It’s just because I don’t keep track of everything. And it’s too burgeoning a literature for me to keep track of as an amusement.
I don’t see that rigorous evaluation has come to the conclusion that there’s human harm, or even the potential for human harm, but I haven’t looked into it myself, so it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to weigh in one way or another.
UD: One other question, the premise of which you may find annoying: Some of the authors of this comment, including you, have consulted for Monsanto in the past. Did that affect the way that the paper took shape in any way? Was Monsanto involved in pulling it together?
CB: No, Monsanto wasn’t involved. You’ll notice there are no Monsanto scientists on there. Now I work on industry groups that include some of Monsanto’s scientists. So I won’t say that I haven’t heard information about this, but they were scrupulously kept out of this.
Michael Schulson is a contributing editor for Undark. His work has also been published by Aeon, NPR, Pacific Standard, Scientific American, Slate, and Wired, among other publications. Find Michael on LinkedIn
A version of this article was originally posted at Undark 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. Undark can be found on Twitter @undarkmag
In the competitive food marketplace, fear-based marketing continues to be a go-to strategy for some food companies trying to differentiate their products from one another. Grocery stores today stock so many varieties of the same product that consumers must make a decision based on different factors like the lowest price available, if it’s made in the USA, or any other criteria that’s particularly important to them.
How did Stonyfield find themselves in such hot water?Dairy products are a commodity and it is difficult to distinguish one carton of milk from another – or one type of yogurt from another. Given their higher price point and the myriad of choices available to consumers, it’s no surprise that Stonyfield is trying to differentiate their products. So, the company turned to fear-based marketing tactics to help boost their sales.
In order to tap into the fear of conscious shoppers—mainly parents trying to make healthy food decisions for their families, Stonyfield brashly uses children to spread misinformation on GMOs.
Stonyfield has successfully pulled on our heartstrings by using a parent’s desire to protect their child by feeding them “safer” yogurt. And this is not the first time they have used children to deliver incorrect messages on food technology. Their “Kids Define” campaign also includes adorable children discussing rBST and pesticide use. The inference, then, is that other yogurt products are dangerous to your children because those “other” dairy farmers have used pesticides, hormones, and GMOs.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPOf course, we know that they are misrepresenting the facts. Organic crops use pesticides, they are just not synthetic pesticides. Their criticism of GMOs was related to the use of glyphosate, which has been deemed safe and non-toxic by the ESFA, WHO, FDA, USDA, and NAS. And just last week, D2D discussed how fear-based marketing and the spread of misinformation regarding rBST has almost completely eliminated the use of this technology in farming.
It is known that marketing strategies that appeal to emotion are the most likely to alter consumer behavior than straight scientific facts. There have been studies that demonstrate when consumers are under an MRI and deciding between different products, they will make the decision based on their emotion rather than the facts about the brand. Therefore, a consumer who has an emotional connection to a brand will be increasingly loyal. (Source: Psychology Today)
Mis-leading marketing tactics to improve market shareThe yogurt market is very competitive and the volume of yogurt purchased in the United States is on the decline. From 2016 to 2017, the volume of yogurt sales decreased by 1.7 billion pints (from 3.37 billion pints in 2016 to 1.67 billion pints in 2017). This decrease, coupled with the similarities between many yogurt products on the market, motivates companies to be more creative in their marketing strategy.
Source: StatistaMoreover, Stonyfield does not have a significant U.S. market share. They are among the least popular brands, having just marginally outsold Muller yogurt.
In response to a video, many mindful consumers began voicing their concerns and frustrations with the message that was being conveyed: “does believing in the science and technology behind GMOs make you a bad parent?”
In order to control their message, these carefully constructed, thought-provoking responses were subsequently deleted by the Stonyfield social media team.
You can visit AgDaily for more content from the “Banned by Stonyfield” social media group, but here is a snippet of their open letter to Stonyfield:
“This kind of marketing hurts us all. Fear-based food messages are negatively impacting the buying and eating habits of consumers, especially among the poorest demographics. It demonizes safe and beneficial technology — technology that allows farmers to grow more food on less land, using fewer resources and reduce the environmental impact of the agricultural sector. Marketing messages like yours work to take choices away from farmers and make consumers feel like they don’t have safe choices at the grocery stores.”
Not only did Stonyfield use children to misrepresent genetically modified technology by including harmful and inaccurate rhetoric like “monstrous” and “gene from a fish used in a tomato,” but they also refused to give the science a voice by deleting informative comments on their Facebook page. As the video received more and more visits from those on both sides of the issue, Stonyfield was provoked into responding with this message on their Facebook page, which has since been deleted.
“We do not believe that eating GMOs have been proven harmful to your health.”
Stonyfield’s response to the backlash they received from their anti-GMO video using children.
Dirt to Dinner collaborator Amanda Zaluckyj, The Farmer’s Daughter, tactfully addresses the many incorrect claims that were made about GMO technology by Stonyfield in this response. “Even though Stonyfield doesn’t believe eating GMOs is harmful, they are more than willing to keep manipulating children to scare people. They are willing to lie to their customers to move their product. They know full well being non-GMO does not make their product better in any way, yet they are more than happy to act like it does if it sells.”
Michelle Miller, The Farm Babe, also contributed to AgDaily, wrote this regarding the negative effect fear-based marketing has on science and developing helpful technology for farmers: “Ask any scientist or commercial farmer, everything we eat has had their genes modified by humans, and there are no commercially available GMO tomatoes, among many other crops. Scaring people about science is sad because our entire world revolves around scientific advancements to make it a better place. Sharing genes with something doesn’t make it weird or scary. In fact, humans share about 50 percent to 60 percent of the same DNA as a banana. Sound weird? That’s why STEM and science education are so important.”
And, to that end, as the D2D team has discussed in many posts, genetically modified foods are safe AND the most heavily tested and regulated in history.
Unfortunately, fear-based marketing exists because it works.Of course, this is not the first time fear-based marketing tactics have been used to sway consumer perception, particularly with respect to GMOs. In a 2016 campaign by Hunt’s tomatoes, the company claimed, “No matter how far afield you look, you won’t find a single genetically modified tomato among our vines.” Well…of course you won’t, because genetically modified tomatoes, although previously available, are no longer being commercially produced! Hunt’s chose to try and differentiate their products despite the fact that the claim isn’t even applicable.
D2D has frequently discussed the spread of misinformation through various marketing tactics. In our articles on the natural label, clean eating, GMOs, hormones in milk, and pesticide use we clarify the overuse and often abuse of these labels in order to make a product look more desirable. Most recently, Are there Hormones in Milk? examined the negative effects consumer marketing had on the rBST technology. We do not want to see what happened with the misunderstanding of rBST repeated with GMO technology. It so important for consumers to stay informed and question the marketing tactics employed by food companies. D2D asks that you ignore the marketing labels and pay attention to the nutritional label— 3oz of Stonyfield YoKids contains 13 grams of sugar!
The Bottom Line:Fear-based marketing campaigns are exactly how misinformation spreads and consumers are left in the dark. Fortunately, consumer backlash like this will make those who create disparaging advertisements think twice before misleading their consumers. So, Stonyfield—the next time a child in your video says, “I think it’s better we get informed of it before we eat it,” we ask that you do just that and present both sides of the story. Offer your potential and current customers unbiased and accurate information.
Caroline Cunnane is a regular contributor to Dirt to Dinner.
A version of this article was originally posted at Dirt To Dinner 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 Dirt To Dinner on X @Dirt_To_Dinner
When United States Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled new dietary guidelines earlier this year to “Make America Healthy Again,” they received a mixed response.
Some organizations, including the American Heart Association, welcomed the renewed emphasis on vegetables, fruits and whole grains. Others were concerned about the promotion of red meat and whole-fat dairy or accused Kennedy of spreading “blatant misinformation that ‘healthy fats’ include butter and beef tallow.”
The word “misinformation” has become very common in media and popular discourse, sometimes for good reasons, because the lies that the word encapsulates can undermine democracy, impair health and fuel violence.
As associate dean of AI strategy in the faculty of mathematics at the University of Waterloo, I know many are especially worried that AI could worsen the spread of misinformation.
Told @theguardian.com that for those who have lost loved ones, accountability risks being overshadowed by misinformation, suspicion and doubt. Imagine losing a child and then seeing AI used online to claim the event never happened.
— Chris Osieck (@chrisosieck.bsky.social) 2026-03-17T11:34:55.512Z
However, the word “misinformation” is also loaded. There seems to be a growing tendency for people to apply the label to just about anything that they may disagree with, rather than genuine lies.
As a professor of statistics, I think the inherent difficulty of assessing evidence may be partly to blame.
Is the die loaded?Statements like “there is no evidence that eating red meat is harmful” or “there is evidence that full-fat dairy is bad for your health” are not so easy to substantiate.
This is partially because it’s often hard — though not impossible with advanced statistical techniques — to isolate the effect of a particular habit from a myriad of other entangled factors, whether genetic or lifestyle, that also affect health. This is why many research studies merely point to an “association” or a “correlation” between food consumption and health effect.
But even in clear-cut cases where no such entanglement exists, assessing evidence is still surprisingly difficult. For instance, suppose a die was rolled seven times and it showed an odd outcome (numbers one, three or five) on six of these occasions. In principle, odd and even outcomes are supposed to be equally likely.
If you are playing a game and your opponent keeps throwing a coveted double six, does that mean your dice are loaded? (Getty/Unsplash+)Is the apparently skewed outcome evidence that the die may be loaded? Does this point to the possibility that someone may be cheating?
Using an evidential scale known as the p-value, one might argue “no,” since there is still a sizeable probability for a normal die to show an odd outcome from more than five of those seven rolls, so rolling six odd numbers is not as unexpected as it appears to be.
Using a different evidential scale known as the e-value, however, one could argue “yes,” since a die would be much more likely to show an odd outcome from six out of seven rolls if it were loaded than if it were not. So rolling six odd numbers is more consistent with the suspicion that the die may be loaded.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPScales of scientific evidenceDespite growing criticism, the p-value is still currently the most commonly used scale for judging scientific evidence. In other words, most scientists today have been taught in school that they should answer our question with “no, the die is not loaded.”
However, the opposite argument is not without merit. In fact, if I had made a fair bet that the die was loaded, the bookie would have had to reward me with a profit after observing the outcome of six odd numbers. This is what the e-value ultimately entails: a betting score. And if one can make a profit with such a bet, then the suspicion cannot be totally unreasonable.
But surely two opposite arguments cannot both be correct at the same time? Or can they? Both arguments require an implicit threshold to draw their respective yes, or no, conclusions. For the first argument, the threshold is: how big a probability — two per cent, five per cent or 10 per cent — is a “sizeable probability?” For the second, the threshold is: how much more likely — five times, 10 times or 25 times — is “much more likely?”
The two arguments are not fundamentally at odds with each other but, using different thresholds, one ends up saying “black” and the other “white” when reality is just a certain shade of grey. Indeed, their respective decision thresholds can be calibrated by statisticians so that they always reach the same conclusion.
How do you weight the evidence, when deciding whether to eat a donut? (Unsplash/Rod Long)Let’s use ‘misinformation’ for genuine liesBut the average human being isn’t very good at performing this type of calibration psychologically. We are prone to reacting very differently when the underlying scale changes.
Would you continue to consume a delicacy if you were told that those who eat it regularly are 25 times as likely to develop cancer later in life as those who don’t? What if you were told that doing so will increase your probability of cancer from 0.01 per cent to 0.25 per cent?
You may decide to change your diet because you are fearful of the elevated risk. You may choose to continue with your existing diet because even the elevated risk is still not all that high.
Neither choice is strictly right or wrong. But today, I’m afraid to say: “I see no need to change my diet given the risks.” If I did, those who are enthusiastic about changing theirs might come together and accuse me of spreading “misinformation.” Such madness has to stop, before it completely destroys our social discourse.
The word “misinformation” should be reserved for genuine lies only, not conclusions decided by subjective thresholds, even if they are standard choices. Declaring there is or isn’t evidence simply because the p-value is below or above the conventional threshold has already generated far too many irreproducible findings.
To call something “misinformation” based on that kind of shaky evidence, or the lack thereof, will only obstruct true scientific progress.
Mu Zhu is a Professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo. Find Mu Zhu 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 @ConversationUS****
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
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
The adage “Follow the science” when formulating public policy has much to recommend it, but it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. Let us explain.Astrophysicist and science writer Ethan Siegel recently wrote, “Science is a way of thinking about the world, the process of inquiry and investigation, and also the full suite of relevant knowledge that we know, collectively, about an enterprise.” It is based on “the scientific method,” a rigorous process that reveals new information, or knowledge, that enables us to know what we know.
But simply saying that scientific knowledge, not science itself, should guide policy is insufficient. An essential ingredient is missing: value judgments. Knowledge created by science tells us, with ever-increasing accuracy, what the world >is, but it does not tell us what the world >ought to be. This gap between “is” and “ought,” which cannot be filled by logic or reason, was articulated by Scottish philosopher David Hume. It can only be filled by value judgments, be they moral, religious, or political.
Value judgments are needed because of tradeoffs. Decisions can be informed by scientific knowledge, but they are not dispositive because differing values can lead to different decisions based on the same accepted body of scientific knowledge. Consider, for example, California’s High-Speed Rail Project, which would link San Francisco and Los Angeles. Although it is technically achievable, whether the cost is worthwhile is a value judgment, and it has changed over the years. As of March 2023, according to a California High Speed Rail Authority project update report, the price tag for the system had risen to $128 billion. That’s a nearly 22 percent increase from last year’s estimate of $105 billion and a far cry from the $33 billion voters approved in 2008. That massive outlay inevitably diverts government resources from other projects—and from taxpayers’ pockets—and what is cost-effective and societally advantageous is a matter of value judgment.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPGenetic engineering The interplay of scientific knowledge and value judgments also applies to opinions about innovative technologies, from nuclear power and fracking to genetic engineering. Let us focus on the last of these, a particular interest of ours.
When it comes to certain activists’ decades-long objections to societally important advances in “genetic engineering,” or “genetic modification,” we would argue that they have been wrong on both the science and the value judgments.
First, the science. Genetic modification refers to a continuum of techniques that have been used over millennia. These include hybridization, mutagenesis, somaclonal variation, wide-cross hybridization (movement of genes across “natural breeding barriers”), recombinant DNA, and, most recently, gene-editing. The primary distinction between the last two and the others is that they are far more precise and predictable than the earlier techniques, which often introduced off-target mutations. And yet, some organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have singled out the newer, more precise, more predictable techniques for sui generis, excessive regulation that has boosted research and development costs and delayed or prevented important advances.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)Because of the continuum alluded to above, and the fact that the newer techniques are more precise and predictable, science is against the activists and so, we would argue, are the value judgments. Activists have teamed up with companies that sell organic and “natural” food products to denigrate crops crafted with molecular techniques, which they have dubbed “Frankenfoods.” This anti-genetic-engineering industry and its lobbyists contribute significantly to the public apprehension toward this technology. They then exploit that fear to sell alternative food products to consumers.
Now, this same industry is lobbying globally for stringent regulation of plants and animals that have been modified with state-of-the-art gene editing techniques such as CRISPR–Cas9. One prominent genetic engineering skeptic, North Carolina State University professor Jennifer Kuzma, said about gene editing, “We need a mandatory regulatory process: not just for scientific reasons, but for consumer and public confidence.” The latter claim, especially, is a fallacy: Thirty years of excessive regulation of genetic engineering has neither reduced public anxiety nor quieted the critics. If anything, these gratuitous regulations have fanned public concerns about this safe, superior technology. As Barbara Keating-Edh, representing the consumer group Consumer Alert, testified before the U.S. National Biotechnology Policy Board three decades ago:
For obvious reasons, the consumer views the technologies that are >most regulated to be the >least safe ones. Heavy involvement by government, no matter how well intended, inevitably sends the wrong signals. Rather than ensuring confidence, it raises suspicion and doubt.
Precautionary PrincipleDecades of large-scale use—millions of acres cultivated and trillions of meals consumed without a single mishap—undermine activists’ concerns. However, there remains one particularly resistant formulation of risk analysis that rejects evidence-based considerations of overall benefit and harm. That is the “Precautionary Principle,” which posits that regulatory action should be taken to avoid risks even when there is incomplete scientific evidence as to their magnitude or potential effects. Advocates of the Precautionary Principle portray it as a neutral tool for assessing risks. But it oversimplifies the complex processes of risk analysis and risk management, allowing regulators to assume that new technologies have infinite risks but uncertain benefits. A new technology is thus assumed to be guilty until it can be proven innocent to a safety standard dictated by its antagonists—a practical impossibility. (See “The Paralyzing Principle,” Winter 2002.)
The Precautionary Principle has now been incorporated into legislation in the European Union and elsewhere.
As a tool of public policy, the primary shortcoming of the Precautionary Principle is that it incorporates neither coherent evidentiary standards nor any clear limits. It stipulates that hypothetical risks should take precedence over substantive demonstrated benefits and effectively frees regulators to arbitrarily require any amount and kind of testing they wish. Likewise, it permits them to ignore overwhelming evidence of a product’s (or a technology’s) safety and benefits, and to prevent or delay its use. It functions independently of “what the science says” and penalizes innovation. It ensures that wherever it is applied, progress—especially in agriculture—will be stunted for the foreseeable future.
The Precautionary Principle is especially perverse when it is applied to the genetic engineering of plants and animals because, without any scientific basis, it discriminates against the use of the newest, most precise, and most predictable techniques by subjecting them to the most intense, stultifying regulation. The negative societal effects of such policies are discussed eloquently in a recent >Nature Plants article by Daniel Jenkins et al.:
Regulation based on process will not advance common goals of nutrition, sustainability or consumer preference. On the contrary, process-based regulation will only delay or prevent the achievement of these goals. Differential requirements lead to a confusing system with higher burdens, lower utility and increased time to market. This only creates disincentive to fund research and business investment, and ultimately throws up barriers to reaching consumers and improving diets for even the simplest and most-familiar of characteristics. When science cannot distinguish one seedless grape from another, neither should regulation.
The Precautionary Principle is not the only tool of anti-genetic-engineering activists, who also invoke opposition to certain new products based on resentment of corporate entities’ profits or on the fact that most agricultural innovation comes from industrialized countries and therefore somehow represents “colonialism” when transferred to developing countries. Such factors obviously should have no bearing on regulation to assure safety and efficacy.
If we are to realize the potential of the newest techniques of genetic engineering, we need to fend off the sophistry and mendacity of anti-innovation activists, both within and outside governments. Public policy, including regulation, should be dictated by science and common sense.
David Bertioli studies peanut genetics, genomics and evolution. He works with breeding programs in the USA, Brazil, Senegal and Uganda to produce improved peanut cultivars with pest and disease resistance derived from wild peanut species. Find David on X @BotanyBert
Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Fellow at the American Council on Science and Health. He was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the FDA. Find Henry on X at @henryimiller
A version of this article ran on the GLP site on Novembere 27, 2023.
While the decision to remove artificial food dyes is typically something people across the political spectrum can get on board with, some say it’s missing the forest for the trees to single out substances that do not have a clear link to chronic illness while existing programs providing people with healthy foods are slashed in federal budget cuts.
…
[S]everal decisions made in the first 100 days of the Trump administration have hobbled existing efforts to increase access to healthy foods. [In April], Dr. Mati Hlatshwayo-Davis received a notice that a program delivering food and nutrition education to seniors and children in partnership with the YMCA in St. Loui, Missouri would be cut …. This program provided meals for low-income families in the region, where Hlatshwayo-Davis serves as the city’s Director of Health.Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPIncluded in the 10,000 jobs cut from the HHS were also officials who monitored the food supply for contaminants at the FDA, which in the massive overhaul of federal agencies is estimated to be losing 20% of its workforce.
This is an excerpt. Read the original post here
The chatter about chemicals in tampons isn’t exactly a new thing; it’s more like a rerun of a series that just won’t quit. Women’s health issues often get the spotlight, but not in the way we’d hope — instead, they tend to become the stars of alarmist headlines. We’ve seen this show before: one minute it’s baby food, the next it’s your favorite moisturizer, and suddenly everyone’s in a tizzy over what’s lurking in our everyday products.
These conversations usually focus on safety, but let’s be real — they often miss the mark when it comes to understanding the difference between tiny traces of something and actual health threats.
The report “Blood, Sweat, and Pesticides: A Closer Look at Toxic Chemicals in Period Products” by the Women’s Environmental Network and Pesticide Action Network UK raises alarms about glyphosate found in tampons. The report, however, misses the mark in a few key areas. While it states that glyphosate levels were found at 40 times higher than the drinking water limit, it fails to provide proper context about what that really means. The detected levels are incredibly low — measured in parts per billion — and well within the safety limits set by regulatory bodies. Just because something can be detected doesn’t mean it’s harmful, and the report doesn’t fully acknowledge that.
The paper also leans heavily on the health concerns surrounding glyphosate without addressing the consensus from major health organizations that say glyphosate, when used as directed, is safe. It’s misleading to suggest that the mere presence of glyphosate in tampons poses a real risk to health when regulatory authorities have determined that these levels are not a concern. Here are 10 points to keep in mind as you read and/or discuss the report:
- Trace Levels Are Not a Concern: The levels of glyphosate detected in menstrual products are extremely low, measured in parts per billion. Regulatory agencies like the EPA and EFSA have established safety limits that are well above these trace amounts, indicating they do not pose a risk to human health.
- Regulatory Consensus: Major health organizations, including the U.S. EPA, EFSA, and various international regulatory bodies, have concluded that glyphosate is safe when used according to label instructions. They have reviewed extensive scientific data and found no convincing evidence linking glyphosate to cancer or other serious health risks.
- Not a Carcinogen: While the IARC classified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen,” this classification is based on limited evidence. In contrast, comprehensive reviews by regulatory agencies have found no significant link between glyphosate and cancer.
- Absorption Rates Are Misleading: The claim that vaginal absorption of glyphosate is significantly higher than dermal absorption is based on comparisons that do not apply to glyphosate, which is hydrophilic and behaves differently than lipophilic substances. Additionally, the actual exposure from tampons is negligible.
- No Evidence of Neurotoxicity: Extensive studies have shown that glyphosate does not exhibit neurotoxic effects. Regulatory authorities have consistently found no evidence linking glyphosate exposure to neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease.
- Endocrine Disruption Claims Are Unsupported: Glyphosate has been evaluated for endocrine-disrupting activity and found to be negative in various screening assays. It does not interact with hormonal pathways in ways that would pose a risk to human health.
- Scientific Scrutiny: The research surrounding glyphosate has undergone rigorous peer review and scrutiny. Studies that claim glyphosate is harmful often lack robust scientific methodology or are based on non-relevant exposure routes.
- Ongoing Monitoring: Regulatory agencies like the EPA continuously monitor new research and studies regarding glyphosate. They have reaffirmed their position that glyphosate does not pose a significant risk to public health.
- Real-World Usage: Glyphosate is one of the most studied herbicides globally, and its safety has been confirmed through numerous studies over decades. Farmers and agricultural practices rely on it for effective weed control, which is essential for food production.
- Misinterpretation of Data: The report’s comparison of glyphosate levels in tampons to drinking water standards is misleading, as the drinking water limit applies to all pesticides and is not based on risk assessment principles. Regulatory limits for daily intake of glyphosate are set based on comprehensive risk assessments that ensure public health safety.
It’s worth noting that discussions around women’s health and children’s health often become alarmist and sensationalized in the media. This tendency can lead to unnecessary fear and anxiety, overshadowing the facts and scientific consensus. While it’s crucial to advocate for safety and transparency in health products, it’s equally important to avoid creating panic over issues that regulatory agencies have deemed safe. The focus should be on informed discussions rather than sensational claims, allowing individuals to make educated choices without being overwhelmed by fear. In this case, the report could have provided a more balanced view, helping the public understand the actual risks involved rather than contributing to a culture of alarmism around women’s health issues.
Key Resources:
- A shout out to HealthNerd who provides a reasoned context around this issue in this Substack. If you aren’t already, give him a follow.
- Is Glyphosate safe? Bayer CropScience
- Glyphosate Safety & Regulatory Guideline Modern Ag Alliance
- 17 Questions about Glyphosate Thoughtscapism
References:
- Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. (2014). Medical Management Guidelines for Parathion. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service.
- Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. (2015). Toxicological profile for glyphosate. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service.
- Andreotti, G., et al. (2018). Glyphosate use and cancer incidence in the Agricultural Health Study. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 110(5), 509–516. https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djx233
- European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). (2022). Opinion of the committee for risk assessment on a dossier proposing harmonised classification and labelling at EU level of glyphosate. Retrieved from https://echa.europa.eu/-/glyphosate-no-change-proposed-to-hazard-classification
- European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). (2015a). Conclusion on the peer review of the pesticide risk assessment of the active substance glyphosate. EFSA Journal, 13(11), 4302. https://doi.org/10.2903/j.efsa.2015.4302
- European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). (2015b). Final addendum to the renewal assessment report — public version. Risk assessment provided by the rapporteur Member State Germany and co-rapporteur Member State Slovakia for the active substance glyphosate according to the procedure for the renewal of the inclusion of a second group of active substances in Annex I to Council Directive 91/414/EEC laid down in Commission regulation (EU) №1141/2010, October 2015. Retrieved from http://registerofquestions.efsa.europa.eu/roqFrontend/outputLoader?output=ON-4302
- European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). (2015). Renewal assessment report on glyphosate. 31 October 2015. RMS: Germany, Co-RMS: Slovakia. Retrieved from https://echa.europa.eu/documents/10162/13626/renewal_assessment_report_addenda_en.pdf
- European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). (2017). Conclusion on the peer review of the pesticide risk assessment of the potential endocrine disrupting properties of glyphosate. EFSA Journal, 15(9), 4979. https://doi.org/10.2903/j.efsa.2017.4979
- European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). (2023). Álvarez, F., et al. Peer review of the pesticide risk assessment of the active substance glyphosate. EFSA Journal, 21(7), 1–52. https://doi.org/10.2903/j.efsa.2023.8164
- Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (1995). National primary drinking water regulations: Glyphosate. Retrieved from https://archive.epa.gov/water/archive/web/pdf/archived-consumer-fact-sheet-on-glyphosate.pdf
- Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (2020). Glyphosate interim decision. Retrieved from [link]
- Levine, S. L., Webb, E. G., & Saltmiras, D. A. (2020). Review and analysis of the potential for glyphosate to interact with the estrogen, androgen, and thyroid pathways. Pest Management Science, 76(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1002/ps.5983
- Milby, T. H. (1974). Occupational exposure to pesticides: Report to the Federal Working Group on Pest Management from the Task Group on Occupational Exposure to Pesticides. Special Collections, USDA National Agricultural Library. Accessed May 28, 2025. Retrieved from https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/speccoll/items/show/2318
- Mink, P. J., Mandel, J. S., Lundin, J. I., & Sceurman, B. K. (2011). Epidemiologic studies of glyphosate and non-cancer health outcomes: A review. Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, 61(2), 172–184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yrtph.2011.07.006
- National Toxicology Program (NTP). (2019). Effects of glyphosate and its formulations on DNA damage in HepaRG and HaCaT cell lines. Retrieved from [link]
- Puckett, G. J., & Hygnstrom, J. R. (2025). Pesticide poisoning: Managing risk and recognizing signs and symptoms. Nebraska Extension Circular EC2505. University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
- Reeves, W. R., McGuire, M. K., Stokes, M., & Vicini, J. L. (2019). Assessing the safety of pesticides in food: How current regulations protect human health. Advances in Nutrition, 10(1), 80–88. https://doi.org/10.1093/advances/nmy061
- Srikrishna, S., & Cardozo, L. (2013). The vagina as a route for drug delivery: A review. International Urogynecology Journal, 24(4). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23229421/
- Moser, V. C., et al. (2022). Glyphosate and neurological outcomes: A systematic literature review of animal studies. Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B, 25(4), 162–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/10937404.2022.2083739
- Vorontsova, Y., et al. (2022). Pharmacokinetics of vaginal versus buccal misoprostol for labor induction at term. Clinical and Translational Science, 15(8). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35587540
Cami Ryan is a social and behavioral scientist working in agriculture at Bayer CropScience. Follow her on Medium here or on X @CamiDRyan.
A version of this article was originally posted at Medium and is reposted here with permission.
Ice cream sales and drownings increase significantly during summer. Although these two outcomes are closely connected, they probably occur in close proximity to each other and may even involve the same people, no sensible observer would claim that buying a snow cone increases your risk of drowning. Most of us intuitively recognize that ice cream purchases and drownings are correlated but caused by independent factors that are also more prevalent during the scorching summer months. Trying to reduce ice cream consumption in July in hopes of reducing pool accidents would be nonsensical.
This fictional scenario illustrates the importance of distinguishing correlation and causation, yet many people are unable to separate the two when they read alarming headlines about chemical exposure and public health. This mistake can lead to flawed conclusions, impacting personal choices, policy, and societal outcomes.
Perhaps the most serious consequence is that misinterpreting correlation as causation can distort public perception. For instance, stories linking trace amounts of lead in baby food to autism unnecessarily scare parents, encouraging litigation and regulations that, while costly, do nothing to improve food safety or prevent autism.
Public literacy in this area ensures critical scrutiny of evidence, preventing hasty or harmful decisions. In an era of data-driven narratives, from health trends to economic forecasts, people are bombarded with statistics. Recognizing that correlation requires further investigation to establish causation empowers individuals to question headlines, seek primary sources, and avoid manipulation by biased or incomplete interpretations.
Join GLP founder Jon Entine and longtime contributors Liza Dunn and Cameron English as they discuss the pitfalls surrounding correlation and causation. Follow this link or listen to the conversation below:
https://t.co/jXwSDDYQMA
— Liza Dunn (@DrLizaMD) June 13, 2025
Dr. Liza Dunn is a medical toxicologist and the medical affairs lead at Bayer Crop Science. Follow her on X @DrLizaMD
Jon Entine, founder and executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, is an Emmy-winning investigative TV News producer and author of seven books, including three on genetics. Please follow him on X at @JonEntine
Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish
A federal reckoning over glyphosate is imminent as the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement gains a foothold with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wielding influence across President Trump’s cabinet. Banning or restricting glyphosate use in the U.S. will either force producers to incur higher costs by turning to alternatives or worsen the environmental impacts of agriculture.
Debate over the health and environmental impacts of glyphosate, the active ingredient in a range of herbicides including RoundUp, is not new. Concerns about its potential link to health conditions like cancer have led to numerous lawsuits against manufacturers of glyphosate-based products since the 1990s. After decades of paying billions in settlements and with 67,000 pending cases, the CEO of pesticide manufacturer Bayer recently warned that the rising costs of litigation could soon force the company to stop selling Roundup in the U.S. altogether. In what is being described as a last ditch effort,
Bayer, along with other manufacturers and farm groups, is lobbying for legislation in several states that would limit the extent to which they could be sued over failure-to-warn claims so long as their product labels comply with federal requirements related to human health risks set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). North Dakota and Georgia were the first states to pass the legislation into law earlier this year.
Beyond the challenges posed by ongoing and expensive litigation, the MAHA movement presents another growing threat to pesticide manufacturers. Kennedy has painted glyphosate as a central villain in his messaging, in which he frequently harkens back to his legal career targeting the manufacturer of RoundUp. MAHA’s growing influence on public discourse has supporters drawing links between chronic disease and various elements of the food and pharmaceutical industries, agricultural practices, and environmental exposures. MAHA-aligned groups like Moms Across America echo Kennedy’s long held criticisms and
Trump’s latest pick for U.S. surgeon general calls achieving a pesticide-free world the single most effective strategy to address health issues. This set the stage for MAHA to become strange bedfellows with environmental groups who have long stirred up fear around pesticide contamination in conventional food products and called for pesticide bans. Unfortunately for both camps, and American consumers, the research fails to show that such restrictions will lead to healthier people or a healthier planet.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.SIGN UPComparing glyphosate toxicity with alternativesGlyphosate is the most commonly used herbicide in the United States. It is applied to an average of 298 million acres or three-quarters of U.S. cropland each year according to data through 2016. A ban or restriction on the use of glyphosate in the U.S. would have the greatest impact on corn, soybeans, and cotton—90 percent of these crops are grown from herbicide resistant varieties. Should the Trump administration ban or restrict glyphosate use in American agriculture, we can expect farmers to swiftly transition to more expensive alternative herbicides. In addition to being higher cost, alternative herbicides can also have greater toxicity and lower efficacy than glyphosate.
Kennedy’s concern with pesticides centers around toxicity. He claims exposure and ingestion are linked to various health issues including non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). Detractors often cite the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s classification of glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” as evidence glyphosate causes cancer. IARC’s assessment of glyphosate has been called procedurally and scientifically flawed and it overlooked one of the largest longitudinal cohort studies which followed 50,000 pesticide applicators and their spouses. The study found no association between glyphosate and any solid tumors or lymphoid malignancies, including NHL and its subtypes. Per Canada’s 2019 evaluation, “no pesticide regulatory authority in the world currently considers glyphosate to be a cancer risk to humans at the levels at which humans are currently exposed.”
The irony is that the rise of glyphosate use since the 1980s displaced other more toxic pesticides in American agriculture. Glyphosate outperforms alternatives on cost, as well as its effectiveness and relatively low application rate of 20 ounces per acre. However, toxicity needs to be considered along with effectiveness and use intensity per acre to give an accurate picture of an herbicide’s risk profile. Lower toxicity isn’t always lower risk when it comes to real world product use. For example, if a less toxic herbicide is less effective, it might be used more intensively, further exacerbating its effects. While herbicide use intensity has increased since the turn of the century, toxicity has stayed the same or decreased for many crops.
While pesticides can be toxic, human health risks are a function of exposure to a relevant dose. When it comes to acute toxicity, defined as risk associated with exposure during the application process, glyphosate has lower toxicity to humans than 94% of all alternative herbicides. Kennedy often claims, without citing any evidence, that the harms of glyphosate stem from prolonged exposure via low dose ingestion of residues in food products. Risk of prolonged exposure is measured as chronic toxicity, for which glyphosate is lower than 90% of all herbicides.
USDA regularly finds that 99% of sampled food products are compliant with federal pesticide residue exposure limits, including for glyphosate. Furthermore, the majority of corn, soybean, and cotton acres in the U.S. grow commodities that are not for direct human consumption. Restricting glyphosate for crops that are used for animal feed, energy, or fiber will have absolutely no impact on health outcomes in consumers.
Today, the leading herbicides used in U.S. corn production include atrazine, mesotrione, glyphosate, acetochlor, and s-metolachlor, according to the most recent data available for 2021. For U.S. soybean production, glyphosate dominates along with 2,4-D and glufosinate. With the exception of mesotrione, all other alternatives outlined in the chart below are more toxic relative to glyphosate based on how many milligrams per kilogram of body weight needs to be injected to cause death in 50% of a test population.
Credit: PubChem 2025 Update; National Pesticide Information Center; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 2024 List of Chemicals Evaluated for Carcinogenic Potential; International Agency for Research on Cancer; Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues; Cornell University Created with DatawrapperNotes: LD50: A higher LD50 indicates lower acute toxicity. This is the dose that is lethal to 50% of test animals. Toxicity rating ranges from very low to high and is modeled after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Pesticide Programs, Label Review Manual, Chapter 7: Precautionary Statements. EIQ Value: A higher EIQ value indicates higher hazard. Source: Eshenaur, B., Grant, J., Kovach, J., Petzoldt, C., Degni, J., and Tette, J. https://cals.cornell.edu/new-york-state-integrated-pest-management/risk-assessment/eiq. Environmental Impact Quotient: “A Method to Measure the Environmental Impact of Pesticides.” New York State Integrated Pest Management Program, Cornell Cooperative Extension, Cornell University. 1992 – 2020.
Cornell University developed an Environmental Impact Quotient (EIQ) that summarizes pesticide risk to farmers, consumers, and non-target organisms in one metric. The EIQ calculation weighs chronic and acute dermal toxicity for farmworkers, chronic toxicity to account for constant potential exposure average consumers would have to pesticide residues in food and water, and acute toxicity for fish, birds, bees, and arthropods. The EIQ also considers leaching and surface runoff potential. Active ingredients assessed by Cornell have EIQ values ranging from 13 to 153. The higher the EIQ value, the greater the hazard. While limited in some respects, EIQ values provide a point of comparison. As outlined in the table above, glyphosate ranks in the middle of other leading herbicides when it comes to environmental impact.
Economic realities must be considered in addition to human health and environmental impacts. A recent report, commissioned by Bayer, found that alternative crop protection products can cost producers up to 2.5 times the cost of glyphosate on a per acre basis. An independent 2021 study modelled the economic impact of a hypothetical tax, as a proxy for regulation, on glyphosate in U.S. corn production. The researchers found that even a modest 10% tax on glyphosate, projected to reduce glyphosate use by about 5%, would result in $98 million in annual losses due to increased costs for farmers and decreased corn production. They find that the market economic loss from restricted weed control outweighs any human health and the environmental benefits achieved by switching to alternatives. Notably, the results indicate farmers would not be able to fully compensate for glyphosate restrictions with alternative herbicides. While a reduction in glyphosate use would lead to a modest increase in the use of other herbicides, this substitution is found to be relatively small and not sufficient to offset the reduction in glyphosate, suggesting substitutes aren’t as available or effective.
A lack of sufficient herbicide alternatives could lead farmers to increase mechanical management of weeds through tillage. However, the costs of shifting toward tillage would be nearly double the cost of buying and applying glyphosate. Such a shift would increase production costs for corn, wheat, soy, and wheat by almost $2 billion. To boot, tillage is a practice criticized by regenerative agriculture supporters, including recently announced nominee for U.S. surgeon general Casey Means, for increasing risk of soil erosion and release of carbon stored in soils, as well as for associated fossil fuel emissions.
Meanwhile, glyphosate and glyphosate tolerant crops have contributed to the adoption of reduced tillage practices in U.S. soybean and corn production. The introduction of glyphosate-resistant corn and soybean, coupled with the application of glyphosate, is credited in one study with preventing at least 41 billion pounds of carbon emissions between 1996 and 2013. Stripping U.S. farmers of crop protection tools will jeopardize the fact that over half of U.S. cropland today is managed with reduced or no-till practices.
Let’s all just go organic instead?Conceivably the Trump administration might not only focus regulatory action on glyphosate, instead targeting a wider swath of synthetic pesticides. Groups like the Center for Biological Diversity recommend the administration revoke EPA tolerances for atrazine, glyphosate, 2-4,D, neonicotinoids, paraquat, and organophosphates and enact policies that would incentivize U.S. agriculture to shift to organic production methods.
A nationwide shift to organic agriculture in the wake of a broad pesticide ban is practically impossible due to a range of systemic constraints. First, organic farming typically produces lower yields, requiring more land to produce a given amount of food. Differences in yield are especially pronounced for certain commodities including wheat. Second, there is not nearly enough manure in the U.S. to fertilize all crops in place of synthetic fertilizers. Therefore, shifting to organic production would also require additional land to produce manure or to grow legumes and other nitrogen-fixing crops that provide needed nutrients. Lastly, organic production is often more costly.
Although organic price premiums may enable farmers to make up for the elevated cost of production of farming organically, price premiums can fluctuate. The magnitude of shifting a significant percentage of U.S. farmland to organic can’t be understated. Less than 1 percent of U.S. cropland and pasture is certified organic. Organic sales only made up about 5.5 percent of all retail food sales in 2021.
Even if successful, a shift to using organic alternatives to control weeds, pests, or diseases would not eliminate synthetic pesticide use in agriculture outright. Nor would it necessarily reduce the overall toxicity of agricultural inputs since organic alternatives for weed control are not always less toxic. Whether organic producers use more or less pesticides in terms of volume than conventional production depends on the crop. And the toxicity of organic pesticides can be higher than synthetic alternatives even if the amount applied is orders of magnitude less.
For example, organic production of grapes, potatoes, tomatoes, apples, citrus, and stone fruit in the U.S. continues to be reliant on copper sulfate, which is a synthetic chemical allowed under organic standards set by USDA to combat fungal and bacterial diseases. Copper sulfate has a very high LD50 acute toxicity of 450 mg/kg. According to the European Chemical Agency, copper sulfate is “very toxic to aquatic life” and its use has been shown to result in significant consequences to biodiversity.
Alternatives to synthetic herbicides that can be used in organic production include clove oil and acetic acid (high concentration vinegar). These non-synthetic herbicides are contact herbicides, meaning they disrupt the cells in the plant tissue they come into contact with, therefore requiring precise and often more frequent application to kill the entire plant. Glyphosate, on the other hand, is a systemic herbicide that disrupts biological processes throughout the plant once absorbed, killing the weed in one go. Glyphosate has a total EIQ value of 41.33. In comparison, acetic acid has a higher hazard value at 45 due to higher potential risks to farmworkers and consumers.
Europe is often venerated by MAHA enthusiasts as having an enviable precautionary regulatory regime for food additives, chemicals, and ingredients. Even President Trump recently asserted that U.S. agriculture is “probably heading towards [the United Kingdom’s] system with no chemicals” under Kennedy’s direction, though the UK does not have a “no chemical” food system. Rather than a beacon, policymakers should view Europe’s farming policy objectives as a cautionary tale. The EU’s Farm to Fork strategy, for example, includes the goal of shifting 25% of production to organic farming.
Critics warn such a shift will cause the EU to increase its imports of agricultural products, offshoring environmental damage to other nations, particularly in South America. USDA found that the EU’s plan to increase organic production would increase consumer costs and worsen food security. Other countries have also grappled with these tradeoffs. These exact consequences of a dramatic shift to ban synthetic agricultural inputs were born out in Sri Lanka in 2022. The Mexican government postponed their ban on glyphosate citing concerns that the government has yet to identify an alternative that can replace glyphosate without sacrificing productivity.
Policies that incentivize transitions to organic production, sans synthetic inputs like pesticides and fertilizers, would not only place economic burdens on farmers, but would also have environmental consequences when it comes to spurring increased land used to compensate for yield losses and persistent nitrogen needs. Given the cautious optimism expressed by left leaning environmental organizations that the MAHA wave might be well enough aligned with their goals to be worth jumping on, it’s worth emphasizing the climate consequences of banning synthetic pesticides like glyphosate in favor of organic systems. In large part due to lower on average yields compared to conventional production, a global shift to organic production is projected to lead to a 16-33% increase in land use and a corresponding 8-15% increase in worldwide deforestation.
Without worldwide conversion to vegetarianism, which is next to impossible per current trends, and substantial reductions in global food waste, increasing the share of global agriculture under organic production beyond the 2% it occupies today is expected to increase greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.
Kennedy’s influence spurs industry action and concern in CongressAnnouncements made by President Trump’s USDA and HHS so far have proven more aligned with MAHA moms, far left environmentalists, and consumer protection groups than Republicans in Congress would have hoped. A recent letter from GOP members called on Kennedy and other agency leaders involved in the MAHA Commission to reject misguided health solutions and instead put forward policies supported by sound science and risk-based analyses. The lawmakers emphasize the importance of weighing the role well-regulated agricultural inputs like pesticides play in keeping food prices low and farming profitable.
It’s clear pesticide manufacturers like Bayer and farmers that rely on low toxicity chemical inputs like glyphosate are hinging their strategy on EPA, who has deemed glyphosate as safe for decades and is not under Kennedy’s jurisdiction. This might prove a losing strategy.
Bayer’s multi-state campaign seeks to ensure states defer to the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority over pesticide labeling. That is, if the label on Roundup is approved by the feds, Bayer would be insulated from pesticide injury lawsuits that claim the manufacturer failed to warn users of the product’s health risks. Bayer and other agriculture industry groups also support federal action to shore up the statute that preempts states from adding their own pesticide labeling requirements. If passed, this would provide pesticide manufacturers more consistent regulatory clarity and likely lessen their legal liability. But, with a farm bill still a long way off, it’s clear Congressional action is sure to move more slowly than state legislatures, if at all.
While Kennedy does not oversee the EPA, his role as HHS Secretary grants him considerable influence over public health policy which can interact with environmental regulations. His influence at the cabinet level and interest in shaping policies and programs outside of HHS jurisdiction should not be underestimated. An EPA that abandonsreliance on scientific evidence and instead caters to loud calls from activists to ban pesticides in the name of health would disrupt the status quo, rendering any legislative proposals that affect EPA regulations entirely ineffectual.
Look no further than the Food and Drug Administration which has become unrecognizable in a matter of months under Kennedy. The once-cautious agency has said it is considering significant food ingredient policy changes—starting with food dyes like Red 40—without any of the typical processes, like posting a regulatory notice for comment, and top officials blatantly contradicting decades worth of the agency’s prior risk assessments. Food dyes are just the start of a long list of supposed “poisons” in the U.S. food supply Kennedy is keen to address. One can expect current efforts to target food dyes to give way to scrutiny over other ingredients and inputs, like glyphosate, with further reaching implications for the stability and sustainability of our nation’s food supply.
Up next for the MAHA CommissionThe MAHA Commission, established by executive order at the start of President Trump’s second term, was tasked with releasing an initial assessment followed by a comprehensive federal policy strategy to end childhood chronic disease. The Commission was directed to focus, in part, on food production techniques and “food ingredients, certain chemicals, and certain other exposures.”
The Commission’s initial assessment outlined several environmental exposures that could impact child health, including crop protection tools with an explicit mention of glyphosate. The report’s discussion of pesticides was considerably more balanced than Kennedy’s past rhetoric regarding their risks, but leaves the door open for more drastic measures in the future.
The Commission notes that some studies have raised concerns about possible links between crop protection tools and adverse health outcomes in children but recognizes that instigating a sudden change to production practices and inputs could jeopardize agricultural production and the global food supply. The Commission also contends that, when it comes to pesticides, EPA has a robust risk- based approach to consider risks to human health and the environment. Despite these assertions, the Commission doesn’t rule out the possibility of further regulating or restricting crop protection tools.
The report makes a promise to not go beyond risk- and scientific processes without “thoughtful consideration,” indicating the administration could take actions that aren’t based in science or that go beyond congressional authority. The Commission perpetuates the idea that if there were natural alternatives to synthetic products that had similar efficacy and cost, those alternatives would be preferred. The entirety of the report appeals to the nature fallacy by questioning the safety of synthetic chemicals in the U.S. food and agriculture system.
The report fails to acknowledge the environmental and human health benefits of synthetic crop protection tools. Holding costs and efficacy constant, some synthetic pesticides will prove superior across other important factors like toxicity, application rates, and environmental persistence. Pesticides are also an important part of fruit and vegetable production, keeping fresh produce an affordable part of children’s diets. Comparisons across this range of factors are worth making, but should adhere to, rather than abandoning, sound science.
The MAHA Commission will now turn to drafting a policy agenda to address the disease drivers identified in its initial assessment. As the Commission considers proposals relevant to research initiatives, the forthcoming update to the Dietary Guidelines, or regulatory actions, the Commission should prioritize supporting farmers in reducing the impacts of pesticide use without sacrificing yields.
USDA should support the research, development, and adoption of technologies and products that enable both organic and conventional producers to reduce the toxicity of pesticide use, either by using less or employing products with better efficacy and lower toxicity. USDA conservation programs should be leveraged to scale the use of precision agriculture technologies to improve application of synthetic pesticides. Federal research dollars should be dedicated to developing less toxic alternatives to use in organic production systems, such as alternatives to copper sulfate to better fight fungal and bacterial diseases. In addition, the Commission should propose that federal agencies support public and private plant breeding programs to develop crop varieties that have improved pest and disease resistance, reducing the need for pesticides.
When it comes to evaluating the effects of agricultural pesticides on human health and determining pesticide residue limits, it is imperative that the Commission rely only on science backed human health risks and differentiate risks based on acute vs. chronic toxicity levels. The Commission should emphasize the importance of EPA putting adequate staffing and resources behind farmworker pesticide surveys and USDA continuing work under its Pesticide Data Program (PDP). Activities led by PDP include sampling, testing, and reporting of pesticide residues on agricultural commodities in the U.S. food supply.
All of the Commission’s proposals should appropriately weigh the extent to which pesticide bans or restrictions would incentivize substitutions with more toxic products or lead to declines in agricultural productivity and increases in food prices. Implementing policies that fail to anticipate these follow on effects would not only have food security implications at home, but also jeopardize America’s global leadership as a food exporter. Further, the Commission should refrain from asserting misleading links between the use of glyphosate in non-food crops, dietary exposure, and human health outcomes.
Ultimately, the Commission must resist the urge to center agricultural practices and inputs as a silver bullet for addressing disease. Employing a narrow focus on specific on-farm agricultural inputs, like glyphosate, and attributing chronic health conditions to agricultural production techniques is not only misguided but detracts from public health interventions that could actually curb rates of chronic illness.
Thank you to Jon Entine, Executive Director of the Genetic Literacy Project, for contributing feedback on this article.
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 Breakthrough Institute 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