Monsanto Co, the giant seed company, expects to begin sales in 2016 of soybeans engineered for tolerance to a wider range of herbicides, says the St Louis Business Journal. It cites a Wall Street Journal story in which Monsanto chief executive Robert Fraley says the new varieties, calls Roundup Ready 2Xtend, are on track for U.S. approval this year and approval globally during 2015.
In an essay in Corn and Soybean Digest, Fraley says ag biotech and conventional breeding can work side by side in meeting world hunger. “The debate over GMO has tended to sidetrack progress on development of a common agenda to solving the global food security problem,” wrote Fraley, who says, “it actually isn’t difficult to figure out where the common ground lies.”
Anti-GMO activist Vandana Shiva of India is profiled by The New Yorker. Shiva argues that “by engineering, patenting, and transforming seeds into costly packets of intellectual property, multinational corporations such as Monsanto, with considerable assistance from the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United States government, and even philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are attempting to impose ‘food totalitarianism’ on the world. She describes the fight against agricultural biotechnology as a global war against a few giant seed companies on behalf of the billions of farmers who depend on what they themselves grow to survive.”