BBC – The Brazilian government has announced trade sanctions against a variety of American goods in retaliation for illegal US subsidies to cotton farmers. The World Trade Organization (WTO) approved the sanctions in a rare move. Brazil published a list of 100 US goods that would be subject to import tariffs in 30 days, unless the two governments reached a last-minute accord. It said it regretted the sanctions, but that eight years of litigation had failed to produce a result. Read article
BBC – An American medical charity has warned that thousands of Burmese refugees in Bangladesh are facing starvation. Physicians for Human Rights said government authorities are preventing the Rohingya, a Muslim minority, from receiving adequate care. Read Article
Guardian – An Observer investigation reveals how rich countries faced by a global food shortage now farm an area double the size of the UK to guarantee supplies for their citizens. We turned off the main road to Awassa, talked our way past security guards and drove a mile across empty land before we found what will soon be Ethiopia’s largest greenhouse. Nestling below an escarpment of the Rift Valley, the development is far from finished, but the plastic and steel structure already stretches over 20 hectares – the size of 20 football pitches. Read article
Daily Telegraph – Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, is planning to tackle the American fondness for sugary soft drinks with a so -called ’soda tax’. Mr Bloomberg, whose administration has already targeted unhealthy trans fats in food and banned smoking from many public areas, has urged New York state legislators to impose a tax of a cent per ounce on the sugary drinks. Read article
WASHINGTON TIMES -A team of researchers from universities across the nation are urgently trying to develop a strain of “super” honeybees to ward off a mysterious malady that has been decimating U.S. colonies for the past three years.Scientists continue to search for the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a malady that has greatly reduced the U.S. bee population. “Over the past three years on average, our surveys have said that we’ve lost about 30 percent of the (2.4 million) colonies nationwide,” said Jeffery Pettis, a lead bee researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Of that figure, the government suspects 13 percent is because of CCD. Read Article
Drinking sugar-sweetened soft drinks has been linked to an increase in new cases of diabetes and heart disease. More people now drink soft, sport and fruit drinks daily, and the increase has led to thousands more diabetes and heart disease cases over the past decade, according to research presented to the American Heart Association’s annual conference. Read Article
Reuters) – Foodborne illnesses cost the United States $152 billion in health-related expenses each year, far more than prior estimates, according to a study released by consumer and public health groups on Wednesday. Food safety advocates are hoping the study will boost efforts in Congress to overhaul the nation’s antiquated food safety system that has seen consumer confidence plunge. Read article
AP — Congressional investigators say the Food and Drug Administration should pay more attention to the safety of some food ingredients, including one involved in a widespread recall this week. A report released Friday by the Government Accountability Office points out that some spices, artificial flavors and other ingredients are not subject to frequent safety reviews by the FDA because the agency or manufacturers deem them “generally recognized as safe.” A flavor-enhancing hydrolyzed vegetable protein recalled Thursday due to salmonella contamination is among those ingredients. Read Article
The Independent – The introduction of a genetically modified potato in Europe risks the development of human diseases that fail to respond to antibiotics, it was claimed last night. German chemical giant BASF this week won approval from the European Commission for commercial growing of a starchy potato with a gene that could resist antibiotics – useful in the fight against illnesses such as tuberculosis. Farms in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic may plant the potato for industrial use, with part of the tuber fed to cattle, according to BASF, which fought a 13-year battle to win approval for Amflora. But other EU member states, including Italy and Austria and anti-GM campaigners angrily attacked the move, claiming it could result in a health disaster. Read Article
Ed – Slowly but surely the global food supply falls under corporate patent. Irrespective of the possible health affects of GM crops, there are considerable civil liberties and moral implications of mankind’s most basic need being controlled by corporate psychology.
Dailiy Telegraph – Up to 45 per cent of important nutrients are lost in fresh vegetable by the time they are consumed. It can take up to two weeks for fresh produce to reach the table from being picked although the survey found that 80 per cent of shoppers thought the fresh vegetables in supermarkets were less than four days old. Read Article
AFP – One of the most common weed-killers in the world, atrazine, causes chemical castration in frogs and could be killing off amphibian populations worldwide, a study published showed. Researchers compared 40 male control frogs with 40 male frogs reared from the moment they hatched from eggs until full sexual maturity in atrazine concentrations in the range that animals experience year-round in areas where the chemical herbicide is found. Read Article
Bloomberg – A few miles beyond an irrigated golf course on the outskirts of Damascus, scores of refugees fleeing drought in Syria’s northeastern breadbasket have settled into tents on a rocky field. “Our wells are dry and the rains don’t come,” said Ahmed Abu Hamed Mohieddin, a wheat farmer from the town of Qamishli in the Fertile Crescent, a rich agricultural area stretching from Iraq to Israel. “We cannot depend on God’s will for our crops. We come to the city, where the money is.” He and three sons work as porters in the capital’s vegetable markets. They are among about 300,000 families driven to Damascus, Aleppo and other cities in one of the “largest internal displacements in the Middle East in recent years,” according to a Feb. 17 report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Read Article
Ed – It should also be noted that Syria has an estimated 1.2 million Iraqi refugees living inside its borders currently
Daily Mail – Fruit juices drunk by millions of children each day could contain a harmful chemical linked to cancer, scientists have warned.
Researchers have found high levels of antimony – which can be lethal in large doses – in many popular brands.
Scientists from the University of Copenhagen found that bottles of fruit juice and squash contained up to 2.5 times more of the substance as is deemed ’safe’ in tap water, under EU guidelines. Read article
Ed. – “Antimony Facts: Antimony itself and many of its compounds are highly toxic. Although not as prevalent, antimony poisoning causes similar effects (to) arsenic poisoning. It can cause headache, body pain and dizziness, and if its concentration rises, poisoning could result in violent and frequent vomiting, and may even lead to death.” Source Site The link on this site (Source Site) to antimony poisoning provides more details.
Dailiy Telegraph – Somali insurgents on Sunday barred the World Food Programme from the famine and war-plagued Horn of Africa country, where the UN says four million people – half the population – needs emergency food aid. The Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab movement, which controls most of central and southern Somalia, said food distributed by the UN agency had undermined local farmers and accused it of acting with a political agenda. Read Article
The Times – Using fossil fuel in vehicles is better for the environment than so-called green fuels made from crops, according to a government study seen by The Times. The findings show that the Department for Transport’s target for raising the level of biofuel in all fuel sold in Britain will result in millions of acres of forest being logged or burnt down and converted to plantations. The study, likely to force a review of the target, concludes that some of the most commonly-used biofuel crops fail to meet the minimum sustainability standard set by the European Commission. Read Article
Daily Mail – A factory farm housing more than 8,000 ‘battery cows’ will be built in the English countryside. Under the controversial plans, Britain’s largest ever dairy herd will be kept in industrial-scale sheds with little access to pasture or sunshine. The cows will be milked around the clock to produce 430,000 pints each day – while their slurry will be recycled to generate power for the national grid. Read Article
Ed – It doesn’t take a genius to appreciate that the vast quantities of antibiotics and growth hormones pumped into these poor animals so to achieve their commercial targets will then move into the human food supply through the milk.
Globe & Mail – Even Jerry Seinfeld knows bees are no laughing matter. When they are at risk, so is much of the world’s food supply – which is why recent colony collapses sent scientists rushing to their labs for answers. They ultimately blamed a rogue virus. But one Vancouver scientist says there’s a bigger problem. And the real crisis still lies ahead. Read Article
Reuters – The saturated fat found mainly in meat and dairy products has a bad reputation, but a new analysis of published studies finds no clear link between people’s intake of saturated fat and their risk of developing heart disease. Research has shown that saturated fat can raise blood levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol, and elevated LDL is a risk factor for heart disease and stroke. Because of this, experts generally advise people to limit their intake of fatty meat, butter and full-fat dairy. Read article
Ed. – Nature tends to be efficient. LDLs (Low Density Lipoproteins – Lipo/lipid = fat) and HDL’s are both necessary parts of our (High Density Lipoproteins) body’s workings. Our nerves are made with cholesterol and other fats, so we eliminate them from our diet at our peril.
BBC – Extracts of a fruit grown on tropical vines appears to have breast cancer blocking powers, say researchers. Scientists found key ingredients of the green and knobbly bitter melon fruit interfered with chemical pathways involved in cancer growth. It turned off signals telling the breast cancer cells to divide and switched on signals encouraging them to commit suicide. Read article
Gather – Under pressure from small farmers and organic consumers, the US Department of Agriculture announced on February 5, 2010, that it is suspending its controversial National Animal Identification System (NAIS) and offering a new approach to tracking animal disease and food contamination. This is a major victory for the Organic Consumers Association, our allies, and organic farmers and ranchers, who have complained that the USDA’s goal of tagging every farm animal in country wouldn’t do anything to prevent disease, would be unnecessary and expensive for small and organic farmers, and couldn’t be enforced without violations of privacy and religion. Read Article
Ed – The trialling of RFID chips in animals is ongoing. You are next.
PhysOrg.com – Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago Institute for Health Research and Policy have received a $2.2 million federal grant to determine whether or not TV food advertising affects children’s diet, physical activity and weight. The four-year project, funded by the National Cancer Institute, is unique because it will separate out the effect of food advertising from the amount of time that children watch TV. Read Article
UPI – A Canadian government department is poised to approve genetically modified pigs for the food supply, the Canwest News Service reported Friday. Sources told the agency Environment Canada will announce approval of the strain known as “enviropigs” Saturday. The strain would then need approval from Health Canada before the pigs enter the food market. Read Article
Ed – Aside from the science and whether or not there are health risks, have you considered the ethical and civil liberties implications of having your food supply owned under patent by corporations?
Daily Green – When the media or researchers talk about how many colonies, how many bees, how many beekeepers have been affected by colony collapse disorder this year, or last year, or the year before, they talk in terms of percent loss… 24% of the bees that died last year perished due to colony collapse disorder, or some such figure. And those who write about this malady toss around those percentages with ease and without pain. It’s easy to do because most of us don’t really know what those numbers mean. Read Article
A comprehensive and regularly updated list of all the apparent effects of Anthropogenic Climate Change according to the mainstream media over the last two decades. CLICK HERE TO READ
EDITORS WARNING: Do not read this analysis if you are of a nervous disposition, easily confused or easily scared.
ScienceDaily — Scientists have confirmed that the healthful substances found in green tea — renowned for their powerful antioxidant and disease-fighting properties — do penetrate into tissues of the eye. Their new report, the first documenting how the lens, retina, and other eye tissues absorb these substances, raises the possibility that green tea may protect against glaucoma and other common eye diseases. Read Article
