Benoît Biteau, a French Green MEP, believes he's got the answer to the global food crisis. And it doesn't involve dismantling the European Green Deal. Biteau has slammed food policymakers for their response to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The EU rushed to suspend environmental rules on leaving space for nature on farms so that farmers could quickly boost the production of animal feed to replace the corn stuck in Ukraine. “It’s pretty much the exact opposite response than the one we should be taking,” Biteau said. The MEP said that organic farming performs well, and that high food prices are mainly being driven by market speculators who profit from unfounded fears of future shortages, and that entrenched farm lobby interests are instrumentalizing the war to thwart the bloc’s urgently needed green goals for farming.“Today it’s the war in Ukraine used as an alibi, tomorrow it’ll be droughts, then floods. The truth is we need to act fast because otherwise we’re going to see even more violent climate events which will truly threaten food sovereignty,” he said. Politico

 

 

The US Food Sovereignty Alliance has honoured Food Sovereignty Ghana as the 2022 International Food Sovereignty Prize winner for its outstanding work in promoting safe and organic food across the country and beyond. Edwin Kweku Andoh Baffour, the communications director of FSG, said the award came at a moment of reflection on the past decade and the contribution that FSG had made to protect human health, animal life, and the environment. He said, "Ghana doesn't need GMOs, farmers require investment in irrigation and post-harvest technology. Bringing in GMOs won't stop crops from rotting on farms." Modern Ghana

 

 

The director of a Boston University laboratory that conducted potentially controversial research on the viruses that cause Covid-19 said his institution didn’t clear the work with the National Institutes of Health because it wasn’t funded by the federal agency. In response to questioning from STAT, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which had awarded two grants to the research group, said that it should have been informed about the nature of the work beforehand, in order for a review to be conducted. STAT News

 

 

The omicron variant of the virus that causes Covid-19 is more transmissible than earlier variants, which has helped drive so many infections that health officials have essentially lost count. But omicron is also less deadly than past variants. Against this background, scientists at Boston University decided to see if they could engineer in a lab a new Covid virus — called the omicron S-bearing virus — that was as infectious as omicron (that is, extremely infectious), but more likely to cause severe disease. It turns out they could. Which we know because they published the details over the weekend. Vox

 

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