In a joint document, as reported by investigative journalist Dario Aranda in the Argentine newspaper Pagina12, organisations from Asia, Africa, and Latin America state that HB4 GMO wheat from the Bioceres company has not been tested for safety and is less productive than conventional wheat. The organisations, from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, denounced the harmful effects of GM wheat, which is already being consumed in Argentina and threatens to reach other countries. In the detailed document, social movements, peasants and Indigenous peoples requested the intervention of United Nations special rapporteurs due to the risks to food, health, and the environment posed by the GM wheat. They confirmed that there are no independent studies affirming its safety, denounced the dangerous herbicide glufosinate ammonium, which it is engineered to tolerate, and stated that according to official Argentine government data, the GM wheat is less productive than conventional wheat. GMWatch

 

 

Between 2016 and 2022, investors poured almost $3 billion into cultivated meat and seafood companies. Yet despite nearly a decade of work and a great many messianic pronouncements, it is increasingly clear that a broader cultivated meat revolution was never a real prospect, and definitely not within the few years we have left to avert climate catastrophe. Interviews with almost 60 industry investors and insiders, including many who have been employed by or been part of the leadership teams of these companies, reveal a litany of squandered resources, broken promises and unproven science. Founders, hemmed in by their own unrealistic proclamations, cut corners, such as using ingredients derived from slaughtered animals. Investors, swept up in the excitement of the moment, wrote cheque after cheque despite significant technological obstacles. Costs refused to enter the realm of plausible as launch targets came and went. All the while, nobody could achieve anything close to meaningful scale. And yet companies rushed to build expensive facilities and pushed scientists to exceed what was possible, creating the illusion of a thrilling race to market. Now, as venture capital dries up across industries and this sector’s disappointing progress becomes more visible, the reckoning will be difficult for many to survive. Investors will be eager to find out what went wrong. For the rest of us, a more pressing question is why anyone ever thought it could go right. Why did so many people buy into the dream that cultivated meat would save us? New York Times (in case of access problems, an archived version of this article is here)

 

 

Four years ago this week, publisher Taylor & Francis released a commentary in their journal Emerging Microbes & Infections — the third most popular paper published by Taylor & Francis in 2020 — that violated their own ethical policies and apparently flouted their own norms for peer review. It claimed people were spreading a “conspiracy theory” if they speculated whether the COVID pandemic started in a Wuhan lab. When emails later came to light exposing that this commentary was corrupt, Paul D. Thacker emailed Taylor & Francis in January 2022, providing them with the pertinent emails, and asking them to explain whether they would take action, as the essay broke their own ethics rules. To this day, Taylor & Francis has taken no action. The Disinformation Chronicle

 

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