Canada today announced it will contribute an additional $1 million to international bodies that develop the standards for food safety and plant protection. Lawrence MacAulay, Canada's Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, told FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva of the decision while both leaders both leaders were in Berlin attending high-level meetings including Sunday's meeting of agriculture ministers from the G20 countries.

In an effort toward better understanding of how the Zika virus infects host cells and spreads, researchers at Purdue University have published a high resolution structure of the immature Zika virus. The structure of the mature Zika virus has been published in 2016, and researchers point at the differences between immature and mature Zika virus.

The Minister for Agriculture of Punjab, Pakistan, Naeem Akhtar Khan Bhabha, acknowledged the importance of biotechnology during his visit to biotech corn field trial. The minister witnessed the biotech corn under field testing conducted by Monsanto in Pakistan. He was also briefed about the technology features, crop characteristics, trial and testing parameters, and agronomic practices.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) completed a thorough assessment of the potential risks of genetically engineered bent grass developed by Scotts and Monsanto. Results of their assessments showed that the new variety is unlikely to pose a plant risk to agricultural crops or other plants in the U.S. Thus, APHIS announced the deregulation of the GE bent grass.

Researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and University of California, Davis in the United States, and the John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom have developed a much-needed genetic resource that will help accelerate the study of gene functions in wheat. The resource, a collection of bread and pasta wheat seeds with more than 10 million sequenced and carefully catalogued genetic mutations, is freely available to wheat breeders and researchers.

New drought across swathes of southern Ethiopia may jeopardize the East African nation's restoration of food security after the worst agricultural seasons in decades unless urgent efforts are made to shore up vulnerable households in rural areas, FAO warned today.

To introduce and give updates on the latest achievements of biotechnology, the Agricultural Science Institute for Southern Coastal Central of Vietnam and Agricultural Genetics Institute jointly organized a seminar on Agricultural Biotechnology and Its Potential Application in Vietnam on December 2, 2016 at Hoang Yen Hotel, Quy Nhon City, Binh Dinh province, Vietnam.

Prices of major food commodities declined for the fifth year in a row in 2016, averaging 161.6 points for the year as a whole, some 1.5 percent below their 2015 levels. Bumper harvests and prospects for staple cereals offset upward pressure on FAO's Food Price Index from tropical commodities such as sugar and palm oil, where production was impacted by El Nino.

A symposium on 20 Years of Commercialization of GM Crops and the Status of GM Crops in Vietnam was organized by Biotechnology Center of Ho Chi Minh City. According to the presentations, it was recorded that 1,180 hectares of land were planted with GM maize in 2015. The average productivity of GM maize reached to 44.8 tons/hecta, while the total yield was ~5.3 millions tons.

Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and NRGene, in collaboration with a global team of researchers have announced the accurate assembly of the W22 maize reference genome. According to the team, the second version of W22 has reached a scaffold N50 of 35.5 MB with less than 2% unfilled sequence gaps.