The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), by request of the European Commission (EC), assessed the 2016 scientific publication by Robin Mesnage et al., including its relevance for the risk assessment of maize NK603. The publication analyzed the proteomic and metabolomic profiles of maize NK603 kernels and compared those to a non-GM maize line used as comparator.

The world's oceans offer both challenges and solutions to the world's Sustainable Development Agenda, and managing them more carefully is essential for global food security today and tomorrow as well as the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said today at the United Nations Ocean Conference.

American cotton farmers face tough times with the prevailing unpredictable weather and decrease in prices of cotton. With the new study of Z. Jeffrey Chen of The University of Texas at Austin, cotton farmers might have better days ahead. Chen and team developed more productive cotton using epigenetic modification. The study is published in Genome Biology.

Farmers in Mwanza Province, North Eastern Tanzania have urged their government to hasten delivery of biotech crops, which they say, may save them from crop failure. The maize, cassava, and cotton farmers whose crop has been severely affected by stalk borer pests, cassava mosaic disease and African cotton bollworm respectively, said that they had applied chemical and cultural control methods against the pests and diseases with little success over the years.

Crop biotechnology has significantly reduced agriculture's environmental impact and stimulated economic growth over the last 20 years of use, according to the new report of PG Economics. The peer-reviewed report GM Crops: Global Socio-economic and Environmental impacts 1996-2015

The swampy land areas of South Sumatera, Palembang are poised to become the next rice granary in Indonesia. Recently, to step up the region’s agricultural productivity, local extension professionals, farmers, and students were trained on the use of laser-assisted land leveling and tractor driving in Palembang.

The call came from the WHO Director-General in May 2016 for a renewed attack on the global spread of vector-borne diseases. "What we are seeing now looks more and more like a dramatic resurgence of the threat from emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases," Dr Margaret Chan told Member States at the Sixty-ninth World Health Assembly. "The world is not prepared to cope."

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is pushing forward with a massive campaign that has so far treated more than 12 million animals in less than three months, protecting the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of families who rely on their livestock's meat and milk for survival.
 

Scientists have successfully engineered a rice plant with an adjustable immune system to make it resistant to multiple diseases at once without decreasing its yield. "For as long as I have been in this field, people have been scratching their heads about how to activate a defense system where and when it is needed," says Jonathan Jones, a professor at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, U.K. "It is among the most promising lines of research in this field that I have seen."

A high-level delegation from Kenya visited Malawi's Bt cotton National Performance Trial (NPTs) fields on May 11, 2017. The team consisted of board chairs from the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (KEPHIS), Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), as well as the Managing Director of RIVATEX, a textile company in Kenya. Farmers, media, and other key players were also represented.