Gawd, the food sucks in America. My bowels are in an uproar right now. What's a guy gotta do to get vine ripened tomatoes? Fresh cucumbers? Arugala in his salad and decent cheese--and not pay an arm and a leg for it? And don't get me started on bread, mkaay?

Everything I have eaten in the last two days tastes like three day old cardboard and Cheezewiz. This whole food thing is going to be a real adjustment. And it is something I was really unprepared for. I've never been a real food hound, eating what's in front of me just like the rest of us. But after a year of eating local, non-industrialized food I can see why people in the rest of the world shake their heads at us.

I'll be taking what I eat a lot more seriously in the weeks to come.

Nicholas D Kristof | NYT

Growing up on a farm near Yamhill, Ore., I quickly learned to appreciate the difference between fresh, home-grown foods and the commercial versions in the supermarket.

...

I’ve often criticized America’s health care system, and I fervently hope that we’re going to see a public insurance option this year. But one reason for our health problems is our industrialized agriculture system, and that should be under scrutiny as well.

A terrific new documentary, “Food, Inc.,” playing in cinemas nationwide, offers a powerful and largely persuasive diagnosis of American agriculture. Go see it, but be warned that you may not want to eat for a week afterward.

(It was particularly unnerving to see leftover animal bits washed over with ammonia and ground into “hamburger filler.” If you happen to be eating a hamburger as you read this, I apologize.)

Johannesburg | June 17

IRIN - It will take at least ten years to develop a variety of staple grain that will survive in the climates caused by global warming in most parts of Africa, and the continent has less than two decades in which to do it, warn the authors of a new study.

"The countries have to start developing varieties now, but many of these countries don't have breeding programmes," said Luigi Guarino, one of three authors of a study to be published on 19 June in the US journal, Global Environmental Change. "This study, we hope, at least raises the flag."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international scientific body, has predicted that food production in Africa could halve by 2020 as global warming pushes temperatures up and droughts become more intense.

The new study by researchers at Stanford University's Program on Food Security and the Environment, in the US, and the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust, noted that "For a majority of Africa's farmers, warming will rapidly take climate not only beyond the range of their personal experience, but also beyond the experience of farmers within their own country."

_{Previously posted articles:
** Africa: The Second Scramble for Africa Starts
** Researchers urge rules to stop 'land-grabbing' worsening hunger
** Foreign land grabs for food could fuel unrest
** China's new export: farmers
** Financial crisis may worsen food crunch it eclipsed
** Rich countries launch great land grab to safeguard food supply}

Renee Schoof | Washington | June 16

McClatchy - American agriculture has become increasingly dependent on foreign sources of natural gas, a key ingredient in the nitrogen fertilizer that farmers use to get high yields of crops such as corn and wheat.

Now, a California start-up company is preparing to open a plant that will make fertilizer in the U.S. and reduce fossil fuel emissions from agriculture.

Nothing exotic needed, said the company, SynGest of San Francisco. The raw ingredient for the same ammonia-based fertilizer farmers have used for decades is something many already have and don't really need: corncobs.

Food is the new fur for the celebrity with a conscience

Actors, designers, pop stars have all got behind the hot new ethical campaign: food. From saving species to investigating conditions for pigs, star quality is pushing it to the foreground.

The Guardian - It is, by anybody's standards, an arresting image: a truly beautiful photograph of a luscious, radiant creature, all shiny eyes and silky skin. And Greta Scacchi, who is pictured clutching the cod to her naked body, doesn't look bad either. In the months and years to come, this picture, flashed throughout the British media last week, will doubtless come to be seen as the seminal image for a particular moment, when the gruelling, knotty business of campaigning around food issues finally became sexy.

The use of celebrity skin to push an ethical issue is nothing new, of course. In the 1990s, Peta - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - convinced a bunch of supermodels, including Naomi Campbell, to appear in the buff under the legend "I'd rather go nude than wear fur". But fur is just so passé. And, in any case, Campbell proved just how fickle the modern celebrity can be by soon deciding that actually, come to think of it, she would much rather wear fur than go nude, and did so on the catwalk in Milan.

Where celebrities are concerned, it seems, food is the new fur. The current set of images featuring Scacchi alongside actress Emilia Fox, director Terry Gilliam and actor Richard E Grant, were launched to back the cinematic release of The End Of The Line, a film about the threat of overfishing - but they are only a part of it. Tomorrow, Paul McCartney and his daughters Stella and Mary are launching a campaign to convince the public to go meat-free for one day a week. Another movie, Food Inc, which looks at the excesses and foul side-effects of industrial food production has just been released in the US and will shortly arrive here. Plus there is a major investigation by environmental campaigner Tracy Worcester into the dark underbelly of the global pig-rearing business which is about to be screened on digital channel More4. Food, and more importantly, really bad food, is hot.

What marks out these campaigns is their sophistication. It began a couple of weeks ago with the news that Nobu, the global high-end chain of Japanese restaurants favoured by the glitterati, was still serving bluefin tuna despite it being an endangered species. The restaurant had added a note to its menu pointing out the threat to the magnificent bluefin and inviting diners to ask for an alternative, but had refused to stop serving it, unlike big-name chefs such as Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver.

Johann Hari | June 6

The Independent - The process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction

In the babbling Babel of 24/7 news – where elections, bailouts and beheadings blur into one long shriek – the slow-motion stories that will define our age are often lost. An extraordinary documentary released next week, The End of the Line, forces us to stop, and see. Its story is stark. In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 per cent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest – unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth.

The story begins in the sleepy Canadian resort of Newfoundland. It was the global capital of cod, a fishing town where the scaly creatures of the sea were so abundant they could be caught with your hands. But in the 1980s, something strange happened. The catches started to wane. The fish grew smaller. And then, in 1991, they disappeared.

It turned out the cod had been hoovered out of the sea at such a rapid rate that they couldn't reproduce themselves. But the postscript is spookier still. The Canadian government banned any attempts at fishing there, on the assumption that the few remaining fish would slowly repopulate the waters. But 15 years on, they haven't. The population was so destroyed that it could never recover.

A growing number of scientists are warning that we could all be living in Newfoundland soon. Professor Boris Worm of Dalhousie University published a detailed study in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature saying that at the current rate, all global fish populations will have collapsed by 2048. He says: "This isn't some horror scenario, it's a real possibility. It's not rocket science if we're depleting species after species. It's a finite resource. We'll reach a point where we run out."

Megan Rowling | June 4

Reuters -

International food experts and African politicians are pushing for guidelines to prevent the surging trend of rich investors buying land in developing countries from hurting poor farmers and causing food crises.

The amount of land under negotiation in deals to help cash-rich countries in the Gulf and Asia secure food supplies for their growing populations has reached 15 to 20 million hectares, roughly equivalent to cropland in Germany or France, estimates the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The monetary value is a huge - $20 to $30 billion.

IFPRI argues in a new policy brief that there are both opportunities and threats for poor nations - many of them in east and southern Africa - that are leasing or selling vast tracts of their land to foreign investors.

On the positive side, land acquisitions have the potential to inject much-needed investment into agriculture and rural areas, boosting food production and jobs. But that depends on the terms and conditions.

"The potential here is great. The question is the extent to which this translates into benefits for the poor and smallholders in the developing countries becoming hosts to these arrangements," said IFPRI research fellow Ruth Meinzen-Dick. "The question is, do these people...get new jobs and income, or do they lose access to the land they have been relying on?"

There's also a fear that, with many east African countries suffering food shortages, renting out land to foreign governments and companies to feed people overseas will make hunger at home even worse.

Moscow | June 4

Reuters - Major grain exporter Russia, plans to raise its output by some 25 percent to 133-136 million tonnes a year in the coming years and aims to contribute to global food security, President Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday.

He said the country was ready to support long-term foreign investment in its agriculture.

"Russia is aware of its responsibility and is now committed to realising its enormous agricultural potential and bringing grain production to such a level as to ensure, together with other major agricultural producers, food security for a substantial part of the world population," Medvedev said.

"High-quality soft wheat is most in demand, since both developed and developing countries use it for flour production. Thus, contributing to the global food security, Russian grain substantially ensures food supply in a number of countries."

In the current 2008/09 crop year Russia aims to export 21 million tonnes of grain, mainly wheat, to some 50 countries, Medvedev said in remarks distributed by the Kremlin ahead of the World Grain Forum, which starts on Saturday in St. Petersburg.

I was on a mission yesterday when I walked down to the Radisson SAS Hotel for breakfast. (A meal there is probably as much as my hotel was, near the train station. Bucharest photos can be found here, by the way.)

"What would you like for breakfast, sir?" The waiter asked me.

"Two scrambled eggs, toast and eight strips of bacon," I said.

"Excuse me? Eight slices?" He asked.

"Yes, eight," I said. "If you have a whole pig back there I'll take it, actually!" I smiled.

He frowned, a puzzled look coming over his dark Gypsy eyes.

"Listen," I said. "I've been traveling in Muslim countries for almost six months and I want pork!"

"Okay," he said, taking a step back from the strange American.

"You have bacon, yes?"

"Of course," he said.

More after the jump.

Alok Jha | May 29

The Guardian - The battle for the Arctic's hidden mineral riches is likely to intensify after a survey revealing the energy reserves present beneath the ice.

A map of potential oil and gas reserves in the region, published today in Science, shows that about 30% of the world's ­un­exploited gas and 13% of oil lie under the seas around the north pole. Billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas lie within the Arctic ­circle, where, until now, permanent ice has prevented drilling.

The report is likely to further stoke international competition for mineral, tourism and shipping rights in the region. Exploration and drilling for oil and gas have become easier as climate change forces the ice to retreat, and all countries with borders inside the Arctic circle are fighting to claim their share. "For better or worse, limited ­exploration prospects in the rest of the world ­combined with technological advances make the Arctic increasingly attractive for ­development," said Paul Berkman of the Scott polar research institute at the University of Cambridge, who specialises in the politics of the Arctic.

I'm not much of a chef. I bought a huge marinated pork loin from Costco, brought it home, cut it in half, wrapped it in tin foil, tossed it on my mom's propane grille, lit it up, set all three burners to high, then walked away to watch a Minnesota Twins baseball game on TV for a few minutes while the grille warmed up.

Just for a few minutes...

Tragically, it was a really exciting, dramatic baseball game. A real barn-burner. Twins won, and then I thought, "Oh shit. What about the pork loin?" I raced to the grille, whose thermometer was pegged at 550 degrees Fahrenheit.

For three hours. Oops.

Martin Hickman | May 2

The Independent - Does your shopping basket contain KitKat, Hovis, Persil or Flora? If so, you may be contributing to the devastation of the wildlife-rich forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, where orangutans and other species face extinction as their habitat disappears.

It's an invisible ingredient, really, palm oil. You won't find it listed on your margarine, your bread, your biscuits or your KitKat. It's there though, under "vegetable oil". And its impact, 7,000 miles away, is very visible indeed.

The wildlife-rich forests of Indonesia and Malaysia are being chain-sawed to make way for palm-oil plantations. Thirty square miles are felled daily in a burst of habitat destruction that is taking place on a scale and speed almost unimaginable in the West.

When the rainforests disappear almost all of the wildlife – including the orangutans, tigers, sun bears, bearded pigs and other endangered species – and indigenous people go. In their place come palm-oil plantations stretching for mile after mile, producing cheap oil – the cheapest cooking oil in the world – for everyday food.

Apr 30

DanChurchAid - Young women in Cambodia are being given agricultural training in an attempt to help alleviate poverty and unemployment. These underprivileged women are not only learning about the seasonal cycles of various crops but also how to farm livestock. The intension is, that they can help to secure a better future for their families.

When Uy Vannek left school at the age of 18 with only a third-grade education, no-one thought that she would one day go on to have her own farm, producing vegetables and poultry.

As a child, her family had to endure a poor standard of living. Money was so scarce, her family could not pay for Uy’s education, and she had to leave school early. As a farmer’s daughter, Uy did not have a lot of options.

In Cambodia, farming has traditionally been seen as men’s work, not a career suitable for women, who have instead been expected to take responsibility for housework and sewing.

Luckily for Uy and other women, the organization Ponleur Kumar is of a different opinion.

Simon Montlake | Bangkok, Thailand | Apr 29

CSM - The Asian Development Bank says the cost of inaction could be severe for the region's agrarian-based economies and rapidly growing coastal cities.

Facing rising sea levels, extreme weather patterns, and lower crop yields, countries in Southeast Asia are slowly waking up to the impact of climate change. Coastal towns in Vietnam are strengthening their sea walls. Communities in Thailand are replanting degraded mangroves. Forest practices are being overhauled in the Philippines.

But economists warn that these reactive efforts don't go far enough to tackle the threat to agrarian-based economies, which face potentially huge losses from failed crops and disaster relief. Far better to invest now, they argue, in adapting to more volatile weather before the full impact crashes through the region.

Southeast Asia is seen as highly vulnerable to the impact of climate change because of its reliance on forestry and agriculture, which employs 43 percent of the workforce, and the concentration of large populations along exposed coastlines and rivers. Tens of millions of people live in fast-growing cities along the coast.

Julio Godoy | Berlin | Apr 21

AllAfrica - Sub-Saharan African countries have of late become the target of a new form of investment that is strongly reminiscent of colonialism: investors from both industrialised and emerging economies buy or lease large tracts of farm land across the continent, either to guarantee their own food provisions or simply as yet another business.

In doing so, investors even deal with warlords who claim property rights, as in Sudan.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and activists in Europe are denouncing this land grab in Egypt, Sudan, Cameroon, Senegal, Mozambique and elsewhere in Africa as a new form of colonialism.

Uwe Hoering, a German researcher on development policy for several European NGOs, including the news letter Weltwirtschaft und Entwicklung (World Economy and Development), called these investments "a new form of agrarian colonialism".

Related:
** Rich countries launch great land grab to safeguard food supply ~ 11/22/08
** Graphic: World land grab (pdf)

Geoffrey Lean | Apr 19

The Independent - Marine giants go hungry as fleets scoop up their prey for our fish suppers.

Starving sea life – from whales to puffins, tuna to seals – is being found all over the world's oceans, as the food on which it depends is being fished out, startling new evidence shows. And much of the depletion, ironically, is caused by raising captive fish – for the table.

New figures from the Food and Agriculture Organisation show that the small fish on which birds and marine mammals feed have become the main target of fishing fleets since stocks of bigger fish have become exhausted. Four times as much of these "prey fish" are now brought to shore as half a century ago, and seven of the world's largest 10 fisheries now go after them.

More than four-fifths of this catch does not go directly to feed people, but is ground up into fish oil and fish meal and increasingly used to raise carnivorous species such as salmon in fish farms. A captive fish needs up to 11b of food to put on a single pound in weight. And, as a result, there is less and less left for its natural predators.

"We have caught most of the big fish and are now going after their food," says Margot Stiles, a marine scientist for Oceana, the leading international sea protection pressure group.

Michael Hogan & Thorsten Severin | Berlin/Hamburg | Apr 14

Reuters - Germany will ban cultivation and sale of genetically modified (GMO) maize despite European Union rulings that the biotech grain is safe, its government said on Tuesday.

The ban affects U.S. biotech company Monsanto's MON 810 maize which may no longer be sown for this summer's harvest, German Agriculture and Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner told a news conference.

The move puts Germany alongside France, Austria, Hungary, Greece and Luxembourg which have banned MON 810 maize despite its approval by the EU for commercial use throughout the bloc.

"I have come to the conclusion that there is a justifiable reason to believe that genetically modified maize of the type MON 810 presents a danger to the environment," Aigner said, stressing the five other EU states have taken the same action.

Steven Duke | Apr 1

BBC -
_{(Current world population - 6.8bn
Net growth per day - 218,030
Forecast made for 2040 - 9bn
Source: US Census Bureau )}

There are already too many people living on Planet Earth, according to one of most influential science advisors in the US government.

Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet programme that humans had exceeded the Earth's "limits of sustainability".

Dr Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza Rice.

Under the new Obama administration, she now advises Hillary Clinton.

"We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people," Dr Fedoroff said, stressing the need for humans to become much better at managing "wild lands", and in particular water supplies.

Pressed on whether she thought the world population was simply too high, Dr Fedoroff replied: "There are probably already too many people on the planet."

A National Medal of Science laureate (America's highest science award), the professor of molecular biology believes part of that better land management must include the use of genetically modified foods.

David Clark Scott | Mar 21

CSM - Mexico’s greatest boxer, Julio César Chávez, would be proud.

Mexico threw a series of precise counterpunches at the US ban on 18-wheelers on Thursday.

Bang! It hit shipments of grapes from California with a 45 percent tariff.

Pow! Pow! Pow! Fresh pears, Christmas trees, and frozen French fries from Oregon were all smacked with a 20 percent tax.

Bam! Sunflower seeds from North Dakota were tagged with a 15 percent duty.

Mexico is the third-largest US trading partner, after China and Canada. The tariffs that went into effect Thursday will hit some $2.4 billion goods across 40 states. That’s likely to mean lost American jobs during one of the worst recessions in recent memory.

The response was not unexpected. You can read it about it here: “Mexico’s punitive tariffs raise stakes on US trucking dispute”

But what’s noteworthy is not the breadth of Mexico’s retaliation. It’s the political accuracy of their tariff targeting.

** Related thread: US law sparks Mexican trade row

George Miller and Katharine Reeve | March 4

How the authors of the new "Rough Guide to Food" lost their appetites for the food industry.

TimesOnlineUK - A surprise consequence of writing a book about food was that we lost our appetite. A month in, we realised we had underestimated just how devastating the effects of our industrial food systems are on our health, animal welfare, climate change and the earth's resources.
[]
Thankfully, a few trips to some farmers markets with their good news story of artisan baking, handmade cheeses and fresh-from-the-ground veg offered the escapism we needed and helped provide a sense of perspective.

Michael T Klare | feb 25 | Asia Times

The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.

As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Barack Obama has referred to as a "lost decade", the result could be a global landscape filled with economically-fueled upheavals.

Indeed, if you want to be grimly impressed, hang a world map on your wall and start inserting red pins where violent episodes have already occurred. Athens (Greece), Longnan (China), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Riga (Latvia), Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Sofia (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithuania), and Vladivostok (Russia) would be a start. Many other cities from Reykjavik, Paris, Rome, and Zaragoza to Moscow and Dublin have witnessed huge protests over rising unemployment and falling wages that remained orderly thanks in part to the presence of vast numbers of riot police. If you inserted orange pins at these locations - none as yet in the United States - your map would already look aflame with activity. And if you're a gambling man or woman, it's a safe bet that this map will soon be far better populated with red and orange pins.

Mark Huffman | ConsumerAffairs.com

Peanut Corporation of America, maker of tainted peanut butter that has shown up in an ever-growing number of food products, has now told customers who received products from its Georgia or Texas plants not to distribute or make any further use of those products.

FDA - Peanut Corporation of America Provides Further Information Regarding Recalled Products

* The Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) has announced that because of its bankruptcy proceedings, it is no longer able to communicate with customers of recalled products.
* PCA customers should contact FDA recall coordinators regarding the proper disposition of recalled products.

Recall List

Previous thread that led to posting this new forum topic

Silvia Aloisi | Rome | Feb 18

Reuters - Big purchases of African land by richer countries in a drive for food security could fuel unrest if the rights of local farmers are not taken into consideration, a land rights campaigner warned on Wednesday.

Madiodio Niasse, director of the International Land Coalition -- which brings together intergovernmental organisations and civil society groups to promote land rights in poor nations -- said there was a general lack of transparency in international land transactions that needed to be addressed.

Middle Eastern countries flush with oil cash but also Asian nations worried about their food security have begun buying large swathes of farmland abroad after a supply scare last year drove prices of most food items to record highs.

"Since the middle of 2008, there has been this huge international trend of purchasing land abroad. Our fear is that if it's not organised and regulated, it will have counterproductive effects and could lead to social unrest," Niasse told Reuters in an interview.

Randall Mikkelsen | Washington | Feb 12

Reuters - The global economic crisis has become the biggest near-term U.S. security concern, causing instability in a quarter of the world's countries and threatening destructive trade wars, U.S. intelligence agencies reported on Thursday.

The director of National Intelligence's annual threat assessment also said al Qaeda's leadership had been weakened over the last year. But security in Afghanistan had deteriorated and Pakistan had to gain control over its border areas before the situation could improve.

"The financial crisis and global recession are likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emerging market nations over the next year," said the report. It said a wave of "destructive protectionism" was possible as countries find they cannot export their way out of the slump.

"Time is our greatest threat. The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to U.S. strategic interests," it said.

The report represents the evaluations of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and serves as a major security reference point for policymakers and Congress. In addition to reviewing potential adversaries, it also considered this year the security impact of issues including climate change, the economy and food and energy supplies.

READ:
** Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence(PDF)
** Highlights(PDF)