Last Thursday, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) posted a new grant – one that readers of Biofortified might be interested to read about. Called the Biotechnology Risk Assessment Grants Program, (PDF) this grant for up to $1 million for each project is for scientists who want to study the environmental risks of genetic engineering in agriculture.
What kinds of environmental risks? Things like basic genetics research, comparing breeding to biotechnology, and downstream effects of environmental release. There is even a section for it you want to submit a research proposal to study co-existence between GE and non-GE crops. You could even study pyramided, or “stacked” GE crops and compare them to single-transgene varieties. So many possibilities.
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GE Survey: More believe safe than not, most undecided
In 2010, Thompson Reuters released a survey* (PDF) of public attitudes toward genetically engineered food in the US. They had several significant findings, some of which should be fairly obvious, but some are real eye-openers. The questions were straight-forward and the raw data was posted online, but there was a distinct lack of visual representations of these results. I thought we could all use a good look at some simple graphs that demonstrate facts that many studies have shown consistently over time – that there are more people who believe that GE crops are safe than not, while most people are still undecided. It also showed that most people say they would eat GE plant-based foods that are currently on the market.
Question number one asked people to self-report their understanding of GE food. While self-reporting has its own problems (Like people who say they completely understand GE foods yet don’t really know anything about them), it does provide some information about how aware different groups are about GE. The survey reports that 65% of people are aware that some foods in the store are genetically engineered, and high-income and highly-educated people are up in the 80s. As for the understanding of the concepts, check out these results:
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