26/July/22

 

A lawsuit filed in Arkansas accuses farmers of joining the Arkansas Seed Growers Association (ASGA) fraudulently, intent on taking over the group and eventually gaining enough clout with the Arkansas State Plant Board to overturn restrictions on a powerful and controversial herbicide, dicamba. The farmers say they’ve been unfairly barred from a group they’re entitled to join, and have sued for reinstatement. The seed association says the farmers joined under the guise of contributing to agriculture. But their “sole purpose for seeking membership was to kick out other members, seize control of the Association, use the ASGA to gain membership on the Plant Board and ultimately begin the process of expanding the use of dicamba in the State of Arkansas,” the association said in a counterclaim against the farmers filed last month in Phillips County Circuit Court. AgTechDaily

 

 

Various commentators have claimed that the uprising in Sri Lanka was caused by a fateful decree former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa made in April 2021 to ban synthetic fertilizers and force the nation’s farmers — prodigious producers of rice and tea, among other crops — to embrace organic agriculture. But Tom Philpott writes that the fundamental problem with blaming Sri Lanka’s current struggles on the fertiliser ban is that the economic crisis predates Rajapaksa’s rash move — and may have inspired it. The true cause of the crisis is the result of questionable economic policies, including taking on huge amounts of expensive debt and launching ambitious infrastructure projects that have failed to attract investment. Mother Jones

 

 

Remember the name of Chinese researcher “Kangpeng Xiao", because the National Institutes of Health want you to forget him, writes Paul D. Thacker. Last week, the NIH filed a motion in a Virginia court to seal portions of documents that reference the Chinese researcher and an NIH official in a lawsuit filed against the agency for redacting and covering up records that might explain how the pandemic began. Kangpeng Xiao’s name became public in December 2020, when the nonprofit US Right to Know published a report on revisions to coronavirus sequences that Chinese researchers had added to the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive. These datasets involved key studies that virologists were using to promote the now discredited theory that the COVID-19 virus may have passed from pangolins to humans. “These revisions are odd because they occurred after publication, and without any rationale, explanation or validation,” wrote Sainath Suryanarayanan, in the report for US Right to Know. The Disinformation Chronicle

 

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