Crops by Roger King 

Monsanto GM seed ban is overturned by US Supreme Court at BBC 06/21/10  The bio-tech company Monsanto can sell genetically modified seeds before safety tests on them are completed, the US Supreme Court has ruled.

A lower court had barred the sale of the modified alfalfa seeds until an environmental impact study could be carried out.

But seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices decided that ruling was unconstitutional.

The seed is modified to be resistant to Monsanto's brand of weedkiller.

The US is the world's largest producer of alfalfa, a grass-like plant used as animal feed.

It is the fourth most valuable crop grown in the country.

Environmentalists had argued that there might be a risk of cross-pollination between genetically modified plants and neighbouring crops.

They also argued over-use of the company's weedkiller Roundup, the chemical treatment the alfalfa is modified to be resistant to, could cause pollution of ground water and lead to resistant "super-weeds".

But Monsanto says claims its products were dangerous amounted to "bad science fiction with no support on the record".

In the Wheat Fields of Kenya, a Budding Epidemic  by Sharon Schmickle  February 18, 2009   GREAT RIFT VALLEY, Kenya -- A virulent new version of a deadly fungus is ravaging wheat in Kenya's most fertile fields and spreading beyond Africa to threaten one of the world's principal food crops, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization.

Stem rust, a killer that farmers thought they had defeated 50 years ago, surfaced here in 1999, jumped the Red Sea to Yemen in 2006 and turned up in Iran last year. Crop scientists say they are powerless to stop its spread and increasingly frustrated in their efforts to find resistant plants.

Nobel Peace laureate Norman Borlaug, the world's leading authority on the disease, said that once established, stem rust can explode to crisis proportions within a year under certain weather conditions.

In the fertile fields of Uganda there are the first green shoots of a possible answer to the food crisis. The green revolution of the 1960s which saw food production catch and outstrip population growth for the first time left Africa behind.

That revolution was driven by a drought and disease-resistant wheat designed by an agronomist from Iowa that yielded unprecedented harvests in Latin America and Asia. Norman Borlaug is not as famous as he should be for a man credited with saving more lives than anyone in history but he was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize.

Uganda's bid to copy the Borlaug's revolution is built on a new breed of rice that can grow in the drier uplands instead of the traditional wetland paddy fields and has doubled the country's production in only four years. Uganda's early success is the first indication that the bid by the Coalition for African Rice Development -- a group of development agencies, led by Japan -- to double rice production on the hungriest continent could work.