India has more than 215 million food-insecure people, many of whom are farmers. Genetically modified (GM) crops have the potential to alleviate this problem by increasing food supplies and strengthening farmer livelihoods. For this to occur, two factors are critical: (i) a change in the regulatory status of GM crops, and (ii) consumer acceptance of GM foods. There are generally two classificati...

Jerusalem artichoke, a native plant to North America has recently been recognized as a promising biomass for bioeconomy development, with a number of advantages over conventional crops such as low input cultivation, high crop yield, wide adaptation to climatic and soil conditions and strong resistance to pests and plant diseases. A variety of bioproducts can be derived from Jerusalem artichoke,...

The recent development in the organic agriculture space in China has been interesting from a business perspective. While China is traditionally a strong producer of organic products, most of the output are exported. However, domestic demand has increased significantly in the past decade, which brought about a growing market. The expansion of this market will not only benefit the companies invol...

Since 2006, many U.S. food and beverage companies have pledged to market healthier foods to children to help combat the childhood obesity epidemic. Despite this, companies' expenditures on online advertising have increased of late. To explore this seemingly contradictory situation, the authors conducted a content analysis of approximately 100 food and beverage brand websites, examining a multit...

Forget about farm-to-fork when it comes to genetically modified (GM) crops. Think farm-to-pharmacy, or farmto-factory. Produced through plant molecular farming (PMF), this new set of transgenic crops is being grown not for food, but to produce medicines and industrial products. For example, potatoes have been modified to produce a vaccine against the Norwalk virus, research that is currently in...

Free, libre, open source software (FLOSS) communities can be very complex and difficult to understand, so quantitative, neutral information about them becomes valuable, especially when they’re large and involve competing companies.1 Fortunately, many FLOSS projects operate in open, public development repositories, which has facilitated the progress of new analytics techniques to study them. In ...