Financial Times – Wheat prices rose further on Friday morning in the wake of Russia’s decision to extend its grain export ban by 12 month, raising fears about a return to the food shortages and riots of 2007-08. In Mozambique, where a 30 per cent rise in bread prices triggered riots on Wednesday and Thursday, the government said seven people had been killed along with 288 wounded. The announcement by Vladimir Putin on Thursday extended an export ban first announced last month until late December 2011, sending wheat and other cereals prices to near a two-year high. Read Article
AOL News-A Boston lab hired by the United Commercial Fishermen’s Association to analyze coastal fishing waters says findings suggest the government’s claim that Gulf of Mexico seafood is safe to eat may be premature. The lab, Boston Chemical Data Corp., said it found dispersant in a sample taken near Biloxi, Miss., almost a month after BP said it had stopped using the toxic chemical to break up the record amounts of crude spewed by the Gulf oil spill. The leak was finally capped on July 15 -Read Article
Daily Telegraph – The Chinese now consume more than twice as much organic food as health-conscious Japan. The market is worth an annual 10billion yuan (£1billion) having quadrupled in the past five years. For comparison, the British organic market is worth roughly £2billion. Interest has been promoted by a series of scares including toxic beans, contaminated milk and pork, pesticide-laced dumplings, chemically-tainted chicken, and the growing presence of what is known as “sewage oil”. Read article
Bloomberg – Wheat prices rose the most in a week on speculation that dry weather will reduce output more than forecast in Argentina and Russia. Argentina is “too dry,” and more rain is needed to boost yields in Russia and Ukraine, where growers are preparing to plant winter wheat, according to T-Storm Weather in Chicago. Wheat futures have jumped 47 percent since the end of June as adverse weather reduced harvests and crop prospects. Read Article
Reuters – Two Iowa egg farms linked to a salmonella outbreak that has sickened thousands failed to follow their own safety plans, allowing rodents and other animals into poultry houses, U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors found. The latest details come days after the FDA pinpointed a bacteria found in chicken feed at the two farms as a probable source of the outbreak, which prompted the recall of more than a half billion eggs. During inspections conducted on August 19-26, officials found rodent holes and leaking manure at several locations run by Hillandale Farms of Iowa, and non-chicken feathers and live mice and flies at houses owned by Wright County Egg, according to reports posted on the FDA website. Read article
Daily Mail – Binge drinking and obesity are fuelling a surge in deaths from liver disease, experts have warned. The number of lives claimed by damaged, diseased and worn-out livers has soared by 60 per cent in only a decade. Liver disease, including cancer, claimed 9,719 lives in England in 2008 – up from 6,058 ten years earlier, a report by MPs says today. Read article
The Guardian-For the second time in less than a year, genetically modified vines being tested by the French National Institute of Agricultural Research (INRA) in its Colmar centre in eastern France have been uprooted and destroyed. Now that France no longer grows or tests GM corn, which used to be a regular summer target of the Faucheurs Volontaires (voluntary reapers) movement, attention has turned to the vines -Read Article
Irish Times-THE GOVERNMENT must immediately implement its pledge to declare Ireland a GM-free zone outlined in its programme for government, the Irish Organic Farmers and Growers Association has said. It said the recent two-pronged decision by the European Commission granting states and regions more autonomy in banning but also in allowing GM cultivation, made this a matter of urgency -Read Article
Reuters- The Canadian government has voiced concerns about a European Union proposal to allow member states to decide whether to ban genetically modified (GM) crops. The bloc’s executive — the European Commission — submitted the proposal in July in a bid to break a deadlock in EU GM approvals, with just two products authorized for cultivation since 1998 -Read Article
Physorg-Fertilizer chemicals may pose a bigger hazard to the environment – specifically to creatures that live in water – than originally foreseen, according to new research from North Carolina State University toxicologists -Read Article
Bloomberg – Corn rose to a 14-month high and soybeans gained for a second straight day on signs of increased demand for U.S. supplies, after drought reduced crops in Russia and parts of Europe and flooding cut acreage in Canada. U.S. exporters sold 120,000 metric tons of soybeans to China and 180,000 tons of corn to unknown destinations for delivery after Sept. 1, the Department of Agriculture said. Sales of corn in the two weeks ended Aug. 19, for delivery in the new marketing year, were 3.987 million tons, the biggest two-week total since at least 1990. Read Article
Wall Street Journal – The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation took advantage of sagging stock prices in the second quarter to add Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), one of the most storied names in finance, to its portfolio, according to a 13F regulatory filing. Read Article
Huffington Post – Monsanto in Gates’ Clothing? The Emperor’s New GMO’s – If you had any doubts about where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is really placing its bets, AGRA Watch’s recent announcement of the Foundation’s investment of $23.1 million in 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock should put them to rest. Genetic engineering: full speed ahead. Read Article
BBC – Cancers of the food pipe in Britain have doubled in men over 25 years, figures from Cancer Research UK show. However, over the same period – 1983 to 2007 – cases in women only rose by 8%. Researchers said the gender contrast in oesophageal cancer rates could be largely explained by the way men put weight on – as “beer bellies” – as well as genetic differences. Men are also likely to have poorer diets, eating more fatty foods and lower amounts of fruit and vegetables. Read article
Yes Magazine-April Dávila wondered what it would take to cut the GMO giant out of her family’s life. She found that it was far more entrenched than she’d ever realized. In January of this year, while procrastinating on Facebook, I followed a link to an article reporting on evidence that there may be health effects associated with consuming Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) corn-Read Article
ABC – One of the world’s largest agricultural biotech companies, Monsanto, has bought part of the Western Australian Government’s grain breeding company, Intergrain. A ‘collaborative agreement’ has been signed to hand over 19.9 per cent of Intergrain’s ownership to Monsanto. Intergrain says it intends to remain an independent provider of new grain varieties for all Australian farmers. But Monsanto’s Peter O’Keefe says it can guarantee buying out more of the company in the future. Read Article
PhysOrg.com – The use of bariatric or weight loss surgery has increased ten-fold in NHS hospitals in England since 2000, finds a study published in the British Medical Journal today. One reason for this rapid rise is increased demand from obese patients as they become more aware of surgery as a viable treatment option, suggest the researchers. Bariatric surgery is performed on people who are dangerously obese, for the purpose of losing weight. Read article
PhysOrg.com – Mothers who did not breastfeed their children have significantly higher rates of type 2 diabetes later in life than moms who breastfed, report University of Pittsburgh researchers in a study published in the September issue of the American Journal of Medicine. “Diet and exercise are widely known to impact the risk of type 2 diabetes, but few people realize that breastfeeding also reduces mothers’ risk of developing the disease later in life by decreasing maternal belly fat.” Read article
NY Times – … in an egg-producing county that has suddenly found itself at the center of the nation’s egg recall over salmonella … the conversation at the weekly gathering of local ladies turned uncharacteristically tense. One woman suggested that the company at the focus of the recall of hundreds of millions of eggs, with huge facilities here, had done more harm than good locally. A second resident jumped in to defend the operation and the DeCoster family… Read article
Reuters – Bacteria found in chicken feed used at two Iowa farms has been linked to a salmonella outbreak that prompted the recall of more than a half billion contaminated eggs, U.S. regulators said on Thursday. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it would keep investigating to determine whether the bacteria originated in the chicken feed or arrived there from another source. Read article
BBC – The price of wheat is expected to remain volatile as the markets wait to hear whether Ukraine will join Russia in imposing an export ban. The price of grain has rocketed in recent weeks over concerns about a shortage of supply. Read Article
The Guardian-US authorities today began the process to approve the first GM animal for human consumption. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a 60-day period of consultation and public meetings over whether to permit a GM strain of salmon to be eaten by humans, even though it has been called a “frankenfish” by critics. The approval process could take less than a year, and if it gets the green light the fish could be on the market in 18 months -Read Article
Asia Times – In last month’s blitzkrieg tour of Central and Southeast Asia, two of the four stops made by United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton share the unfortunate bond of enduring an invasion by US air and ground forces. In the space of a few days, Clinton visited Vietnam and Afghanistan, thus physically linking what had once been and what has now become the United States’ longest war. One of the more insidious links that tie these conflicts together was highlighted in a few of the news stories about Clinton’s trip. That link, in a word, is agri-business. Read Article
Reuters- Poor farming practices, lack of water management, deforestation and climate change are turning vast stretches of the Earth into barren deserts, the United Nations said on Monday. Launching a 10-year campaign to halt the advance of deserts, the U.N. environment programme (UNEP) said land degradation in dry places had affected 3.6 billion hectares (8.9 billion acres) — a quarter of the world’s land area — and a billion people -Read Article
AP- A 22-mile-long invisible mist of oil is meandering far below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where it will probably loiter for months or more, scientists reported Thursday in the first conclusive evidence of an underwater plume from the BP spill. The most worrisome part is the slow pace at which the oil is breaking down in the cold, 40-degree water, making it a long-lasting but unseen threat to vulnerable marine life, experts said. Earlier this month, top federal officials declared the oil in the spill was mostly “gone,” and it is gone in the sense you can’t see it -Read Article
BBC – A UN report says the Israeli military has increasingly restricted Palestinian access to farmland in the Gaza Strip and fishing zones along its shore. The Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Gazans were never informed of the exact nature of such restrictions, and the Israeli army used live ammunition to enforce them. The policy has led to tens of thousand of people losing their livelihoods. Israel says the restrictions are necessary to prevent militant attacks. Read article
