by Anastasia on 9 November 2010 In a few moments, talks at the First Global Conference on Biofortification will begin. Up first: the keynote address The Future of Food by William J. Garvelink, the US Government Deputy Coordinator for Development Feed the Future: Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative. Then, a panel discussion on the Importance of agriculture for addressing malnutrition. If you have any questions regarding biofortification, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to find the answer and address it in a later post. Follow the conference on Twitter #biofortconf.
Even before the talks get started, the posters here display some exciting research. For example, B.B. Singh, an agronomist who splits his time between Texas A&M and an Indian university, has developed 60 day cowpea.
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 13 October 2010 Back in February, Frank & I went to the MOSES Organic Farming Conference, and while Frank was quick to put up his pictures, and I got one video up, I’ve been a bit lax in getting the rest of the material up and annotated. While discussing genetic engineering over at Grist, Doug Gurian-Sherman from the Union of Concerned Scientist popped in to say a big hello and a response to my comment. One of
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by Anastasia on 12 October 2010 At 10am central time, a discussion about biodiversity and agriculture will begin as part of the Biodiversity World Tour. The event is sponsored by CropLife International, a consortium of companies and industry groups. The discussion will be broadcast live and you can join the conversation by tweeting with the hashtag #BWT2010. It’s bound to be interesting, I hope you’ll join in! I’ll be covering the event for Biofortified with a blog post along with
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by Anastasia on 11 October 2010 The 2010 World Food Prize Laureates David Beckmann and Jo Luck were introduced by the President of Iowa State University Gregory Geoffroy for a talk titled: Grassroots Efforts in the Fight against Global Hunger. The speakers were met with record attendance for this annual event, about 500 students, faculty, and community members. Tonight’s lecture is part of a week long series of events celebrating the legacy of Norm Borlaug and looking to what we can do to solve hunger in the US and across the world.
Many World Food Prize Laureates have been scientists, and scientists are undoubtedly important in developing new crop varieties and new methods that can produce more food with fewer inputs, particularly for small famers. This year’s Laureates have a new message to share. As David Beckmann pointed out during his talk, great scientists are important, but it also takes groups like Bread for the World and Heifer International to organize and mobilize people to help. This year’s Laureates share a message of hope and inspiration.
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by Kevin Folta on 20 September 2010 Recently at the International Horticultural Congress in Lisbon, Portugal, a workshop was dedicated to transgenic crop biology and its integration with public perception. As mentioned in previous posts, the central theme is to placate the misinformed public opinion by using clever technologies to circumvent traditional unfounded criticisms of biotechnology.
Dr. Franz Krenz was the first speaker of the session. His focus was in describing what have been known as cisgenic technologies, or the moniker sometimes applied to allele-specific marker assisted selection, precision breeding.* Dr. Krenz and colleagues have adopted a very strict interpretation of what cisgenic means. By his definition, a cisgenic plant contains regulatory regions and protein-coding regions from the same species, shuttled by biotechnological means. There are no bacterial genes for resistance, no viral promoters, no other genic sequences. Corn to corn, rice to rice, quince to quince. It would be like moving a gene that controls eye color from one person to another to another to make their blue eyes brown. Homo sapiens to Homo sapiens. Nothing fancy.
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