On September 12, 2022, President Biden issued an “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy.” While much of the Executive Order stresses health, medicine, energy and biological data, there are specific sections that apply to agriculture and food.
Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it had released additional science-based information about GMOs on its “Feed Your Mind” website. Now FDA has added new fact sheets, infographics, videos, and instruction guides specifically tailored to consumers, health educators, and registered dietitians/registered dietitian nutritionists.
After writing about the new US requirement to disclose bioengineered foods and ingredients, I spent some time at my local grocery stores checking out how different manufacturers are making their disclosures. Armed with my cell phone (for the digital disclosures), I visited my local Giant (owned by Ahold) and Wegmans stores.
Starting January 1, 2022, USDA regulations specify how foods sold in the United States that are bioengineered or contain bioengineered ingredients must disclose that information to consumers.
A new report from the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest finds that the impacts of GE crops on pesticide use must be considered on a case-by-case basis: crop-by-crop and pesticide-by-pesticide, with particular attention to substitution effects and their implications for the net toxicity of pesticides applied to each crop for each use.
I invite you to take a break from the coronavirus news cycle as I summarize three developments you may have missed that have occurred in agricultural biotechnology in the United States since the start of 2020.
