GMO News

Field of Schemes: How GMO alfalfa messed up a perfectly good thing

By Melissa Waddell, Non-GMO Project Most of us don’t think about alfalfa very much. Outside of agricultural communities and diehard fans of Our Gang, it is safe to say alfalfa is not a hot topic. We’d like to challenge that notion. Bear with us: In the US, alfalfa is grown on roughly 23 million acres annually, most […]

Jurassic Park coming to the Arctic? Scientist aims to “de-extinct” wooly mammoth as solution to climate change

In what would seem to be a “Colossal” publicity stunt or a headline from The Onion, a tech entrepreneur and Harvard geneticist have hatched a plan to genetically engineer Asian elephants to resemble long-extinct wooly mammoths as a way to slow global warming. What could possibly go wrong? Entrepreneur Ben Lamm and geneticist George Church, […]

Brazil’s millers oppose GMO wheat imports

Brazil’s flour millers are threatening to stop buying wheat from Argentina if Brazil approves genetically modified wheat imports from its neighbor. According to the Brazilian Wheat Industry Association (Abitrigo), local millers are opposed to processing GMO wheat from Argentina or any other country. Rubens Barbosa, head of Abitrigo, told Reuters: “There is no country in […]

Conservationists and farmers sue over Trump administration removal of most GMO regulations

The Center for Food Safety (CFS) and allied plaintiffs recently filed a new federal lawsuit challenging the 2020 decision by the Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) to eliminate most genetically modified organism oversight, including future GMO crops, trees, and grasses. Previously nearly all GMO plants had to go through formal USDA approval before open […]

GM crops cannot succeed in Africa

It’s a model not designed to match the African smallholder farming system—and with rare exceptions, it’s failing in a big way. Canadian Associate Professor Matthew Schnurr argues in a new book that genetically modified crop technology, with its “large scale, heavily capitalized, mechanized monoculture,” is suited to industrial agriculture without considering the geographic, social, ecological, […]