While Americans on the mainland remain blissfully ignorant of the issues surrounding genetically engineered foods, the people in Hawaii have it literally, shoved in their faces. Hawaii is Ground Zero for the biotechs, who can run four crop rotations per year, in the idal climate for growing. Hawaii has more experimental crops per acre, than any place on the planet. Many of Hawaii's citizens have been converted to gmo free activists, by the devastating aftermath, from the invasion of biotech, into their land and their lives.

a) Adopting herbicide tolerant soybeans, under conventional tillage, reduces household labor by 23 percent. Consequently, "It appears that farmers are substituting HT soybeans for household labor, freeing up the resource for off-farm employment and leisure."

b) Neither Bt corn nor HT corn has a statistically significant impact on household labor. This result can easily be explained, in the absence of Bt technology many corn farmers simply do not attempt to control for corn borers.

c) Unlike Bt corn, adopting Bt cotton saves household labor. Bt cotton requires less spraying. This difference amounts to a 29% decrease in household labor.

d) With the exception of corn, we find that GM crops save labor.

America’s appetite for fuel ethanol could take food away from some of the world’s poorest people. The price of corn and other crops is soaring because of the demand for grain to make ethanol, a gasoline additive, and that means the government’s budget won’t buy as much food as it used to. The price of corn alone, a key food in Africa, has more than doubled in the past year. [...] News of greater demand in corn yields boosted corn prices to their highest level in ten years Friday. Wilmington-based DuPont, the largest U.S. corn seed producer, and its St. Louis-based competitor, Monsanto Co., which produces genetically modified seeds, are expected to benefit. Last year, Delaware farmers produced 6 percent more corn, or 23.3 million bushels, than in 2005.

Association of Official Seed Certifying Agencies (AOSCA) CEO Chet Boruff notes efforts are being intensified to assure seed purity for 2007 amid demand for a growing variety of biotech crops and concern over export “contamination.” [...] Boruff noted seed genetic purity is a “very big issue” especially for the GMO-sensitive European Union, a major U.S. corn gluten buyer that has influenced biotech acceptance policies among U.S. grain processors. But assuring purity poses an equally large challenge for the seed industry.

Monsanto Company and Divergence, Inc. announced today an extension to their ongoing collaboration agreement to develop nematode-resistant soybeans, as well as the accomplishment of a key initial milestone. The two companies initiated this relationship in 2004. Under the agreement, Monsanto had an option to extend the agreement for one year. Due to research and development accomplishments, Monsanto decided to exercise this option and take advantage of extending the collaboration for an additional year.

Monsanto Company and Divergence, Inc. announced today an extension to their ongoing collaboration agreement to develop nematode-resistant soybeans, as well as the accomplishment of a key initial milestone. The two companies initiated this relationship in 2004. Under the agreement, Monsanto had an option to extend the agreement for one year. Due to research and development accomplishments, Monsanto decided to exercise this option and take advantage of extending the collaboration for an additional year.

The Supreme Court has opened the door to a category of patent lawsuits that a lower court had barred, issuing a decision that will probably shift power in the courtroom from bigger patent-owning companies to smaller start-up companies that rely on obtaining licenses for patented technology. The court's 8-1 decision Tuesday held that the holder of a patent license can sue to challenge the patent's validity without first refusing to pay royalties and putting itself in breach of the license agreement.

With the use of transgenic crops expanding around the globe, we need to decide what level of unapproved plants we are willing to accept in our diets. Zero is not an option, says Heidi Ledford. Steve Linscombe still isn't quite sure how it happened. The director of the Louisiana State University AgCenter for Rice Research knows that he grew a few lines of transgenic rice in field trials between 2001 and 2003. He also knows that one of those lines, LLRICE601, was grown on less than one acre. What he is not clear on is how the line then wended its way into the food supply. That little mystery is now the subject of an official investigation and a class-action lawsuit.

cientists have discovered a new source of stems cells and have used them to create muscle, bone, fat, blood vessel, nerve and liver cells in the laboratory. The first report showing the isolation of broad potential stem cells from the amniotic fluid that surrounds developing embryos was published today in Nature Biotechnology. "Our hope is that these cells will provide a valuable resource for tissue repair and for engineered organs as well," said Anthony Atala, M.D., senior researcher and director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Countering Charles Darwin’s view that evolution occurs gradually, UC Irvine scientists have discovered that plants with short life cycles can evolutionally adapt in just a few years to climate change. This finding suggests that quick-growing plants such as weeds may cope better with global warming than slower-growing plants such as Redwood trees – a phenomenon that could lead to future changes in the Earth’s plant life. “Some species evolve fast enough to keep up with environmental change,” said Arthur Weis, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “Global warming may increase the pace of this change so that certain species may have difficulty keeping up. Plants with longer life cycles will have fewer generations over which to evolve.”