Farmers To Face Fines Or Prison Sentences For Selling Food Directly To Customers. Missing - The Food Stamp Program. Effect of fluoride in drinking water on children’s intelligence - FJ2003_v36_n2_p84-94.pdf. Professor John Vandermeer challenges environmentalist Mark Lynas on GMOs. Neoliberal environmentalist Mark Lynas recently gave a talk at the Oxford Farming Association in which he apologized for once militating against GMOs.
Now, after having discovered "science" he has decided we need GMOs to feed the world . John Robbins: The Dark Side of Vitaminwater. Now here's something you wouldn't expect.
Coca-Cola is being sued by a non-profit public interest group, on the grounds that the company's vitaminwater products make unwarranted health claims. No surprise there. But how do you think the company is defending itself? In a staggering feat of twisted logic, lawyers for Coca-Cola are defending the lawsuit by asserting that "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.
" Does this mean that you'd have to be an unreasonable person to think that a product named "vitaminwater," a product that has been heavily and aggressively marketed as a healthy beverage, actually had health benefits? Goldman bankers get rich betting on food prices as millions starve - Business News - Business. Less than a week after the Bank of England Governor, Sir Mervyn King, slapped Goldman Sachs on the wrist for attempting to save its UK employees millions of pounds in tax by delaying bonus payments, the investment bank faces fresh accusations that it is contributing to rising food prices.
Goldman made about $400m (£251m) in 2012 from investing its clients' money in a range of "soft commodities", from wheat and maize to coffee and sugar, according to an analysis for The Independent by the World Development Movement (WDM). This contributed to the 68 per cent jump in profits for 2012 Goldman announced last week, allowing it to push up the average pay and bonus package of its bankers to £250,000. Monsanto Joins World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Monsanto has joined the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and is offering the WBCSD’s Business Ecosystems Training (BET) course globally for employees, according to the agribusiness company.
Monsanto says the BET course will enhance employees’ understanding of the links between ecosystems and business. The UN expects the global population to reach 9 billion by 2050, which will mean farmers will need to grow 70 percent more food by that time, and demand for water from agriculture will likely rise from 70 percent in 2012 to at least 89 percent by 2050. This will also put increasing strains on land and ecosystem services. Agriculture depends on healthy ecosystems for services such as pollination for nearly 75 percent of the world’s crop species, as well as fresh water, erosion control and climate and water regulation, according to an Environmental Leader column by DuPont’s Amanda DeSantis and World Resources Institute’s Janet Ranganathan.
In Latin America, a growing backlash against modified food (GMO) A new, peer-reviewed study published in Food and Chemical Toxicology has found that rats fed a regular diet of Monsanto’s genetically modified corn or exposed to Roundup, Monsanto’s top-selling weedkiller, were more likely to develop tumors, suffer organ damage and die sooner.
Backers say GMOs helps farmers produce more, but some politicos fear the risks of tinkering with crops’ DNA. Are GMOs the answer to global hunger? (Shutterstock photo) LIMA, Peru — Are genetically modified crops “Franken-foods” or the answer to global hunger and climate change? That is the dilemma dividing Latin America, where vast quantities of GM crops are grown.
Outside the U.S., no region has a greater expanse of agricultural land sown with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) than South America. Together, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay have roughly 120 million acres of GM crops, principally soybean, but also significant amounts of corn. Genetically modified foods a danger?
Fast Food. Monsanto. The international food system and the climate crisis. Today’s global food system, with all its high-tech seeds and fancy packaging, cannot fulfil its most basic function of feeding people.
Global food system must be transformed 'on industrial revolution scale' The existing global food system is failing half the people on Earth, the report warns.
Photograph: Martin Godwin The world will not be able to feed itself without destroying the planet unless a transformation on the scale of the industrial revolution takes place, a major government report has concluded. The existing food system is failing half of the people on Earth, the report finds, with 1 billion going hungry, 1 billion lacking crucial vitamins and minerals from their diet and another billion "substantially overconsuming", leading to obesity epidemics. Stresses on the food system are reflected in price spikes but the cost of food will rise sharply in coming decades, the report adds, which will increase the risk of conflict and migration.
"The global food system is spectacularly bad at tackling hunger or at holding itself to account," said Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute of Development Studies and an author of the Global Food and Farming Futures report. Reports and publications. Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food. Correction Appended: Aug. 20, 2009 Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another.
The industrial food system depends to its peril on cheap oil. Agriculture: The Basics of Our Industrial Food System in 5 minutes. Birke Baehr: What's wrong with our food system. Our Failing Food System. Agriculture in the United States has taken the wrong road, and it isn't working.
Factory Farming, what is factory farm? - The Issues. On This Page: What is Industrial Agriculture or Factory Farming? Industrial Crop Production Industrial Animal Production The Characteristics of Industrial Agriculture Corporate Involvement in Agriculture The True Costs Did You Know? What You Can Do For More Information Reports and Articles In the last few decades, consolidation of food production has concentrated power in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations.
Many of today’s farms are actually large industrial facilities, not 40 acres of pastures, red barns, and rows of mixed vegetable crops that most Americans imagine. These consolidated operations are able to produce food in high volume but have little to no regard for the environment , animal welfare , soil and water quality , or food safety . What is Industrial Agriculture or Factory Farming? Our energy-gulping industrial food system revealed in eight bullet points. Reefer madness: Refrigerated supermarket trucks are but one link in our gas-guzzling food chain.Photo courtesy Paul Sullivan via FlickrIn his recent The New York Times op-ed, “Math Lessons for Locavores” — debated at length in our “Food Fight” feature — Stephen Budiansky shows that transportation and “modern” (i.e., highly mechanized and chemical-intesnsive) farming make up relatively small parts of industrial food’s energy footprint.
Consumers in their kitchens, in Budiansky’s view, are the real energy guzzlers — so locavores should stop worrying and learn to love industrial food. Foodies, Get Thee to Occupy Wall Street. The Occupy Wall Street protests grew out of anger at the outsized power of banks. But as they've expanded nationwide, the uprisings have evolved into a kind of running challenge to the way power is concentrated in all aspects of our economy—concentrated into the hands of people with an interest in maintaining the status quo. No doubt, the financial sector is a stunning example. This MoJo chart shows how the 10 largest banks came to hold 54 percent of US financial assets, up from 20 percent in 1990. As big banks gobbled smaller banks and became megabanks, they managed to extract more and more wealth out of the economy . Even after the epochal meltdown and bailout, the financial sector now claims fully a third of US corporate profits .
But other economic sectors are similarly concentrated, and have a comparable grip on public policy.