Stronger Plants, Stronger Science, and Stronger Communication
Two economics professors in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University have written an interesting piece about local food, titled The Locavore’s Dilemma: Why Pineapples Shouldn’t Be Grown in North Dakota. Jayson L. Lusk is Professor and Willard Sparks Endowed Chair of Agribusiness and F. Bailey Norwood is Associate Professor. In short, the economists argue “there…
In an earlier post, we quoted Klaus Ammann’s investigation of maize yields and the differences between the United States and Europe in improvement in these yields over time. This post provides an update of this story, showing encouraging recent progress in United States maize yields per hectare, as compared to a discouraging parameter for maize…
China’s hungry againANDREW MARSHALL03 Dec, 2010 11:19 AM Farm on LineTHE global economy might be only running in second gear, but demand for food is fast moving into supercharged territory again, particularly in hungry China. In October average food prices jumped 10 per cent as commodity prices leapt in the dragon economy, which is now…
Global Harvest Initiative GAP report 2010 A new report has come out which explains why agricultural innovation is important for conserving resources and benefiting the global environment.It does this by showing that we need improvements in what economists call total factor productivity of agriculture to meet the demands on the farm output that will rise…
Read More “A sustainability gap needing to be filled by farm innovation” »
GMO Pundit participated in a session running in parallel with the conference of parties (COP) biodiversity discussions that occurred last week in Nagoya, Japan. He had an opportunity to frame some points to make to the delegates who are interested in conserving biodiversity, an issue the Pundit is passionate about too. He does worry that…
Economic Impacts of Policies Affecting Crop Biotechnology and Trade – Kym Anderson, New Biotechnology (in Press), full paper athttp://web.services.adelaide.edu.au/cies/publications/present/CIES_DP1012.pdf Agricultural biotechnologies, and especially transgenic crops, have the potential to boost food security in developing countries by offering higher incomes for farmers and lower priced and better quality food for consumers. That potential is being heavily…
It pays not to cultivate GM crops, survey findsBy Steve Connor, Science EditorFriday, 8 OctoberUK Independent The first economic analysis of growing genetically modified crops on a wide scale has found that the biggest winners were the farmers who decided not to grow them.