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Genetically Modified Microorganisms: What Are the Risks, and Who’s Watching?
by Aaron Lerner, Arnon D. Lieber, Cass Nelson-Dooley, André Leu, Michelle Perro, Geoffrey Koch, Carina Benzvi, and Jeffrey Smith
When most people hear “GMO,” they think of crops – corn or soybeans engineered to resist pests. But scientists have been quietly engineering something far smaller and potentially far more consequential: microorganisms. Bacteria, yeasts, and fungi have been genetically modified and, in some cases, released into the environment on a massive scale, sometimes without the public even knowing.
A new review article published in the journal Microorganisms by a team of eight scientists and physicians argues that we are moving too fast. The technology to create genetically modified microorganisms (GMMs) has outpaced the regulations designed to keep them in check, and the potential consequences, for human health, for soil, and for the climate, deserve urgent attention.
Mexico’s Food Sovereignty Remains Under Threat From Genetically Modified Corn and Pressure From Multinational Corporations
by Jeny Pascacio
“The two years of silence from the Ministry of Economy (SE), despite four rulings ordering it to activate the mechanisms of the USMCA (free trade agreement between Mexico, the United States, and Canada) against the United States for pressuring Mexico to import genetically modified corn (GMC), respond to a strictly commercial interest, said Mercedes López Martínez, common representative of the Collective Lawsuit for Corn.
During the six-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, two presidential decrees were issued banning the importation of GMC. In the second decree, issued in 2023, the ban on GMC for human consumption was strengthened, establishing that it cannot be imported or planted and that, gradually, it must also not be present in the livestock industry or other food-related industrial uses. The United States responded by requesting an arbitration panel and filed a complaint against Mexico for breaching the USMCA.”
Who Is Financing the Future of African Agriculture?
by AFSA Africa
“The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) launches a new report asking a critical question: Is the African Development Bank (AfDB) financing food systems that truly serve Africa’s people?
Based on an analysis of 20 AfDB-supported agricultural projects, this study, researched by Dr Keiron Audain for AFSA, reveals a troubling pattern. Despite strong rhetoric around food security and climate resilience, a significant share of AfDB financing continues to reinforce agro-industrial models built on monocultures, synthetic inputs, and corporate value chains. Meanwhile, farmer-managed seed systems, agroecological practices, territorial markets, and Indigenous knowledge remain underfunded and marginalised.
The report exposes persistent gaps in transparency and participation. Communities are frequently consulted but rarely empowered to shape decisions. Investments that affect land, livelihoods, and diets are too often designed without meaningful co-creation with the smallholder farmers who feed the continent.
At a time when Africa faces escalating climate shocks, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity, public finance cannot continue to support systems that deepen dependency, degrade soils, and concentrate power in corporate hands. Africa does not need a blind expansion of industrial agriculture. It needs investment in agroecology, crop diversity, resilient seed systems, and local food economies that strengthen sovereignty and community control.
This report is not just an analysis. It is a call to redirect agricultural finance toward justice, ecological integrity, and food sovereignty. AfDB and African governments must ensure that public resources build resilient, community-rooted food systems rather than entrenching models that undermine them.”
Meet Our Local Expert: Homero Blas Bustamante, México
by Lara Su Tansan
“Mexico sits at a particular crossroads. It has one of the richest agricultural traditions on the planet: milpa systems, polycultures, campesino knowledge that runs centuries deep, and at the same time, decades of policy that pushed agrochemical dependency so far into smallholder farming that it stopped feeling like a choice. Herbicides, synthetic fertilisers, monoculture.
Homero Blas Bustamante has spent his career making them visible again.
He is an agronomist and a farmer. He works his own land in Cafetitlán, Oaxaca, as a real testing ground where he tries things, watches what happens, and adjusts. He doesn’t ask farmers to take risks he hasn’t taken himself. That matters more than most credentials.”
Agroecology Has a PR Problem. Here’s How We Can Solve It
by Robbie Blake
“Ask ten people on the street if they’ve heard of agroecology, and most will say no. Ask what it might mean, and they’ll guess it’s something scientific (like entomology, perhaps?).
The agroecology movement is growing in recognition and influence. But it has a PR problem. As a movement we are locked behind technical jargon and inaccessible language. And that makes us easy to ignore.
Definitions of agroecology seem obscure to the layperson. (The 13 principles and 10 elements, anyone? How many could you name?) Here’s but one recent example from my inbox:
‘promoting soil regeneration, diversified crop and livestock production, reduced dependency on external inputs, circular systems and economies, landscape multifunctionality, good governance…’ It goes on.
This isn’t just an agroecology problem. Across the food movement, we’ve paid too little attention to the frames and stories we use to win popular support. We assume our audiences share our vocabulary and associations – but often we just sound weird."
Digital Colonialism: Is AI the New Frontier of the Battle for African Agriculture?
by Battle For African Agriculture Podcast
“In this episode of The Battle for African Agriculture, Dr. Million Belay speaks with Jim Thomas, an AI Market and Power Fellow with the European AI and Society Fund who tracks the societal impacts of emerging technologies and corporate power, especially on biodiversity, climate justice, and human rights. He explains why, in his view, biodigital agriculture and generative AI fundamentally clash with agroecology.
Jim argues that these technologies are not neutral digital tools but extractive systems dependent on intensive energy use, mineral extraction, water consumption, and continuous data capture. He traces the shift from genetic engineering that tied seeds to chemicals, to digital platforms that now tie farmers to data driven prescriptions. Monsanto’s 2013 purchase of The Climate Corporation marked a turning point, repositioning the company as a data business through platforms such as Climate FieldView that collect farm level data and guide decisions through artificial intelligence.”
Check more episodes from The battle for African Agriculture podcast here.
Learn more
Check more episodes from The battle for African Agriculture podcast here
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From Climate Problem to Climate Solution
by Steve Valk
“One of the catastrophic problems of climate change is that it diminishes our ability to grow food — prolonged droughts, devastating heat, crop-destroying floods and unpredictable weather patterns.
Based on a study published last year in Nature, the Stanford School of Sustainability reports that at the current rate, climate change will reduce the yield of staple crops — wheat, corn, soybeans, barley, and cassava — by 24 percent by the end of the century. The exception to staples is rice, which benefits from higher nighttime temperatures. But the lower supply of most staples, combined with higher demand — there continues to be more mouths to feed — means we will pay more for the food we eat.
But agriculture is not just a casualty of climate change. It’s also a cause. It’s estimated that the processes of growing food contribute roughly one third of the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating up our world.”
Kindah Ibrahim on Rebuilding Syria’s Agriculture Sector
by Marianne Dhenin
“Rebel fighters seized Damascus in December 2024, ending the half-century-long rule of Bashar al-Assad and his father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad. Now, having toppled the family that sparked a civil war in response to large-scale protests in 2011, the Syrian people have a long-awaited chance to rebuild. But it comes as the harms of climate change are deepening across the region.
Temperatures in Syria are rising, water stress is worsening, and desertification creeps across new land each year. Results of the UN’s first Global Stocktake, announced at COP28 in 2023, warned that without more substantial commitments to climate action, the planet faces a rise in temperature of three degrees by 2100, which could render swathes of the Eastern Mediterranean region and broader Middle East unlivable. Making matters worse, Syria must grapple with the fallout of conflict-related pollution and chronic neglect and mismanagement of natural resources during the fourteen-year-long war. (For more on how Syria’s new government is addressing climate change, read my earlier reporting in Atmos.)”
ROO Learning Series: Weed Management Beyond Tillage
by Canadian Organic Growers
“In the early months of 2025, the Regenerative Organic Oats (ROO) program hosted a series of virtual gatherings that created farmer-to-farmer learning opportunities focused on key topics in regenerative organic agriculture. This resource shares the experiences, insights, and advice of ROO farmers on weed management beyond tillage, highlighting multiple approaches to managing weeds in a regenerative organic system. Explore this resource to gain first-hand insights into real-life scenarios and discover approaches that might be a perfect fit for your own context.”
Green Lightening Future
by Jim Boak
“This was the latest chart I could find that compared net income earned by farmers to the net income of the input supply companies. Maybe current information is difficult to find because powerful entities do not want anyone to see that understands the message and has the ability to do something about it.
Input companies, which are for the most part either mines or pharmaceutical giants; know they need to change their products and their role in the food and feed production chain because they are the same companies doing the research, advocating for and selling farmers a few of the depleted and in some cases totally absent soil organisms that their legacy products continue to kill.
Lets leave the “Icide” so called “crop protection” products aside and talk about the nutrient side for a moment.”
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Bats: Regenerative Ecosystem Allies
This interview/article, written by Roger D. Jones, is in support of Vía Orgánica and The Billion Agave Project — a regenerative movement dedicated to soil restoration, water conservation, biodiversity protection, and climate resilience.
‘AI for Whom?’ Inside Brazil’s Data Centre Boom
The government’s legislative push for the sector is stalling, while experts warn of its socio-environmental risks and governance gaps.
Scientists Looked Beneath One of Oldest Trees on Earth. What They Found Is Astounding
The researchers discovered a hidden world of life among the roots of Chile's ancient alerce trees. Here's why that's important.
International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists
“The United Nations declared 2026 as the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP). Covering about half the world’s land, rangelands are home to unique biodiversity and pastoral communities whose livelihoods depend on them. Pastoralists raise animals, contribute to food security, and hold diverse cultural heritage and local and indigenous knowledge, preserving ecosystems across the world.
Syngenta Says It Will Stop Making Pesticide Linked to Parkinson’s Disease
Company will halt production of controversial paraquat weed killer by end of June as it faces thousands of lawsuits.
In a 6-Year Trial, Diverse Cropping Was a Triple-Win: Less Emissions, More Income, More Yields
Simply adding sweet potato, peanuts, and soy crops to the regular wheat-maize mix across the North China Plain could offset national emissions by almost 6%, a new study found.
How to Design a Food Forest with Swales Layout
“In today’s blog post, I want to showcase the exact design process of creating a layout for a food forest with swales. But before we start with the process, you have to understand one crucial thing about your site: the slope of the land.
Spatially Explicit Global Assessment of Cropland Greenhouse Gas Emissions Circa 2020
Emission areal intensities averaged 2 MgCO2e ha−1 globally, with higher intensities in Asia and Europe, where croplands also achieved high caloric productivity. Spatial correlations between emission intensity and production efficiency reveal geographic trade-offs between mitigation potential and food production. The resulting dataset establishes a unified global framework for a spatially explicit assessment of agricultural emissions and efficiency.
Efficient Use Of Land: An Underappreciated Climate Benefit of Agroforestry
Some of agroforestry’s biggest benefits are getting more notice these days. Carbon sequestration, resilience to extreme weather events, and improvements to water quality, wildlife habitat, and soil health are among these important benefits. But agroforestry also has less-discussed impacts of critical importance, from farm scale to planetary.
Food, Trade And Turmoil: Navigating Global Disorder
Sweeping US tariffs are sending shockwaves through global markets, sparking retaliations, market upheaval & fears of a global recession. The Global South — already grappling with a historic debt crisis — is now reeling from dramatic aid cuts and punitive terms of trade. With food prices soaring, farmers squeezed and hunger intensifying, food systems are among the first to feel the strain.
Feral Horses and Cattle Create More Resilient Nature, Rewilding Study Reveals
Protected natural areas across Europe are changing. Climate change, with rising temperatures and heavy rainfall, is turbocharging the growth of shrubs and trees, choking the flowers and insects that need the light and heat of open spaces. Traditionally, this scenario prompts nature managers to reach for chainsaws and brush cutters to keep the landscape open.
Corporate Bioinputs: Agribusiness’s New Toxic Trap
Up until the end of the 1990s, Monsanto was mainly a company focussed on producing and selling chemical pesticides. These kill bugs quickly and indiscriminately, ideal for large, monoculture farms and routine spraying, albeit devastating for biodiversity and human health. Monsanto didn’t care at all about non-chemical pesticides like those made with the soil microbe Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). So-called biopesticides, are slower acting and suited to smaller-scale production, with farmers monitoring the crops closely and spraying only when necessary. Though less harmful, biopesticides make much less money for companies, as they usually fall outside the patent industry’s grasp.
Conservation Agriculture: Helping to Return to Within Planetary Boundaries
Conservation Agriculture (CA) offers the only universally applicable agricultural practices that can be adopted at scale and speed, i.e., across all agro-ecological zones within the coming 1–2 decades. We review the rationale, evolution, and prospects of CA across the world.
Grasslands and Wetlands Are Being Gobbled Up By Agriculture, Mostly Livestock
A new study takes a first-of-its kind look at how farming converts non-forested areas and major carbon sinks into cropland and pasture.
Colorado Bill Would Curb Uses of Crop Seeds Coated With Harmful Pesticides
In a move that reflects mounting US opposition to a class of harmful insecticides linked to environmental and human health risks, Colorado lawmakers last week introduced a bill to curb the use of neonicotinoids.
SFI 2026 Update: It’s Time to Mobilise for Below 3HA Farms
The Landworkers’ Alliance wants to express its huge disappointment at the Government’s recent announcement that the 2026 Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) will exclude farmers and growers operating on fewer than 3 hectares of land.
When It Comes to Greening the Desert, Rattlesnakes May Be Prolific Gardeners
New research shows that seeds excreted by the venomous reptiles germinate at a higher rate.
How to Start a Seed and Plant Swap
These neighborhood gatherings build community, protect biodiversity, and encourage new gardeners.
Farmer Access to Seeds Is Vital for Healthy Local Food Systems
On February 19, IATP submitted comments to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Peasants, emphasizing the importance of protecting farmers’ Right to Seeds including the right to save, use, exchange, and sell farm-saved seeds. See the full comments here, and read on for an introduction from submission author Shiney Varghese.
UN Warns! The World Is Entering ‘Water Bankruptcy’ and Billions Could Be in Serious Danger
Experts estimate that three out of four people live in countries facing water shortages, contamination, or drought. Around four billion people experience water scarcity for at least one month each year. Roughly 70% percent of major aquifers are in decline, raising fears that some losses could be impossible to reverse.
Saving Nature: 11 Women to Watch in Science
These women are using their hard-earned knowledge to protect our planet already ravaged by brutal storms, epic floods and intense wildfires.
PELUM Kenya Is Advancing a Vision for Climate-Smart Farming
The Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (PELUM) Association is working to advance agroecological principles and practices in East, Central, and Southern Africa. Their Kenyan chapter, PELUM Kenya, engages in advocacy, networking, knowledge sharing and capacity building to support the country’s smallholder farmers produce food in a way that heals the planet and supports their livelihoods.
Farmer’s Hands-off Approach Creates Unusual Lamb With Distinct Flavour Chefs Say Is Like Nothing Else in Australia
Frank Egan imagined he would spend the rest of his days peacefully farming the English Suffolk sheep he had been running for more than 20 years. It was a fork in the road that ultimately led to a years-long "experiment", which transformed the way the 83-year-old farms and has also helped expats feel more at home in Australia.
The Battle Over Seeds in Latin America: The Legal Siege and People’s Response
Corporate encroachment is increasingly disguised as legal protection. Under laws that allegedly safeguard seeds, doors are opened for their registration, certification, or privatisation. Faced with this encroachment, Indigenous and rural communities defend their seeds as if they were a living territory. What is at stake is not just agriculture, but an essential pillar of Latin American societies.
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Upcoming Events
In Person:
03/24 - GreenTech Americas 2026, Mexico.
03/25 - Be prepared: Civil food resilience, Northern Ireland.
03/26 - Congreso Compostaje y Regeneración de Suelos, Colombia.
03/28 - Certificación en Diseño de Permacultura (PDC), Mexico.
Online:
03/23 - Webinar - Farm Path - A Farm Foundation Program.
03/25 - Webinar – Cover Crops Made Simple: From Planting Basics to Livestock Grazing.
03/26 - Webinar – The Hidden Power of Forests: Connection and Cooperation from Roots to Canopy.
03/30 - Webinar – Especialización en Agricultura Regenerativa.
04/01 - Webinar – Especialización en Manejo Holístico.
*Click here to view full events calendar and submit your own
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Regeneration International is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit, dedicated to building a global network of farmers, scientists, businesses, activists, educators, journalists, policymakers and consumers who will promote and put into practice regenerative agriculture and land-use practices that: provide abundant, nutritious food; revitalize local economies; regenerate soil fertility and water-retention capacity; nurture biodiversity; and restore climate stability by reducing agricultural greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time drawing down excess atmospheric carbon and sequestering it in the soil.
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