News archive: February 2010

“We shouldn’t be a part of a system that will destroy traditional seeds and crops and allow multinational corporations to infringe on the agriculture sector.”

Indian Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan, saying Genetically Modified food would lead to the ‘colonization’ of the food sector.

The Guardian UK, 9 February 2010.

Out of every dollar we spend at a store, only 8 cents makes it back to the farmer.

“The paradox is there’s this view that organic is elitist, it’s expensive, it’s a lifestyle choice for people who can afford it. As far as I’m concerned it’s not elitist to believe everyone should have the right to high-quality, nutritious food from sustainable farming systems. What’s elitist is that a handful of corporations have got a vice-like grip on the farming systems and food.”

Patrick Holden, Soil Association director, rejecting claims that organic is expensive and elitist.

Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.’s business practices reveal how the world’s biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.

With Monsanto’s patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.

Declining competition in the seed business could lead to price hikes that ripple out to every family’s dinner table. That’s because the corn flakes you had for breakfast, soda you drank at lunch and beef stew you ate for dinner likely were produced from crops grown with Monsanto’s patented genes.

Monsanto’s methods are spelled out in a series of confidential commercial licensing agreements obtained by the AP. The contracts, as long as 30 pages, include basic terms for the selling of engineered crops resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, along with shorter supplementary agreements that address new Monsanto traits or other contract amendments.

The company has used the agreements to spread its technology — giving some 200 smaller companies the right to insert Monsanto’s genes in their separate strains of corn and soybean plants. But, the AP found, access to Monsanto’s genes comes at a cost, and with plenty of strings attached.

For example, one contract provision bans independent companies from breeding plants that contain both Monsanto’s genes and the genes of any of its competitors, unless Monsanto gives prior written permission — giving Monsanto the ability to effectively lock out competitors from inserting their patented traits into the vast share of U.S. crops that already contain Monsanto’s genes.

Monsanto’s business strategies and licensing agreements are being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice and at least two state attorneys general, who are trying to determine if the practices violate U.S. antitrust laws. The practices also are at the heart of civil antitrust suits filed against Monsanto by its competitors, including a 2004 suit filed by Syngenta AG that was settled with an agreement and ongoing litigation filed this summer by DuPont in response to a Monsanto lawsuit.

The suburban St. Louis-based agricultural giant said it’s done nothing wrong.

“We do not believe there is any merit to allegations about our licensing agreement or the terms within,” said Monsanto spokesman Lee Quarles. He said he couldn’t comment on many specific provisions of the agreements because they are confidential and the subject of ongoing litigation.

“Our approach to licensing (with) many companies is pro-competitive and has enabled literally hundreds of seed companies, including all of our major direct competitors, to offer thousands of new seed products to farmers,” he said.

The benefit of Monsanto’s technology for farmers has been undeniable, but some of its major competitors and smaller seed firms claim the company is using strong-arm tactics to further its control.

“We now believe that Monsanto has control over as much as 90 percent of (seed genetics). This level of control is almost unbelievable,” said Neil Harl, agricultural economist at Iowa State University who has studied the seed industry for decades. “The upshot of that is that it’s tightening Monsanto’s control, and makes it possible for them to increase their prices long term. And we’ve seen this happening the last five years, and the end is not in sight.”

At issue is how much power one company can have over seeds, the foundation of the world’s food supply. Without stiff competition, Monsanto could raise its seed prices at will, which in turn could raise the cost of everything from animal feed to wheat bread and cookies.

The price of seeds is already rising. Monsanto increased some corn seed prices last year by 25 percent, with an additional 7 percent hike planned for corn seeds in 2010. Monsanto brand soybean seeds climbed 28 percent last year and will be flat or up 6 percent in 2010, said company spokeswoman Kelli Powers.

Monsanto’s broad use of licensing agreements has made its biotech traits among the most widely and rapidly adopted technologies in farming history. These days, when farmers buy bags of seed with obscure brand names like AgVenture or M-Pride Genetics, they are paying for Monsanto’s licensed products.

One of the numerous provisions in the licensing agreements is a ban on mixing genes — or “stacking” in industry lingo — that enhance Monsanto’s power.

One contract provision likely helped Monsanto buy 24 independent seed companies throughout the Farm Belt over the last few years: that corn seed agreement says that if a smaller company changes ownership, its inventory with Monsanto’s traits “shall be destroyed immediately.”

Another provision from contracts earlier this decade– regarding rebates — also help explain Monsanto’s rapid growth as it rolled out new products.

One contract gave an independent seed company deep discounts if the company ensured that Monsanto’s products would make up 70 percent of its total corn seed inventory. In its 2004 lawsuit, Syngenta called the discounts part of Monsanto’s “scorched earth campaign” to keep Syngenta’s new traits out of the market.

Quarles said the discounts were used to entice seed companies to carry Monsanto products when the technology was new and farmers hadn’t yet used it. Now that the products are widespread, Monsanto has discontinued the discounts, he said.

The Monsanto contracts reviewed by the AP prohibit seed companies from discussing terms, and Monsanto has the right to cancel deals and wipe out the inventory of a business if the confidentiality clauses are violated.

Thomas Terral, chief executive officer of Terral Seed in Louisiana, said he recently rejected a Monsanto contract because it put too many restrictions on his business. But Terral refused to provide the unsigned contract to AP or even discuss its contents because he was afraid Monsanto would retaliate and cancel the rest of his agreements.

“I would be so tied up in what I was able to do that basically I would have no value to anybody else,” he said. “The only person I would have value to is Monsanto, and I would continue to pay them millions in fees.”

Independent seed company owners could drop their contracts with Monsanto and return to selling conventional seed, but they say it could be financially ruinous. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready gene has become the industry standard over the last decade, and small companies fear losing customers if they drop it. It also can take years of breeding and investment to mix Monsanto’s genes into a seed company’s product line, so dropping the genes can be costly.

Monsanto acknowledged that U.S. Department of Justice lawyers are seeking documents and interviewing company employees about its marketing practices. The DOJ wouldn’t comment.

A spokesman for Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said the office is examining possible antitrust violations. Additionally, two sources familiar with an investigation in Texas said state Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office is considering the same issues. States have the authority to enforce federal antitrust law, and attorneys general are often involved in such cases.

Monsanto chairman and chief executive officer Hugh Grant told investment analysts during a conference call this fall that the price increases are justified by the productivity boost farmers get from the company’s seeds. Farmers and seed company owners agree that Monsanto’s technology has boosted yields and profits, saving farmers time they once spent weeding and money they once spent on pesticides.

But recent price hikes have still been tough to swallow on the farm.

“It’s just like I got hit with bad weather and got a poor yield. It just means I’ve got less in the bottom line,” said Markus Reinke, a corn and soybean farmer near Concordia, Mo. who took over his family’s farm in 1965. “They can charge because they can do it, and get away with it. And us farmers just complain, and shake our heads and go along with it.”

Any Justice Department case against Monsanto could break new ground in balancing a company’s right to control its patented products while protecting competitors’ right to free and open competition, said Kevin Arquit, former director of the Federal Trade Commission competition bureau and now a antitrust attorney with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York.

“These are very interesting issues, and not just for the companies, but for the Justice Department,” Arquit said. “They’re in an area where there is uncertainty in the law and there are consumer welfare implications and government policy implications for whatever the result is.”

Other seed companies have followed Monsanto’s lead by including restrictive clauses in their licensing agreements, but their products only penetrate smaller segments of the U.S. seed market. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready gene, on the other hand, is in such a wide array of crops that its licensing agreements can have a massive effect on the rules of the marketplace.

Monsanto was only a niche player in the seed business just 12 years ago. It rose to the top thanks to innovation by its scientists and aggressive use of patent law by its attorneys.

First came the science, when Monsanto in 1996 introduced the world’s first commercial strain of genetically engineered soybeans. The Roundup Ready plants were resistant to the herbicide, allowing farmers to spray Roundup whenever they wanted rather than wait until the soybeans had grown enough to withstand the chemical.

The company soon released other genetically altered crops, such as corn plants that produced a natural pesticide to ward off bugs. While Monsanto had blockbuster products, it didn’t yet have a big foothold in a seed industry made up of hundreds of companies that supplied farmers.

That’s where the legal innovations came in, as Monsanto became among the first to widely patent its genes and gain the right to strictly control how they were used. That control let it spread its technology through licensing agreements, while shaping the marketplace around them.

Back in the 1970s, public universities developed new traits for corn and soybean seeds that made them grow hardy and resist pests. Small seed companies got the traits cheaply and could blend them to breed superior crops without restriction. But the agreements give Monsanto control over mixing multiple biotech traits into crops.

The restrictions even apply to taxpayer-funded researchers.

Roger Boerma, a research professor at the University of Georgia, is developing specialized strains of soybeans that grow well in southeastern states, but his current research is tangled up in such restrictions from Monsanto and its competitors.

“It’s made one level of our life incredibly challenging and difficult,” Boerma said.

The rules also can restrict research. Boerma halted research on a line of new soybean plants that contain a trait from a Monsanto competitor when he learned that the trait was ineffective unless it could be mixed with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready gene.

Boerma said he hasn’t considered asking Monsanto’s permission to mix its traits with the competitor’s trait.

“I think the co-mingling of their trait technology with another company’s trait technology would likely be a serious problem for them,” he said.

Quarles pointed out that Monsanto has signed agreements with several companies allowing them to stack their traits with Monsanto’s. After Syngenta settled its lawsuit, for example, the companies struck a broad cross-licensing accord.

At the same time, Monsanto’s patent rights give it the authority to say how independent companies use its traits, Quarles said.

“Please also keep in mind that, as the (intellectual property developer), it is our right to determine who will obtain rights to our technology and for what purpose,” he said.

Monsanto’s provision requiring companies to destroy seeds containing Monsanto’s traits if a competitor buys them prohibited DuPont or other big firms from bidding against Monsanto when it snapped up two dozen smaller seed companies over the last five years, said David Boies, a lawyer representing DuPont who previously was a prosecutor on the federal antitrust case against Microsoft Corp.

Competitive bids from companies like DuPont could have made it far more expensive for Monsanto to bring the smaller companies into its fold. But that contract provision prevented bidding wars, according to DuPont.

“If the independent seed company is losing their license and has to destroy their seeds, they’re not going to have anything, in effect, to sell,” Boies said. “It requires them to destroy things — destroy things they paid for — if they go competitive. That’s exactly the kind of restriction on competitive choice that the antitrust laws outlaw.”

Quarles said some of the Monsanto contracts let companies sell their inventory for a period of time, rather than be required to destroy it. Seed companies also don’t have to pay royalty fees on the bags of seed they destroyed.

“Simply put, it was designed to facilitate early adoption of the technology,” he said.

Some independent seed company owners say they feel increasingly pinched as Monsanto cements its leadership in the industry.

“They have the capital, they have the resources, they own lots of companies, and buying more. We’re small town, they’re Wall Street,” said Bill Cook, co-owner of M-Pride Genetics seed company in Garden City, Mo., who also declined to discuss or provide the agreements. “It’s very difficult to compete in this environment against companies like Monsanto.”

By Christopher Leonard, AP Agribusiness Writer , On Sunday December 13, 2009

“None of us want to be able to buy animals that have been tortured before you eat them, but it is very difficult to make the right choices when product is so cheap.”

Tracey Worcester, writer and director of Pig Business

“Just as we don’t accept cars that aren’t meeting our emission standards, so we shouldn’t accept food that doesn’t meet our welfare standards.”

David Cameron

Agriculture is responsible for about 30% of total global Greenhouse Gas emissions. These are produced by:

· fossil fuel use
· flattening forests to grow food
· releasing the carbon dioxide trapped in soil
· raising non-organic livestock, such as cows

But agriculture has a huge potential to create Greenhouse Gas savings. Restocking soil with just a fraction of the carbon content we’ve stripped from it in recent decades could make a significant cut in emissions.

Negotiators gathered in Copenhagen for climate change talks suggest that farmers should be paid to sequester carbon in the soil. This is an extension of a scheme which already exists that protects forests by putting a price on carbon saved by not chopping them down.

But there’s no guarantee that farmers would be either willing or able to participate in carbon trading, and research has shown that forest protection scheme only has short-term benefits for subsistence farmers or foresters.

Dr. Tom MacMillan, executive director of the Food Ethics Council says:

“Farmers have always been weather watchers; now they’re the ones under scrutiny. What comes out of Copenhagen will affect farmers, but whether it will benefit them is open to question.”

“Everyone agrees we need to cut carbon emissions. But carbon trading is no silver bullet – it favors the larger players in agriculture, including multinational companies and governments, not small-scale farmers.”

“Government policies on agriculture and climate that take the needs of the world’s poor into account, and a global commitment to promote sustainable consumption are key.”

Sales for organic and ethical products in the US are rising – more so than sales for conventional products – and consumer demand for those products is increasing despite the global economic downturn, according to a report published in October by Packaged Facts. Approximately one quarter of US adult shoppers buy certified organic food or beverages and one third continue to pay more for organic foods, says the report.

Consumers are buying products that are perceived to fulfill ecofriendly, natural, organic, local, or humane requirements and enhance a company’s corporate responsibility profile. US retailers like WalMart and Safeway are expanding their offerings of organic goods. And leading the way are increased sales of organic breads and grain products and “ethical” drinks, according to market reports.

According to the Organic Trade Association, US supermarket sales of environmentally sustainable or ethical products could rise 8.7 percent by the end of 2009 to nearly $38 billion. In 2008, sales of goods specifically labelled organic rose 17 percent to $ 24.6 billion.

Increased sales for “greener” products – whether energy-efficient lightbulbs or organic produce – are likely the result of increased awareness of sustainability issues in the face of the global economic crisis and climate change, experts say.

“With the economy foremost in consumers’ minds, heightened price sensitivity in the midst of the current recession is inevitably having an effect on the market for ethical products,” said Don Montuori, publisher of Packaged Facts. “However, our survey indicates that more shoppers understand the environmental, social, and economic implications of their choices. The result is a sizable number of consumers who will purchase typically more expensive ethical products even in economically challenging times.”

The report “Ethical Food and Beverage, Personal Care and Household Products in the U.S.” is available at www.reportbuyer.com/go/PKF00176

Give farmers in Bangladesh a thought this Halloween. Pumpkins are proving a lifeline for thousands of families as an innovative non-profit action group from the UK have decided to help out by donating pumpkins seeds so that people can grow their own. Practical Action is a non-profit that gives families in Bangladesh seeds and compost to grow pumpkins, which they eat and sell. The organization helps people all over the world to help themselves fight out of poverty.

To help spread the word about this ingenious – yet simple – solution, become a Facebook Fan of Practical Action and get your own little pumpkin! You can donate to the cause and get a little pumpkin for your Facebook page by clicking this link:

apps.facebook.com/practicalaction/

If you’re not a Facebook user, donate to the cause at www.practicalaction.org.uk/donate

Los Angeles magazine is a cross between Time Out and a high-end glossy magazine like Vogue. It’s a monthly guide to what’s cool in L.A., and the October 2009 edition is a special all about the Edible Garden.

Here’s what they say about Ysanne Spevack, founder of OrganicFoodee.com

“When the call comes from a home owner overwhelmed by the limes hanging low or the tomatoes bursting from their trellises, Ysanne Spevack gathers up her pruning shears, picking pole, gloves, and hat. The London native, now a Silver Lake resident, began offering her services as a picker and preserver in February, when she discovered people were too busy to harvest their gardens, let alone do anything with the produce. The author of 13 cookbooks on organic food and the editor of the online food magazine organicfoodee.com, Spevack transforms her clients’ fruits and vegetables into Meyer lemon marmalade, fig jam, orange curd, apple‑sauce, corn relish, pickled beets, tomato salsa, pies, and more—usually in their kitchens. After an initial visit during which she takes stock of any additional supplies she’ll need, such as canning jars or pie plates, she generally accepts two projects a week (she’s also a violinist and composer). “It’s so easy to grow here,” she says. “None of this stuff is rocket science.” » Hourly rates: $20 in the garden, $45 in the kitchen, $75 for a kitchen lesson. Email hello@pickandpreserve.com

By Ann Herold and Leilah Bernstein”

www.lamag.com/featuredarticle.aspx?id=20444

Read a feature in Woman’s Day magazine about how to eat organic food on a budget, featuring more of Ysanne’s top tips.

Read it here: Woman’s Day

Curvy cucumbers and knobbly carrots return to supermarket shelves tomorrow throughout Europe thanks to the abolition of European Union (EU) rules on the size and shape of 36 types of fruit and veg. For 20 years EU-wide marketing standards have ensured that only the finest-looking produce reaches the shops. But to reduce red tape and bureaucracy – and make cheaper fruit and vegetables available as household bills rise – Eurocrats are lifting unnecessary restrictions.

Lorraine Wheaton, head of category planning for produce at WalMart’s UK Asda stores, said: “At Asda we hate to see perfectly good food go to waste and, where possible, we use the ugly fruit and vegetables in some of our prepared foods to eliminate waste.

“The relaxation of the laws mean that we can bring in more fruit and vegetables which, in return, means cheaper prices for customers.”

She added: “Currently fruit and vegetables are classed according to their looks. Customers are paying through the roof for a class 1 onion when a class 2 onion is just as good, especially if they both end up in your spaghetti Bolognese.”

Organic food is about inner quality, not outer appearance – that is its hallmark. Fresh, local and seasonal is better then a bland but cosmetically perfect piece of fruit or veg. The abolition of the perfect produce rules will create huge opportunities for everyday people to buy cheaper organic produce that’s just as good, if not better.

A long-term feeding trial commissioned by the Austrian government found mice fed on genetically modified corn had fewer offspring and lower birth rates. Corn grown and eaten in the USA is almost exclusively genetically modified. Genetically modified corn is an ingredient in most regular packaged foods in the USA, including bread, pizza, soda and snacks. Corn is listed in ingredients under many different names, including modified corn starch and high fructose corn syrup.

The Austrian trial triggered a call from Greenpeace for a recall of all GM (genetically modified) food crops currently on the market worldwide on the grounds of the threat to human health.

Why eating GM food could lower your fertility

A long-term feeding trial commissioned by the Austrian government found mice fed on GM corn had fewer offspring and lower birth rates.

The trial has triggered a call from Greenpeace for a recall of all GM food crops currently on the market worldwide on the grounds of the threat to human health.

Most of the research on GM crop safety has been conducted by biotech companies, such as Monsanto, rather than outside independent laboratories.

GM advocates have argued that the fact the US population has been eaten some types of GM food for more than a decade is proof of its safety.

However, these reassurances have been turned on their head by the study commissioned by the Austrian Ministries for Agriculture and Health, which was presented yesterday at a scientific seminar in Vienna.

Professor Dr Jurgen Zentek, Professor for Veterinary Medicine at the University of Vienna and lead author of the study, said a GM diet effected the fertility of mice.

GM expert at Greenpeace International, Dr Jan van Aken, said: ‘Genetically modified food appears to be acting as a birth control agent, potentially leading to infertility.”

‘If this is not reason enough to close down the whole biotech industry once and for all, I am not sure what kind of disaster we are waiting for.”

‘Playing genetic roulette with our food crops is like playing Russian roulette with consumers and public health.”

The Austrian scientists performed several long-term feeding trials with laboratory mice over a course of 20 weeks.

One of the studies was a so-called reproductive assessment by continuous breeding (RACB) trial, in which the same parent generation gave birth to several litters of baby mice.

The parents were fed either with a diet containing 33% GM maize, a hybrid of Monsanto’s MON 810 and another variety, and a normal feed mix..

The team found changes that were ’statistically significant’ in the third and fourth litters produced by the mice given a GM diet. There were fewer offspring, while the young mice were smaller.

Prof Zentek said there was a direct link between the changes seen and the GM diet.

A press release from the Austrian Agency for Health and Nutrition, said the group of mice given a diet of genetically engineered corn saw a significant change in fertility.

It said: ‘The number of litters and offspring decreased in the GE-fed group faster than in the control. In the GE-fed group more females remained without litters than in the control group.’

Monsanto press offices in the UK and USA were unable to provide a comment on the findings.

CropGen, which speaks for the biotech industry, claims GM crops have been accepted as safe by Government authorities on both sides of the Atlantic.

By Sean Poulter

“Clearly, keeping animals packed together in unnatural conditions is conducive to the breeding and mutation of viruses. Most food scares of recent years — dioxin contamination of pork, antibiotics in salmon, salmonella in chicken, BSE and so on — come down to unnatural, intensive farming practices done on the cheap. Then there is the troubling disappearance of the honey bees, thought to have been caused by pesticide overuse.”

“Now, I’m not saying that buying organic will save us from swine flu or bring back the bees but, clearly, if you worry about these things you should choose to eat food that has been produced in a natural way, with minimal chemicals and without cruelty to animals.”

Alex Renton, The London Times

“Life-threatening disease is the price we pay for cheap meat. How much harm will we do to ourselves in the name of cheap meat? We know that bird flu developed in the world’s vast poultry farms. And we know that pumping animal feed full of antibiotics in factory farms has given us a new strain of MRSA. It’s a simple, horrible process. The only way to keep animals alive in such conditions is to pump their feed full of antibiotics. But this has triggered an arms race with bacteria, which start evolving to beat the antibiotics – and emerge as in the end as pumped-up, super-charged viruses invulnerable to our medical weapons.”

Johann Hari, The Independent UK

“Given that the new strain of Swine flu virus (containing segments of bird, pig and human flu virus), has shown itself capable of passing from human to human and causing human fatalities – the immediate priority must be to protect human health, containing further spread if possible and building-up stocks of suitable vaccine. But this occurrence of yet another disease emanating from livestock and capable of infecting humans – raises serious questions as to the role of intensive livestock systems acting as ‘incubators’ for a wide range of human health-risks and specifically as breeding grounds for potential flu’ pandemics… ”

Robin Maynard, Soil Association campaigns director, comments on the outbreak and spread of Swine ‘flu virus.

The Times of Zambia has just reported that three types of Monsanto genetically engineered (GE) corn has failed to pollinate affecting 82,000 hectares (202 000 acres) of vital food production land. Corn (maize) is a staple food in Africa and farmers regularly fight drought, but never before have their plants failed to be pollinated.

Such a catastrophic event is unheard of and highlights the dangers that have been forecast by scientists about the risks to food security posed by Genetically Engineered Organisms. GE crops have been aggressively marketed in developing countries including South Africa, and portrayed by agribusiness as the solution to the Worlds’ food security. The reality is the opposite – this year many people will hunger as a direct result of the Monsanto corn failing to pollinate.

Gates Studio is an award-winning boutique design firm in Boston, Massachusetts founded by Valerie Gates and run with her husband, Barry Friedman. They specialize in complete creative design solutions including branding and style guide design, print and collateral design, website design and development, digital photography, and film/video creative and production.

When Valerie Gates read Omnivore’s Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable and Miracle this winter, she knew she had to do something to help the small organic farms and the local food movement in the Boston area. Gates came up with the idea to offer local growers and farms her studio’s professional design and branding services on a creative pro-bono sliding scale. With help from the non-profit group, Southeastern Massachusetts Agricultural Partnership, she put out the word to local farms that she was offering her studio’s services on a first-come, first-served basis as follows:

First five farms: a barter agreement of design time and services for organic food or CSA shares

Next five farms: 75% discount on rates for services

Next five farms: 50% discount on rates for services

Next five farms: 25% discount on rates for services

By the end of the second day, Gates had over 15 farms and local growers lined up to take advantage of her unique offer. “I wanted
to do my part in helping even out the playing field for small growers and help them compete with larger farms and organizations that have larger marketing budgets,” explained Gates. “I also wanted to find a creative way to get my family to eat more organically and introduce them to sustainable farming life by creating a relationship with these local farms.”

Gates Studio has won EMMY, BDA, Promax and American Film Institute Awards and their clients include: CBS, Liberty Mutual, United Way, Women’s Entertainment Network, The American Meteorological Society, Charles River Labs, The Medical Foundation, and the Dept. of Health and Human Services.

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A sustainable global food system in the 21st Century needs to be built on a series of “new fundamentals”, according to a leading food expert. Professor Tim Lang, a member of the UK government’s newly formed Food Council, warned that the current system, designed in the 1940s, was showing “structural failures”, such as “astronomic” environmental costs. The new approach needed to address key fundamentals like biodiversity, energy, water and urbanisation, he added.

“Essentially, what we are dealing with at the moment is a food system that was laid down in the 1940s,” he told BBC News. “It followed on from the dust bowl in the US, the collapse of food production in Europe and starvation in Asia. At the time, there was clear evidence showing that there was a mismatch between producers and the need of consumers.”

Professor Lang, from City University, London, added that during the post-war period, food scientists and policymakers also thought increasing production would reduce the cost of food, while improving people’s diets and public health.

“But by the 1970s, evidence was beginning to emerge that the public health outcomes were not quite as expected,” he explained.

“Secondly, there were a whole new set of problems associated with the environment.”

Thirty years on and the world was now facing an even more complex situation, he added.

“The level of growth in food production per capita is dropping off, even dropping, and we have got huge problems ahead with an explosion in human population.”

Professor Lang lists a series of “new fundamentals”, which he outlined during a speech he made as the president-elect of charity Garden Organic, which will shape future food production, including:

* Oil and energy: “We have an entirely oil-based food economy, and yet oil is running out. The impact of that on agriculture is one of the drivers of the volatility in the world food commodity markets.”
* Water scarcity: “One of the key things that I have been pushing is to get the UK government to start auditing food by water,” Professor Lang said, adding that 50% of the UK’s vegetables are imported, many from water-stressed nations.
* Biodiversity: “Biodiversity must not just be protected, it must be replaced and enhanced; but that is going to require a very different way growing food and using the land.”
* Urbanisation: “Probably the most important thing within the social sphere. More people now live in towns than in the countryside. In which case, where do they get their food?”

Professor Lang said that in order to feed a projected nine billion people by 2050, policymakers and scientists face a fundamental challenge: how can food systems work with the planet and biodiversity, rather than raiding and pillaging it?

The UK’s Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, recently set up a Council of Food Policy Advisers in order to address the growing concern of food security and rising prices.

Mr Benn, speaking at the council’s launch, warned: “Global food production will need to double just to meet demand. We have the knowledge and the technology to do this, as things stand, but the perfect storm of climate change, environmental degradation and water and oil scarcity, threatens our ability to succeed.”

Professor Lang, who is a member of the council, offered a suggestion: “We are going to have to get biodiversity into gardens and fields, and then eat it. We have to do this rather than saying that biodiversity is what is on the edge of the field or just outside my garden.”

Michelin-starred chef and long-time food campaigner Raymond Blanc agrees with Professor Lang, adding that there is a need for people, especially in the UK, to reconnect with their food.

He is heading a campaign called Dig for Your Dinner, which he hopes will help people reconnect with their food and how, where and when it is grown.

“Food culture is a whole series of steps,” he told BBC News.

“Whatever amount of space you have in your backyard, it is possible to create a fantastic little garden that will allow you to reconnect with the real value of gardening, which is knowing how to grow food.

“And once you know how to grow food, it would be very nice to be able to cook it. If you are growing food, then it only makes sense that you know how to cook it as well.

“And cooking food will introduce you to the basic knowledge of nutrition. So you can see how this can slowly reintroduce food back into our culture.”

Mr Blanc warned that food prices were likely to continue to rise in the future, which was likely to prompt more people to start growing their own food. He was also hopeful that the food sector would become less wasteful.

“We all know that waste is everywhere; it is immoral what is happening in the world of food. In Europe, 30% of the food grown did not appear on the shelves of the retailers because it was a funny shape or odd colour. At least the amendment to European rules means that we can now have some odd-shaped carrots on our shelves. This is fantastic news, but why was it not done before?”

He suggested that the problem was down to people choosing food based on sight alone, not smell and touch.

“The way that seeds are selected is about immunity to any known disease; they have also got to grow big and fast, and have a fantastic shelf life. Never mind taste, texture or nutrition, it is all about how it looks. The consumer today has got to understand that when they make a choice, let’s say an apple – either Chinese, French or English one – they are making a political choice, a socio-economic choice, as well as an environmental one. They are making a statement about what sort of society and farming they are supporting.”

The latest estimates from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show that another 40 million people have been pushed into hunger in 2008 as a result of higher food prices.

This brings the overall number of undernourished people in the world to 963 million, compared to 923 million in 2007.

The FAO warned that the ongoing financial and economic crisis could tip even more people into hunger and poverty.

“World food prices have dropped since early 2008, but lower prices have not ended the food crisis in many poor countries,” said FAO assistant director-general Hafez Ghanem at the launch of the agency’s State of Food Insecurity in the World 2008 report.

“The structural problems of hunger, like the lack of access to land, credit and employment, combined with high food prices remain a dire reality,” he added.

Professor Lang outlined the challenges facing the global food supply system: “The 21st Century is going to have to produce a new diet for people, more sustainably, and in a way that feeds more people more equitably using less land.”

By Mark Kinver for BBC News

Last summer, for reasons that needn’t bother us here, I had to make a shirt the old-fashioned way , with fabric and a pattern and a sewing machine. The only person I knew who could help was my wife’s 97-year-old great-aunt, Peggy Parker.

Peggy is a brilliant and witty woman, but in the past few years her clothes-making know-how has been completely neglected. What a waste! Because from the moment she scented the fabric and the needles, Peggy was a woman possessed. She barked instructions and capered about snipping this, threading that and knotting the other, till I felt slightly dizzy.

And it suddenly dawned on me, dull-brained oaf that I am, that Britain’s elders have a lot to offer. With Christmas upon us, and the generations being thrown together for days on end, I daresay that many other people my age will shortly come to the same conclusion, if they haven’t already.

Because it seems that the combination of credit crunch and environmental concern is driving us to seek out the wisdom of other ages — wisdom that for too many years has been brushed off shamefully as the chuntering of old codgers too eager to talk about the privations of war and rationing.

One of the most remarkable exemplars of this new cross-generational trend is British charity Oxfam’s “Green Granny” service. The charity has recruited a crack team from a less wasteful generation to offer advice on things such as fixing a button on a shirt, darning socks and making delicious food from leftovers.

One green granny is Barbara Walmsley, a 71-year-old from Cookham in Berkshire, UK, who provides advice on YouTube and also answers queries submitted to “Ask a Granny” on the charity’s website.

“Every granny has her own tricks for saving money,” says Walmsley, “and I’m really glad to have the chance to share them with younger people.”

Oxfam’s Rose Marsh, who is younger than the grannies themselves, came up with the idea. “The main thrust of our campaign was to make people be greener but we thought: how do you do that in the credit crunch? And then we realised that the two things are the same — because if you live more cheaply it’s more green. And that’s when we thought about talking to our grandparents’ generation.”

The older generation have all the answers, she concluded, but for years we’ve ignored that: “There are all these skills that people are discovering today and treating them as if they’re miracles — like how to get rid of a stain. If I see that on YouTube I think it’s magic, but if I ask my grandma she knows all about it. This is knowledge that we’ve all lost.”

For Walmsley, the new-found status of guru is both welcome and unexpected. Her generation drew the short straw, she believes: “When we were young we were daunted by our elders and now we have to avoid saying the wrong thing with younger people. A few years ago, for instance, you would not have had any compunction about asking your children when they were going to start a family. Today you wouldn’t dream of doing that.

“I’m very fortunate. I don’t think I’ve ever been treated disrespectfully by family and friends. But in society generally the respect given to elders has slipped away. In the past, younger people would go to older people for advice. I don’t think that happens now. They talk to their contemporaries instead.”

What caused that to change? “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s something to do with families being so dispersed. They’re not popping into each other’s houses all the time.”

The environmentalist Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Town movement, is, like Marsh, convinced that the elderly have much to teach about living sustainably and he has actively harvested their wisdom for some time.

“To go to the elders and ask for their input is something that in many cultures would be instinctive,” Hopkins says. “But in ours it has been sidelined. One interesting thing when you do an interview with the elderly is that they always start by saying, ‘I don’t know why you want to talk to me; I’m sure I have nothing interesting to say to you . . .’ and then go on to tell you all this fascinating stuff.”

All the same, he recommends interviewing them one at a time. “I went to do one with a lady who had fascinating stories to tell about being a Land Girl on Devon farms during the war, but she said, ‘My dear, I have nothing interesting to tell you at all, so I invited my friend to come along as well’. A few minutes later he arrives and I start talking with the two of them.

“The problem is that one will say, ‘And down by the quay there was that shop, what was it called?’ The other will reply ‘Jameson’s’, to which the first will say, ‘Oh yes, Jameson’s . . . now they had three sons didn’t they?’ ‘Oh yes, Jason, he’s in Australia now. . .’ and so on. It was very hard to get any useful information.”

Alas, not everybody is quite so avid to share the insights of the elderly. They will do it, but only if they are paid first.

In April, a British pensioner named Jack Hammond hit the headlines after his son Michael placed an advertisement in the local post office offering £7 (about US$10.50) an hour for someone to keep Jack company in the pub.

The 88-year-old from Hampshire, UK, a retired electrical engineer, used to drink with a neighbour four times a week, but had recently moved into a nursing home to be closer to his family; his son, a chef, was concerned that he was isolated.

Hammond Jr had previously sought volunteers to accompany his father, but to no avail; the offer of cash made all the difference. He said he was “absolutely staggered” by the warm response to his advertisement.

A similar social need, and incentive structure, is addressed by Eldertainment, set up by brothers William and Heneage Stevenson, aimed at bringing students from top universities together with older people and, according to the promotional material, “encourage knowledge transfer and interaction between the generations”.

Meetings are relaxed and informal and the participants decide whether to make idle conversation, conduct fearsome political debate or tackle household tasks such as shopping and gardening. Each meeting is different. Many of the older generation have enjoyed being read to out loud. One insists on a highly competitive weekly game of Scrabble.

Everything comes at a price, of course. For the high-class companionship of students from top universities, the elderly — or their guilt-ridden relatives — must pay rather more for Eldertainment than Jack Hammond’s son pays for trips to the pub: individual meetings cost £30 (about US$45) an hour, although there is a special introductory offer of four one-hour meetings for £100 (about US$150).

Such intergenerational enterprise doesn’t always have to be one way, however. One thing the elderly have to offer — space — is brilliantly harnessed by Homeshare, a charitable scheme operating in several areas across the country.

A homeshare involves putting two people with different needs together. They also have something to offer one another: on the one hand somebody with a home who could do with help and a watchful eye, and on the other, a person who needs accommodation and is willing to give support in return.

Both the householder and the homesharer gain from the arrangement and feel valued and respected for their own contribution, allowing them both to enter into it with dignity and enthusiasm. Additionally, the costs to families and the wider community are low. But what’s it like in practice?

One couple who have benefited from this are Ruby Martin, 92, and Rita Northcote, a medical student from New Zealand who shares Martin’s home in northwest London, where the homeshare scheme is run by Vitalise.

Martin’s daughter set up the arrangement some years ago. “She didn’t want me to be on my own,” says Martin. “I have heart problems and if I had an attack and there was no one here . . .”

Did she have reservations about sharing her home with a stranger? “Not at all. I looked on it more as an adventure. I thought, ah, a new opening. What’s going to happen now?”

Northcote is Martin’s sixth homesharer. She’s had people from all round the world, including one man.

“Charles was a very interesting person from South Africa,” says Martin. “But they’ve all been very good. We have conversations and I ask about their country and where they live and I can explain to them what it was like in my day and the countries I’ve been to and what I’ve seen. Modesty aside, I think they do learn a lot from me.”

Northcote knows the scheme’s restrictions would be off-putting for many, especially people of her generation: homesharers are allowed just one weekend away from the home each month and must do at least 10 hours of companionship and help a week. Indeed, she wouldn’t put up with it herself — she says when I meet them together — if Martin were less congenial: “But we get on so well, despite the difference in our ages. We eat similar food and notice similar things and laugh at the same jokes. And Ruby is so positive.”

It’s a testament to their closeness that, by way of shorthand, Northcote calls Martin “granny” when talking about her with friends.

As a result of her homeshare, Martin has had much greater exposure to younger people than most of her contemporaries: “I couldn’t do without it. People of my age who don’t have that, I feel for them. It’s important to keep the generations talking to each other. It makes the world go round.”

Like Walmsley, Martin is unsure why that has fizzled out in recent years: “It was a different world when everybody in the street knew everyone else. You looked out for everyone else. In the war, the first thing you did in the morning was ask your neighbour if everybody was all right. I wish that kind of thing could come back without a war, but it has to be something very big to bring people together like that.”

Or does it? Since my shirt-making session with great-aunt Peggy, I have started to wonder if there might be some way to harness the skills and free time of other elderly people — for my own purposes and theirs.

With that in mind, I popped into the neighboring care home to ask if any of the residents would be prepared to teach knitting and crochet to me and my five-year-old daughter. Several hands shot up. Lessons start in January: perhaps we will film them and post them on YouTube.

by John-Paul Flintoff for The London Times, December 21 2008

Eurpoean Union proposals which will potentially ban the use of carcinogenic, mutagenic, neurotoxic and reprotoxic substances will be voted on by members of the European Parliament’s Environment Committee on Wednesday November 5th.

As neurotoxins, the group of substances known as neonicotinoids could be banned in the European Union. These substances have been shown to have a devastating impact on honey bees across the world, and a number of European countries have subsequently banned their use. We are urging the UK to do the same by supporting the new legislation.

As Hiltrud Breyer, the MEP overseeing the legislation explains, the new rules ‘will create a win-win situation for all – for consumers’ health, for the protection of the environment, but also for Europe’s farming industry’. The UK government is almost alone in opposing adequate safeguards.

The chemical industry has been making very misleading claims about loss of production from non-organic farming in the UK if these additional, and we think modest, safeguards are agreed by the EU.

Some of the claims are ridiculous; for example, an article in the UK farming press claimed that the UK would lose 100% of our carrot crop! Organic farmers grow carrots, along with many other crops, successfully in the UK, and yields are not much below, or are similar to non-organic farms. We hope that MEPs on the Committee will treat some of the claims they are being presented with from the UK with a healthy scepticism.

Peter Melchett, policy director of the UK’s largest organic food charity the Soil Association said:
“Other European Countries have recognized the devastating impact which these chemicals have had on the British honey bee population. The UK government should follow suit and support the EU proposals to ban these dangerous chemicals. The government should be acting to protect public safety and wildlife, not merely a small sector of the chemical industry”.

The vast majority of consumers believe cloned animals and their offspring should not be farmed for food, according to an EU study. Currently, there is no law to stop meat and milk from these animals getting into the food chain. Nor is there any requirement to label food from clone offspring. The EU and Britain’s Food Standards Agency are in the throes of deciding how clone farming should be policed. A survey of 25,000 European consumers yesterday made clear that families are unhappy at ‘Frankenstein Food’ farming.

Sean Poulter, Daily Mail, UK

ONCE you become accustomed to gas at $4 a gallon, brace yourself for the next shocking retail threshold: bananas reaching $1 a pound. At that price, Americans may stop thinking of bananas as a cheap staple, and then a strategy that has served the big banana companies for more than a century — enabling them to turn an exotic, tropical fruit into an everyday favorite — will begin to unravel.

The immediate reasons for the price increase are the rising cost of oil and reduced supply caused by floods in Ecuador, the world’s biggest banana exporter. But something larger is going on that will affect prices for years to come.

That bananas have long been the cheapest fruit at the grocery store is astonishing. They’re grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they’re cut off the tree. Apples, in contrast, are typically grown within a few hundred miles of the store and keep for months in a basket out in the garage. Yet apples traditionally have cost at least twice as much per pound as bananas.

Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined, which is especially amazing when you consider that not so long ago, bananas were virtually unknown here. They became a staple only after the men who in the late 19th century founded the United Fruit Company (today’s Chiquita) figured out how to get bananas to American tables quickly — by clearing rainforest in Latin America, building railroads and communication networks and inventing refrigeration techniques to control ripening. The banana barons also marketed their product in ways that had never occurred to farmers or grocers before, by offering discount coupons, writing jingles and placing bananas in schoolbooks and on picture postcards. They even hired doctors to convince mothers that bananas were good for children.

Once bananas had become widely popular, the companies kept costs low by exercising iron-fisted control over the Latin American countries where the fruit was grown. Workers could not be allowed such basic rights as health care, decent wages or the right to congregate. (In 1929, Colombian troops shot down banana workers and their families who were gathered in a town square after church.) Governments could not be anything but utterly pliable. Over and over, banana companies, aided by the American military, intervened whenever there was a chance that any “banana republic” might end its cooperation. (In 1954, United Fruit helped arrange the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala.) Labor is still cheap in these countries, and growers still resort to heavy-handed tactics.

The final piece of the banana pricing equation is genetics. Unlike apple and orange growers, banana importers sell only a single variety of their fruit, the Cavendish. There are more than 1,000 varieties of bananas — most of them in Africa and Asia — but except for an occasional exotic, the Cavendish is the only banana we see in our markets. It is the only kind that is shipped and eaten everywhere from Beijing to Berlin, Moscow to Minneapolis.

By sticking to this single variety, the banana industry ensures that all the bananas in a shipment ripen at the same rate, creating huge economies of scale. The Cavendish is the fruit equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: efficient to produce, uniform in quality and universally affordable.

But there’s a difference between a banana and a Big Mac: The banana is a living organism. It can get sick, and since bananas all come from the same gene pool, a virulent enough malady could wipe out the world’s commercial banana crop in a matter of years.

This has happened before. Our great-grandparents grew up eating not the Cavendish but the Gros Michel banana, a variety that everyone agreed was tastier. But starting in the early 1900s, banana plantations were invaded by a fungus called Panama disease and vanished one by one. Forest would be cleared for new banana fields, and healthy fruit would grow there for a while, but eventually succumb.

By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt. It was saved at the last minute by the Cavendish, a Chinese variety that had been considered something close to junk: inferior in taste, easy to bruise (and therefore hard to ship) and too small to appeal to consumers. But it did resist the blight.

Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough been done to aid efforts to diversify the world’s banana crop by preserving little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia.

In recent years, American consumers have begun seeing the benefits — to health, to the economy and to the environment — of buying foods that are grown close to our homes. Getting used to life without bananas will take some adjustment. What other fruit can you slice onto your breakfast cereal?

But bananas have always been an emblem of a long-distance food chain. Perhaps it’s time we recognize bananas for what they are: an exotic fruit that, some day soon, may slip beyond our reach.

By DAN KOEPPEL,
June 18, 2008, NY Times

Dan Koeppel is the author of “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.”

This is an extract of an interview with Californian organic restauranteur Alice Waters, published April 29, 2008.

What’s in your kitchen?

A fireplace that I can cook in and big windows that look out to my garden. There is no equipment, as such; certainly not machines. I have lots of pestles and mortars, a rather small stove, a big table to eat at and a big table to cook on.

I mostly buy food at the market and use it pretty much right away. My refrigerator has a lot of condiments, jams and jellies. I also keep pasta, grains and couscous.

I grow mostly herbs in my garden, as well as some salad and radishes and citrus fruits. There’s also lots of mint and lemon verbena. I love making fresh mint tea. We serve it after meals at the restaurant.

Local produce pioneers

California has set a lot of trends among foodies in the western world, and buying from home is just one of them

How would you sum up your food philosophy?

Pretty simply that I want to buy food that’s locally grown, sustainably farmed, seasonably ripe, and then I want to cook pretty simply. I really love having the fireplace going. I cook eggs and toast in the fire; that’s my specialty, if you can call it one.

How have our attitudes to food changed?

I think there has been a reaction to the manipulation of our food system and I think we’re finally coming back to our senses. We’re just realising that we need to eat real food, food that’s grown for our good health, and we need to eat a variety of foods.

I think the most exciting thing is the biodiversity that’s coming back to gardens. We’re not just getting five kinds of lettuce now, we’re getting 25.

What is Britain’s best-kept food secret?

After mad cow, I think you had a kind of wake-up call and people just started paying attention in a way that they hadn’t before. There’s an awareness in England about where food comes from that doesn’t really exist anywhere else I know about. You have the horticultural roots that will make it possible to really change the food system. And you have an enlightened Prince of Wales who is aware of the food system.

Do you prefer eating in or eating out?

I always like to eat at home, but being the restaurantrice that I am, I also like to eat out. I go to the places where I know the owner because I like to get their advice. I love salads and pasta. I’m less of a dessert person and like savoury foods.

What is the next big (real) food trend?

I don’t like to think of it (food) as a trend, but around the world there is more focus on food. If you can call seasonal food in the garden a trend, then I think it’s coming back.

The way that we’re ultimately going to save ourselves and this planet is if we educate ourselves and our children about where our food comes from. I think the work that Jamie Oliver and the Soil Association are doing in England is radical and vital.

US farmers have been given the green light to produce cloned meat for the human food chain. In a report billed as a “final risk assessment” of the technology, the US Food and Drug Administration has concluded that healthy cloned animals and products from them such as milk are safe for consumers.

The announcement follows the launch of a public consultation on the issue by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Its “draft opinion” on the technology gave provisional backing on the grounds that there was no evidence for food safety or environmental concerns.

Joyce D’Silva, of Compassion in World Farming describes it as “…a technology that has arisen out of a huge burden of animal suffering and that is still going on.” She said even if the embryo loss rates were brought down to acceptable levels, the technology would be detrimental to animal welfare. “It looks like it is going to be used to produce the most highly productive animals… These are the high-producing animals that have the most endemic welfare problems anyway.”

The UK National Farmers’ Union has adopted a wait-and-see attitude to the technology. Helen Ferrier, the NFU’s food science adviser said, “Generally our views on the safety or the acceptability etc are really based on the opinions of independent scientific experts.” If cloning is adopted she said the NFU did not favor labeling cloned meat.

“If the product is absolutely the same as its equivalent but using a different system, it’s not necessarily very useful to label it, because it’s misleading to the consumer and it’s impossible to enforce.”

OrganicFoodee.com thinks otherwise. Consumers want the facts about what they are eating. It’s our basic right to have cloned meat clearly labeled so we can choose to buy it or not to buy it. Until cloned meat is labeled, the only way to avoid eating it is to buy organic meat, as organic meat by law cannot be cloned.

British shoppers were warned yesterday that there could be a shortage of organic turkeys at supermarkets this Christmas. The recent bird flu outbreak in East Anglia, which resulted in tens of thousands of premium birds being culled, is posing major problems for suppliers and retailers with less than three weeks to go. Industry experts predict that customers may find it harder to buy a fresh turkey, which will push up prices.

The extent of the looming problem was underlined by a major quality supermarket chain, Waitrose, which said yesterday that it would have no organic turkeys to sell this Christmas. The store had planned to source its entire stock of 18,000 birds from two UK farms on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk. However, they were all slaughtered when the premises became infected with avian flu.

In the past year, the UK organic turkey market has increased by almost 50 per cent as British shoppers spend more for top-quality, traceable produce.

Each growing season, like many other sugar beet farmers bedeviled by weeds, Robert Green repeatedly and painstakingly applies herbicides in a process he compares to treating cancer with chemotherapy.

In his right hand, Duane Grant holds a genetically engineered sugar beet, next to a conventional beet. Once refined, the sugar from each would be the same, sucrose.

“You give small doses of products that might harm the crop, but it harms the weeds a little more,” said Mr. Green, who plants about 900 acres in beets in St. Thomas, N.D.

But next spring, for the first time, Mr. Green intends to plant beets genetically engineered to withstand Monsanto’s powerful Roundup herbicide. The Roundup will destroy the weeds but leave his crop unscathed, potentially saving him thousands of dollars in tractor fuel and labor.

For Mr. Green and many other beet farmers, it is technology too long delayed. And the engineered beets could pave the way for the eventual planting of other biotech crops like wheat, rice and potatoes, which were also stalled on the launching pad.

Seven years ago, beet breeders were on the verge of introducing Roundup-resistant seeds. But they had to pull back after sugar-using food companies like Hershey and Mars, fearing consumer resistance, balked at the idea of biotech beets. Now, though, sensing that those concerns have subsided, many processors have cleared their growers to plant the Roundup-resistant beets next spring.

It would be the first new type of genetically engineered food crop widely grown since the 1990s, when biotech soybeans, corn and a few other crops entered the market.

“Basically, we have not run into resistance,” said David Berg, president of American Crystal Sugar, the nation’s largest sugar beet processor. “We really think that consumer attitudes have come to accept food from biotechnology.”

A Kellogg spokeswoman, Kris Charles, said her company “would not have any issues” buying such sugar for products sold in the United States, where she said “most consumers are not concerned about biotech.”

If some other big food companies are now open to genetically modified sugar, though, they are not talking about it. Both Hershey and Mars declined to comment. “There’s just nothing we have to say on the topic,” a Mars spokeswoman said.

Many sugar refiners and seed developers also refused to comment, hewing to an industrywide plan to coordinate the introduction of the genetically engineered beets and carefully control what is said about them.

When it comes to genetically modified crops, there is a reason to keep one’s corporate head low — to avoid protests. Some opponents of biotechnology are only now getting wind that the sugar beets have been resurrected.

“When I first saw this I said, ‘No, it can’t be,’” said Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association. “I thought we had already dealt with this.”

His organization issued a call to arms and thousands of identical e-mail messages were sent to Mr. Berg at American Crystal Sugar warning that “profit margins of your company and its supporting farmers” would be hurt by consumer resistance.

Mr. Berg said he received 681 messages in a 24-hour period before having the e-mail blocked. He said he still believed that most consumers would accept biotech crops. Mr. Cummins, however, said he would next try to persuade consumers to pressure food companies to boycott the sugar. “I don’t think companies like Hershey are going to want any more hassles than they already have,” he said, referring to recent earnings pressure and management turmoil at the chocolate company.

About 10,000 American farmers grow sugar beets on about 1.3 million acres, mainly in Northern states from Oregon to Michigan. That makes the beets a minor crop compared with corn, at about 90 million acres, and soybeans, at almost 70 million.

And yet beets account for about half the nation’s sugar supply, with the rest coming from sugar cane. The sugar from beets and cane, generally considered interchangeable, is used in candies, cereals, cakes and numerous other products, although some food manufacturers have switched to high-fructose corn syrup, which is cheaper.

When genetically engineered versions of soybeans and corn — as well as cotton and canola — were introduced in the mid-1990s, farmers quickly adopted them. But opposition to genetically engineered crops then took hold, particularly in Europe. Food companies, fearing protests or loss of customers, pressured farmers not to grow the crops.

Sugar was not the only crop affected. Insect-resistant potatoes developed by Monsanto were withdrawn from the market in 2001 after fast-food companies resisted them. Monsanto gave up on developing Roundup-resistant wheat in 2004, in part because American wheat farmers feared losing exports. The rice industry, also heavily dependent on exports, has never grown herbicide-tolerant varieties.

Even if the situation has now changed for sugar, however, other crops might still meet resistance. For one thing, sugar is a refined product that contains no DNA or proteins, just the chemical sucrose. “While the sugar beet is genetically different, the sugar is the same,” said Luther Markwart, executive vice president of the American Sugarbeet Growers Association and co-chairman of the Sugar Industry Biotech Council.

By contrast, the foreign DNA and proteins in genetically modified wheat, rice or potatoes can be eaten by consumers, which at least theoretically raises food safety questions.

Moreover, only about 3 percent of American sugar is exported, Mr. Markwart said, compared with about half of wheat and rice.

The sugar industry’s organizational structure also helps. Virtually all sugar processors — the companies that buy the beets from farmers and then extract the sugar and sell it — are owned by the farmers themselves. That makes them more likely to accept the biotech crops than an independent processor might be.

Among farmers, demand for the Roundup Ready beets, as they are known, is expected to be strong. “The sugar beet growers are going to adopt this technology immediately,” said Alan G. Dexter, the extension sugar beet specialist at North Dakota State University and the University of Minnesota. In a survey he conducted, 57 percent of beet growers cited weeds as their biggest problem, with diseases the distant runner-up at 16 percent.

The seeds will be most attractive to those with the biggest weed problems. With a technology fee of a little more than $100 per 100,000 seeds paid to Monsanto, the genetically engineered seeds will cost at least twice as much as conventional seeds. That translates to about $50 to $65 in extra seed costs per acre.

But Duane Grant, who grows about 5,000 acres of sugar beets in Rupert, Idaho, said the extra seed outlays would be offset by other savings. He said his annual herbicide costs would drop to $35 an acre, from $70, and he would no longer have to hire migrant workers to pull weeds by hand, at a cost of $35 to $150 an acre.

Mr. Grant, who was designated by the national beet growers’ association as its spokesman on this issue, also said Roundup would have to be sprayed only two or three times during the spring-to-fall growing season, while the existing herbicides must be sprayed five times or more. The existing herbicides are decades old and some weeds have developed resistance to them, Mr. Grant said.

Some weed experts say there are also some weeds resistant to Roundup and its generic equivalent, glyphosate, as a consequence of the heavy use of the herbicide spurred by the proliferation of Roundup Ready crops. But such weeds are not found in beet fields, Mr. Grant said.

He said that with conventional beets, Roundup can be used only before the seedlings emerge from the ground, because after that the Roundup would kill them.

Bringing back the biotech beets took a long, coordinated effort involving Monsanto, seed companies, growers, processors and trade groups under the auspices of the Sugar Industry Biotech Council.

Rival seed companies all agreed to use seeds descended from a single genetic transformation done by Monsanto and KWS, a German seed company. That meant the industry had to win federal approval only once. The new genetically engineered sugar beet was reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration in 2004 and approved for unrestricted growing by the Agriculture Department in early 2005.

And before planting the beets, farmers have waited for approvals in other important markets. Just last month Europe approved the beets for food and feed use, although not for planting.

Because such foods would have to be labeled in Europe as containing genetically engineered ingredients, some American food companies might use cane sugar, which is not genetically modified, for products they export to Europe. But in the United States, foods containing sugar made from biotech beets would not have to be labeled.

The sugar beet industry conducted field trials in Idaho last year and Michigan this year. Mr. Grant, who was part of the Idaho test, said the biotech seeds actually had slightly higher yields and sugar output than very similar conventional varieties.

Some environmentalists say the use of Roundup on sugar beets could contribute to the growing problem of Roundup-resistant weeds. But the Agriculture Department said it expected little, if any, environmental effect from growing the beets.

One factor that could help keep the trait from spreading is that beets produce seeds only in their second year, after passing through a winter. So beets grown in most parts of the country never produce seeds, because farmers harvest beets every fall and plant new seeds the next spring.

But in California, beets stay in the ground through the winter and there are weeds that can mate with sugar beets. So growers there may be more cautious about the Roundup revolution.

“We have to make sure we don’t cause ourselves more problems than we’re curing,” said Ben Goodwin, executive manager of the California Beet Growers Association.

Story written by Andrew Pollack for the New York Times

A new organic food store has opened in London’s trendy Clerkenwell district where everything for sale is sold without packaging – Unpackaged.

Shoppers are invited to bring their own containers to fill with everything from fresh organic produce to organic rice, organic dried fruits, organic oils and even eco washing powder. The store does offer reusable containers if needed, but is heavily promoting their customers to bring their own by offering a discount of 50 pence per kilo (about US$1 every 2 lbs).

It’s an old-fashioned concept. This is the way most stores operated a hundred years ago, from the old Wild West trading posts of California to the village delicatessens of the Swiss Alps. But the difference with this new store is that it’s modern and fun, with a deep political motivation to spread an eco-message while passing on the price benefits of lower packaging.

A newly published scientific study shows that infants who eat organic dairy products, and whose mothers also consumed organic dairy products when they were pregnant, are 36% less likely to suffer from eczema than children who consume conventional dairy products.

Whilst there is a significant body of evidence showing that organic food contains higher levels of beneficial nutrients than non-organic foods, this is the first example of a definite specific health impact of organic food consumption being published in a peer reviewed journal.

Currently one-third of the children in Western societies show symptoms of allergies including eczema, hayfever and asthma.

Whilst the study confirms organic dairy consumption protects against the development of eczema, the scientists could only hypothesise why organic dairy foods deliver this protection. Their hypothesis follows the established facts of increased levels of the beneficial conjugated linoleic acid isomers (CLA) found in milk from organically managed cows. A separate recent study confirms that higher levels of conjugated linoleic acids are not only found in cows’ milk but also in the breast milk of women consuming organic milk. This therefore underpins the hypothesis that the higher levels of CLAs in the breast milk of organic milk drinking mothers are a key mechanism in reducing eczema, as well as the organic dairy diet of the infants themselves.

CLA’s are currently receiving much attention in nutritional research, as experimental evidence suggests these fatty acids might have anti-carcinogenic, anti-atherosclerotic, anti-diabetic and immune-modulating effects, as well as a favorable influence on the proportion of fat tissue to muscle mass in the body.

Peter Melchett, Soil Association policy director said:
“The first peer reviewed scientific paper showing a significant health benefit from eating organic food is a major landmark. But the scientists’ findings of over a third fewer cases of eczema among children fits in with the experience of many people who eat organic food. Given the strong evidence that organic has more beneficial nutrients, and the absence of harmful additives, common sense suggests that organic food is better for your health. It’s good to see this starting to be confirmed by scientific research. These studies add to the body of evidence showing that the UK Food Standards Agency’s stance on organic food is out of date.”

The research was carried out by the Louis Bolk Institute and the Department of Epidemiology, Care and Public Health Research Institute (Caphri), Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands in association with a number of other medical schools:; Respiratory Epidemiology and Public Health Group, National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, London, UK; Department of Epidemiology, Nutrition and Toxicology Research Institute Maastricht (NUTRIM), Maastricht University, PO Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, the Netherlands, Department of Medical Microbiology, University Hospital of Maastricht, Maastricht, the Netherlands; Department of Experimental Immunology, Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

VARGINHA, Brazil — Rafael de Paiva was skeptical at first. If he wanted a “fair trade” certification for his coffee crop, the Brazilian farmer would have to adhere to a long list of rules on pesticides, farming techniques, recycling and other matters. He even had to show that his children were enrolled in school.

“I thought, ‘This is difficult,’” recalled the humble farmer. But the 20 percent premium he recently received for his first fair trade harvest made the effort worthwhile, Mr. Paiva said, adding, it “helped us create a decent living.”

More farmers are likely to receive such offers, as importers and retailers rush to meet a growing demand from consumers and activists to adhere to stricter environmental and social standards.

Mr. Paiva’s beans will be in the store-brand coffee sold by Sam’s Club, the warehouse chain of Wal-Mart Stores. Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s and Starbucks already sell some fair trade coffee.

“We see a real momentum now with big companies and institutions switching to fair trade,” said Paul Rice, president and chief executive of TransFair USA, the only independent fair trade certifier in the United States.

The International Fair Trade Association, an umbrella group of organizations in more than 70 countries, defines fair trade as reflecting “concern for the social, economic and environmental well-being of marginalized small producers” and does “not maximize profit at their expense.”

According to Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, a group of fair trade certifiers, consumers spent approximately $2.2 billion on certified products in 2006, a 42 percent increase over the previous year, benefiting over seven million people in developing countries.

Like consumer awareness of organic products a decade ago, fair trade awareness is growing. In 2006, 27 percent of Americans said they were aware of the certification, up from 12 percent in 2004, according to a study by the New-York based National Coffee Association.

Fair trade products that have experienced the biggest jump in demand include coffee, cocoa and cotton, according to the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations.

Dozens of other products, including tea, pineapples, wine and flowers, are certified by organizations that visit farmers to verify that they are meeting the many criteria that bar, among other things, the use of child labor and harmful chemicals.

There is no governmental standard for fair trade certification, the same situation as with “organic” until a few years ago. Some fair trade produce also carries the organic label, but most does not. One important difference is the focus of the labels: organic refers to how food is cultivated, while fair trade is primarily concerned with the condition of the farmer and his laborers.

Big chains are marketing fair trade coffee to varying degrees. All the espresso served at the 5,400 Dunkin’ Donuts stores in the United States, for example, is fair trade. All McDonald’s stores in New England sell only fair trade coffee. And in 2006, Starbucks bought 50 percent more fair trade coffee than in 2005.

Fair trade produce remains a minuscule percentage of world trade, but it is growing. Only 3.3 percent of coffee sold in the United States in 2006 was certified fair trade, but that was more than eight times the level in 2001, according to TransFair USA.

Although Sam’s Club already sells seven fair trade imports, including coffee, this will be the first time it has put its Member’s Mark label on a fair trade product, which Mr. Rice of TransFair called “a statement of their commitment to fair trade.”

He added, “The impact in terms of volume and the impact in terms of the farmers and their families is quite dramatic.”

Michael Ellgass, the director of house brands for Sam’s Club, said the company could afford to pay fair trade’s premium because it has reduced the number of middlemen.

Coffee usually passes from farmers through roasters, packers, traders, shippers and warehouses before arriving in stores. But Sam’s Club will buy shelf-ready merchandise directly from Café Bom Dia, the roaster here in Brazil’s lush coffee country.

“We are cutting a number of steps out of the process by working directly with the farmer,” Mr. Ellgass said.

Some critics of fair trade say that working with thousands of small farmers makes strict adherence to fair trade rules difficult.

Others argue that fair trade coffee is as exploitive as the conventional kind, especially in countries that produce the highest-quality beans — like Colombia, Ethiopia and Guatemala. Fair trade farmers there are barely paid more than their counterparts in Brazil, though their crops become gourmet brands, selling for a hefty markup, said Geoff Watts, vice president for coffee at Chicago’s Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea, a coffee importer.

But in Brazil, a nation with little top-grade coffee, the partnership between small producers and big retailers is a better blend, Mr. Watts said.

Fair trade coffee farmers in Brazil are paid at least $1.29 a pound, compared with the current market rate of roughly $1.05 per pound, said Sydney Marques de Paiva, president of Café Bom Dia.

Most coffee farmers are organized into cooperatives, and some of that premium finances community projects like schools or potable water.

Like most of his cooperative’s 3,000-odd members — and three-quarters of coffee growers worldwide — Mr. Paiva, the coffee farmer (no relation to Mr. Marques de Paiva), farms less than 25 acres of land. He produces around 200 132-pound sacks for the co-op, with 70 percent of that sold as fair trade to Café Bom Dia.

The company would buy more if there were more of a market for fair trade coffee, it said.

The fair trade crop brought Mr. Paiva about 258 reais ($139) a sack, compared with about 230 reais for the sacks that were not fair trade. For the latest crop, that meant an additional 3,920 reais ($2,116) for him, a huge sum here in the impoverished mountains of Minas.

“It’s been great for us,” Mr. Paiva said with a huge, toothless grin. “I call the people from the co-op my family now.”

Mr. Ellgass, the Sam’s Club executive, said the chain hoped to expand its fair trade goods.

So do Brazil’s farmers. “Everybody is doing their best to come up to standard so we can sell our coffee as fair trade,” said Conceição Peres da Costa, one of the co-op’s growers. “Everybody wants to earn as much as he can.”

By Andrew Downie for the New York Times

The indiscriminate use of toxic pesticides on banana plantations in the French Caribbean has left much of the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe poisoned for a century to come, a report to the French parliament warned yesterday. The two islands and their 800,000 inhabitants faced a “health disaster”, with soaring rates of cancer and infertility, said Professor Dominique Belpomme, a French cancer specialist.

Based on present trends, half the men of Martinique and Guadeloupe were likely to develop prostate cancer at some point in their lives, Professor Belpomme said. Birth defects in children were also becoming far more common, he warned.

Tests have shown that every child born in Guadeloupe is contaminated with chlordecone, a highly toxic pesticide also known as kepone, which was banned in many countries in 1979. It was used legally in France until 1990 and in the French Caribbean until 1993. But it was used illegally to kill weevils in Martinique and Guadeloupe until 2002, often sprayed by airplanes.

Professor Belpomme said: “The situation is extremely serious. The tests we carried out on pesticides show there is a health disaster in the Caribbean. The word is not too strong. Martinique and Guadeloupe have literally been poisoned.”

“The poisoning affects both land and water. Chlordecone establishes itself in the clay and stays there for up to a century. As a result, the food chain is contaminated, especially water. In Martinique, most water sources are polluted.”

Politicians from the islands, which are overseas departments of France, were torn between accusing the professor of “alarmism” and calling for a full inquiry.

“This must not be covered up by a conspiracy of silence,” said Victorin Lurel, the socialist leader of the Guadeloupe regional council. Christian Estrosi, the French minister for overseas territories, cast some doubts on the scientific basis of the report but said he was “wholly favorable” to an official commission.

Martinique and Guadeloupe produce more than 260,000 tonnes of bananas a year, worth US$300m. The industry, which employs 15,000 people, also receives £90m (US$180m) in EU aid. The islands, which are relatively poor compared with the French mainland, are already struggling to recover from Hurricane Dean, which devastated every banana plantation in Martinique and half of those in Guadeloupe last month. Many growers may find their soils and water tables so contaminated they will never be allowed to re-plant their crops, Professor Belpomme said. Although the banana fruit itself is not affected by chlordecone, the toxin can remain in soil for 100 years and is absorbed by humans through the skin and respiratory tract. Exposure to the powder can cause tremors, headaches, slurred speech, dizziness, memory loss, weight loss and sterility and raise the risk of developing cancer.

In early August, Guadeloupe’s appeal court accepted a complaint against “persons unknown” for “poisoning” the island with pesticides. This opens up the possibility of a criminal investigation into the responsibility of successive French governments in failing to ban, or monitor, the illegal use of the chemicals.

According to Professor Belpomme, the impact on health in the islands will be more serious than the “tainted blood” scandal of the 1980s, in which 4,000 French people were infected by blood contaminated with the HIV virus .

“In this case, it is a whole population which has been poisoned,” he told MPs. “Those people who are alive today but also future generations.

“The rate of prostate cancer is major. The French Caribbean is second in the world ranking. The rate of congenital malformation is increasing and women are having fewer children than 15 years ago. The standard theory is that this is because of the Pill, but I think it is linked to pesticides.”

But Christian Choupin, head of the Martinique and Guadeloupe banana growers’ association, insisted chlordecone was no longer used and claimed Professor Belpomme’s report had “no proper scientific basis”. “He is giving the impression that people are dropping like flies, which is not at all the case,” M. Chupin said.

By John Lichfield in Paris for The Independent UK

A new American scientific study clearly links exposure to commonly used pesticides increases the risk of asthma. Over 23 million Americans suffer from asthma, of which almost 9 million are minors.

The new scientific study of nearly 20,000 American farmers was presented on Sunday to the European Respiratory Society Annual Congress in Stockholm, Denmark. It was carried out by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Of the 19,704 farmers included in the study, 127 had doctor diagnosed allergic asthma and 314 had non-allergic asthma.

The study concludes that a history of high pesticide exposure shows a doubling of asthma risk. The link remained statistically significant after adjusting for a variety of potentially confounding factors including age, smoking, body weight, and state of residence.

During the study, 452 farmers aged 30 and over developed asthma. Farmers in Iowa and North Carolina, who used around 16 chemical sprays, were found to be most at risk.

Overall, 16 of the pesticides studied were associated with asthma: 12 with the allergic variety of asthma and 4 with the non-allergic type. Coumaphos, EPTC, lindane, parathion, heptachlor, and 2,4,5-TP were most strongly linked to allergic asthma. For non-allergic asthma, DDT, malathion, and phorate had the strongest effect.

“This is the first study with sufficient power to evaluate individual pesticides and adult asthma among individuals who routinely apply pesticides. Moreover, this is the only study to date to do this for allergic and non-allergic asthma separately,” a spokesman for the researchers said.

“The possible scope of the link between pesticides and adult-onset asthma raises a problem of broader interest, given the considerable quantities of pesticides used in the domestic and urban environments. Their impact on a population which, while less exposed, has a greater risk of allergies and a higher prevalence of asthma, remains to be determined.”

It is more than 30 years since an American scientist, Ben Feingold, first suggested that artificial food colors and other additives caused overactive, impulsive and inattentive behavior in children; this sort of hyperactivity is known to be a marker for later educational difficulties, especially problems with reading, and antisocial behavior.

Feingold’s work and subsequent studies, however, were dismissed as flawed or inconclusive.

Today’s UK government-commissioned research confirming that food additives commonly found in non-organic children’s food have a detrimental effect on their behavior is the largest trial of its kind. But its findings come as no surprise to campaign groups such as the Hyperactive Children’s Support Group, who have long argued that eliminating junk food can dramatically improve the behavior of some children.

One of the things that makes the latest findings so significant is that the research by the University of Southampton has been so thoroughly conducted and reviewed and cannot be argued away; it is published in medical journal The Lancet today. The study also found there was increased hyperactivity in children with no history of problems.

The leader of the research, Professor Jim Stevenson, said it provided a clear demonstration that changes in behavior could be detected in three-year-old and eight-year-old children who consumed a mix of additives. Researchers at the same department found similar effects in a study seven years ago.

The additives tested were designed to match what a child would be exposed to in a normal diet. The mixes tested included artificial colors used for decades in many products aimed at children and the widely used preservative sodium benzoate. All of the food additives in the test are banned from organic food, so choosing organic soft food, candy, cakes and ice cream means avoiding these food additives.

Since Feingold’s original work, behavioral problems among schoolchildren have risen, as have diagnoses of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. Estimates of numbers of children suffering from full ADHD vary: one UK survey estimates that 2.5% of British schoolchildren are affected, and international studies put the figure at 5-10%.

The UK Government’ Food Standards Agency (FSA), which commissioned the study, was taking a cautious line yesterday. Professor Ieuan Hughes, the chairman of its expert committee on the toxicity of chemicals in food (CoT), said that since some children in the study reacted significantly to the additives but others did not, it was not possible to draw conclusions about the effect on the general population. Nor was it possible, he said, to extrapolate from these particular additives to other additives.

The FSA revised its official advice, but only to suggest that parents who think their children show signs of hyperactive behavior should avoid foods containing artificial colors and the preservative sodium benzoate by checking labels. In fact, many of the products which contain these additives – sweets, cakes, ice cream and drinks – are sold without labels.

The FSA has also not issued advice to schools on whether the additives should be banned from school food but advised concerned parents to ask head teachers.

Experts were asking yesterday why it had taken the authorities so long to act and why they had not gone further to remove the additives from food. Tim Lang, professor of food policy at London’s City University, said:

“The first calls to investigate these additives were made 30 years ago. Good for the FSA for finally doing this research but why did it take so long? The FSA must take a tougher pro-child position.”

Since EU legislation regulates the use of additives, the agency has referred the findings to the European Food Safety Authority, which has begun a review of all additives. It recently withdrew approval for one of the first colors it re-examined, Red 2G, which has been used for cosmetic purposes for decades in meat products.

Erik Millstone, professor of science policy at University of Sussex, who has studied the additives industry for many years, criticized the CoT and the FSA response as wholly inadequate. “Stevenson’s team has robustly shown that food additives do adversely affect the behavior, not only of children diagnosed as hyperactive, but normal healthy children too. The CoT pretends that these results have no implications for the general population or for food additives as a whole … The complacency of the CoT and FSA officials must now cease,” he said.

Although the FSA and the food industry stressed that the additives had been assessed for safety by the EC, some of the colors have been banned at various times in Scandinavian countries and the US. Also, some were approved many years ago when safety testing did not consider the effect on behavior. Until now, safety testing has looked at individual additives in isolation not in the cocktails in which they are consumed in the diet.

The FSA has been considering the safety of these additives since 2000, when it received the results of a study conducted by the same researchers, known as the Isle of Wight study. That research concluded that significant improvements in children’s behavior could be produced by the removing of colorings and sodium benzoate from their diet. CoT decided that this study was inconclusive, however. The purpose of the latest FSA study was to provide conclusive evidence.

Head teachers who have worked to remove additives from school meals said the research vindicated their efforts. Alan Coode, former head of a primary school in Merton, said: “We knew this all along. When we changed our school meals and removed additives there was a new calmness to the school. The science has just caught up.”

The food industry said it was already removing many artificial colorings. It argues that avoiding sodium benzoate is more difficult because it stops drinks that may have a shelf life of several years going off. The preservative is still very widely used, particularly by soft drinks manufacturers.

PepsiCo said no decision would be taken about its use of additives until it had seen the research. Coca-Cola, GlaxoSmith Kline, which makes energy drinks, and Unilever referred us to the industry’s Food and Drink Federation. Its director of communications, Julian Hunt, said: “It is important to reassure consumers that the Southampton study does not suggest there is a safety issue with the use of these additives. In addition, the way in which the additives were tested as a mixture is not how they are used in everyday products.” He said the industry would continue to reduce the use of additives.

The global additives market is worth more than $25bn (£12.4bn) a year. It grew by 2.4% a year between 2001 and 2004, when the food industry says it was transforming itself, and is growing rapidly.

Article by Felicity Lawrence for The Guardian, UK

Organic food and drink sales in the UK nudged the £2 billion (US$4 billion) mark for the first time in 2006, with a sustained market growth rate of 22 per cent throughout the year.

Launched to coincide with the start of the UK’s Organic Fortnight 2007, the Soil Association’s definitive annual Organic Market Report shows continued strong growth and dynamic public support for organic food, drink, textiles and health and beauty products.

Retail sales of organic products through organic delivery and mail order schemes and other direct routes increased from £95 million in 2005 to £146 million in 2006 – a staggering 53 per cent growth, more than double that experienced by the major supermarkets.

Organic textiles and the booming organic health and beauty sector are experiencing particularly strong growth. 2006 saw a 30 per cent increase in the number of health and beauty products licensed with the Soil Association. At current growth rates, the UK market for organic cotton products is estimated to be worth £107 million by 2008.

The report includes consumer research by Mintel which shows that more than half of those surveyed had purchased organic fruit and vegetables within the previous 12 months; one in four consumers had bought organic meat or dairy products; and one in six had purchased packaged organic goods.

Other key figures from the report reveal:

* Sales of free-range and organic outstripping eggs from caged birds for the first time. Consumer concerns over animal welfare appear to be driving changes in the poultry sector.
* An average of £37 million (US$74 million) is spent each week on organic produce in the UK with consumers living in London, the Southeast, the Southwest and Wales most likely to buy organic food.
* Households with children under the age of 15 tend to buy a wider range of organic foods than those with no children.
* Organic farmers are three times as likely to market their products locally or directly as non-organic farmers in the UK.

Despite the steady growth in demand for organic food over the past decade, some key sectors are still failing to meet demand. Organic livestock sectors are dependent on supplies of organic feed, but UK self-sufficiency in organic cereals fell below 50 per cent, during 2006, increasing our reliance on imported organic grains. The cost of livestock feed, whether for organic or non organic farmers, is rising as a result of recent poor global harvests, increasing diversion of cereals into biofuel production and rapidly rising demand particularly from China and India.

Helen Browning, Soil Association Director of Food and Farming said:
“These figures are extremely encouraging, the year on year growth in sales not just in food and drink, but also the newer booming clothing and health and beauty sectors confirm organic has moved well beyond a mere fad or niche.”

“The staggering 53 per cent growth in sales through home delivery schemes and other direct routes confirms strong public support for local, seasonal and organic food that provides a fair return to farmers and growers, boosts the local economy, and also reduces your carbon footprint – consumers are increasingly linking everyday food choice to environmental action.”

“While this year’s report confirms a positive future for organic food and farming, the organic movement faces challenges in the long-term from climate change and rising oil prices, as do all farmers and growers. Rises in feed and fuel prices will need to be reflected in food prices at the check-out that enable farmers to get a fair return on their production costs. It’s fantastic to have such strong public support for and understanding of the benefits provided by organic farming, but that must urgently extend to more widespread acceptance, by retailers as well as consumers, of the true costs of producing staple foods like eggs, milk, meat , and bread sustainably.”

“The significant short-fall in UK grown organic cereals is a major concern, forcing greater reliance on imports for livestock feed – but of course, it is also a major opportunity for current non-organic cereal farmers to convert and supply a guaranteed and growing market.”

“With the government’s own studies confirming that organic farming typically uses 30 per cent less energy than non-organic farming, it’s not surprising more and more people are choosing to purchase planet-friendly, organic food. This is confirmed by an independent poll commissioned by the Soil Association from Mumsnet, which found that 84 per cent of mums believe that organic is better for their family and 90 per cent for the planet. We’ll be using that endorsement from the nation’s mums to get Gordon Brown to wake up to the planet-friendly benefits of organic food and farming.”

The Chinese government yesterday launched a counter-offensive on product quality controls, threatening a ban on imports of US pork and calling for a worldwide drive to improve health and safety standards. This is because US pork products may contain ractopamine, a growth hormone that is banned in China but not in the US.

Chinese officials are to send two separate delegations to the US to discuss mounting concerns about safety controls following a series of scares over food, drugs and toys exported from the country. The scandals culminated this week in the US company Mattel’s decision to recall 18 million toys made in China and sold worldwide following warnings they may contain faulty magnets on which children could choke.

The first of the Chinese delegations will arrive in Washington this month to meet the US Food and Drug Administration, Zhao Baoqing, a spokesman for the country’s American embassy said, to be followed by a second round of talks in September with the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

However, Mr Zhao warned the Chinese government would not accept suggestions that lower production standards in Asia are the only problem area that such talks should cover. “I would like to say that the question of food safety and quality is a question for all the countries in the world,” he said. “It is not just a question for individual countries.”

Chinese officials are desperate to prevent a global backlash against exports from the country and have already introduced a series of measures designed to reassure trade partners.

In particular, the Chinese exports department has begun random testing of goods from industries including food and electronics, and also begun relaxing restrictions on journalists seeking to report on the manufacturing sector.

Last month, the former head of the Chinese food and drug safety agency was executed following a corruption scandal and officials have also launched a campaign urging manufacturers to more closely scrutinise the activities of sub-contractors.

Nevertheless, the scandals have encouraged some Western politicians to step up calls for much tighter controls on imports from China.

Christopher Dodd, the Democrat senator from Connecticut, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination, even called for a ban on Chinese imports yesterday. “Parents should be confident that the toys and food they give their children have been inspected and are safe,” he said. “I am calling on the President to use his authority to immediately suspend all imports of toys and food from China.”

Meglena Juneva, the European Union’s Consumer Protection Commissioner, also called for greater vigilance on export standards. The EU already has a system through which each member state is required to notify the Commission of product recalls so that other countries can consider whether to follow suit. The Commission also has powers to ban products sourced from countries or firms implicated in several scandals.

However, widescale bans on imports from China would almost certainly provoke a trade war with the West, with serious consequences for both sides. Trade between China and the US alone is expected to be worth $500bn (£252bn) a year by 2010.

China has already warned it is considering a ban on pork imports from America, on the grounds that some products may contain ractopamine, a growth hormone that is banned in China but not in the US. A similar ban could be imposed on chicken feet and other agricultural produce.

The pork sector could be the first flashpoint in escalating trade disputes between China and the West. China’s concerns about US hormone treatments are mirrored by increasing anxiety among Western producers about an outbreak of the potentially fatal blue ear disease in Asia. Though Chinese officials say the outbreak is under control, the authorities have had to cull tens of thousands of pigs.

By David Prosser, Deputy Business Editor, The Independent UK, 17 August 2007

Somewhere in America, word gets out that the country’s top natural foods grocer is setting up shop. Soon property prices start to rocket. Once it’s built, the Croc-wearing, Audi-driving “soccer moms” arrive, happy to pay over the odds for organically produced food.

It’s a fair bet that many of the customers are also Democrat supporters, the sort of Americans who want to do something positive for the environment. We know this because John Mackey, the chief executive of the world’s largest natural food chain, puts enormous effort into understanding what motivates the people who buy his organic carrots. And Whole Food stores, found in such Democratic bastions as Austin, Berkeley, Boston, New York and Washington DC, are all extremely profitable.

But the company is also at the receiving end of what many see as a politically motivated investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, which is trying to halt Whole Foods’ proposed purchase of a loss-making competitor, Wild Oats.

The commission revealed this week that Mr Mackey has been posting “voluminously” in online market discussion forums under the pseudonym Rahodeb, which is an anagram of his wife’s first name, Deborah.

So far there is no allegation of wrongdoing on Mr. Mackey’s part, and it is widely assumed that the chief executive of a publicly traded company would not be stupid enough to leak insider information on a stock discussion board, or make statements to pump up Whole Foods stock price.

But the commission is eager to show that Whole Foods is anti-competitive, and allowing it to buy out a rival health food chain would lead to monopolistic practices. The blocking of the merger with Wild Oats comes as Wal-Mart begins to move into the organic food business, sensing the enormous profits to be made. Wal-Mart, the number one grocer in the US, could quickly come to dominate the small organic food sector.

Mr Mackey’s anonymous blogging is but the latest of his eccentricities. He is a vegan, a libertarian and a fiercely successful capitalist who hates trade unions. He is worth an estimated $40m and, unlike so many of America’s mega-wealthy, thinks that’s enough. Last November, he slashed his salary from $1m to $1.

He dropped out of university in 1978 aged 25, to co-found his first vegetarian establishment in Austin, Texas, a vegetarian wholefood store with the ironic name Safer Way. Soon he was living in the store, using the commercial-sized dishwasher as a shower. When the store was flooded, loyal customers helped to clean up.

The company quickly expanded, becoming what the Financial Times called “the fastest-growing mass retailer in the US”. Last year, Whole Foods’ total revenue was more than $5bn and its gross profit was more than $1.6bn. The company has 181 supermarkets. It has also arrived in the UK, opening the world’s largest Whole Foods store in the centre of town.

Mr Mackey remains the driving force behind Whole Foods, and unlike other companies such as Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, which sold out to a corporation, he shows no signs of selling up. Instead he is increasingly focused on animal welfare. He has banned the sale of live lobsters in most of his stores and has developed a five-star rating for all meats sold.

“What he’s doing is educating Americans about food and sustainability,” said Bryan Meehan, who sold his company Fresh and Wild to Whole Foods. “He is intensely competitive in a positive way, but also deeply caring about the world.”

by Leonard Doyle in Washington, DC for The Independent, UK

A food additive used to make commercial sausages and burgers pink may cause cancer. Scientific studies suggest Red 2G, (also known as E128), causes tumours in rats and mice and might have the same effect on people. After reviewing the experiments, the European Food Safety Agency (Efsa) said it could set no safe limit for the additive.

The European Commission is expected to ban its use within a fortnight, but products containing the additive on the shelves are not likely to be withdrawn in Europe. In America, there are currently no plans to limit the use of Red 2G.

Efsa has been reviewing the safety of colourings, many of which were approved for use 30 years ago. In a statement yesterday, the agency said its scientific panel on food additives, flavourings, processing aids and materials had reviewed several evaluations of Red 2G since 1999. It found the additive, one of a band of controversial “azo-dye” colourings, converted in the body into a substance called aniline.

“Based on animal studies the panel concluded that aniline should be considered as a carcinogen,” Efsa said, adding that it was not possible to state that the cancer had developed because of the genetic structure of the animal cells.

“It is therefore not possible to determine a level of intake for aniline which may be regarded as safe for humans,” it added. “The panel therefore decided that Red 2G should be regarded as being of safety concern.”

The European Commission is “reflecting” on the assessment and is expected to act at a meeting with member states on 20 July. A spokesman said Red G was used in Britain and Ireland but was not used in Scandinavia.

Ian Tokelove, of the pressure group the Food Commission, said there had been concerns about Red 2G going back decades and it was suspected of being a carcinogen in the 1980s. “Our general view is that additives are totally unnecessary,” he added. “We don’t need them in our food. They’re there to disguise the quality of the food and in this case to make meat products look fresher and meatier than they are.”

Red 2G is permitted for use in breakfast sausages with a minimum cereal content of 6 per cent and in burgers with 4 per cent of vegetables or cereals. It gives meat a reddish-pink appearance that turns brown on contact with heat.

Feature by Martin Hickman for The Independent, UK. July 10, 2007

The fast food chain McDonalds announced that all milk for its tea and coffee sold in the 1,200 outlets in the UK will come from organic British cows, starting the end of July. So far, 500,000 liters are sold in children’s Happy Meals. After the end of July, the company will need 8.6 million liters each year – a share of 5 % of all organic milk sales in the UK. This will make the company one of the biggest buyers for this product.

OrganicFoodee.com hopes the company’s food sourcing continues to improve in the UK and around the world. It would be a huge achievement if McDonalds decided to introduce organic milk into its restaurants across the USA, creating better opportunities for American organic farmers and providing healthier options for American McDonalds customers.

A 10-year study comparing organic tomatoes with rival produce suggests they have almost double the amount of antioxidants called flavonoids that protect the heart. According to the findings, levels of quercetin and kaempferol were found to be on average 79 per cent and 97 per cent higher, respectively, in organic tomatoes.

The study was led by Dr. Alyson Mitchell at the University of California at Davis. Flavonoids can fight heart disease, blood pressure and strokes, and have been linked to staving off some forms of cancer and dementia, said Dr Mitchell.

Differences in soil quality, irrigation and the handling of harvested produce have made direct comparisons difficult in the past, she said. She had conducted two earlier studies to compare organic and non-organic tomatoes. In this latest study, due to be published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the researchers used data from a long-term project that used standardized farming techniques.

Dr Mitchell said the findings can be explained by the availability of nitrogen in the soil. Flavonoids are produced as a defense mechanism that can be triggered by nutrient deficiency. The inorganic nitrogen in conventional fertilizer is easily available to plants and so, the team suggests, lower levels of flavonoids are probably caused by over-fertilizing the soil.

A major British supermarket has dropped Prince Charles as a vegetable suppliers because it says his produce did not meet the right standards. They also dropped fresh produce from Patrick Holden’s farm, the Director of the Soil Association, the UK’s main organic food and farming organization.

The move has prompted Patrick Holden to accuse leading supermarkets of being so centralized and industrialized that they cannot deliver the local organic food their customers want.

Mr Holden said he believes that he and Prince Charles have become victims of the supermarket system’s industrial processes and imposed food miles. They were sacked as suppliers of carrots to Sainsbury’s at the end of January, 2007.

He and the Prince had been forced to truck their vegetables hundreds of miles from their farms to a centralized packing house in East Anglia before they were sent back to be sold in Sainsbury’s stores local to their area.

Mr Holden believes his vegetables were of the highest quality when harvested, but the combined effects of long-distance transport, handling to create large enough batches for the machines that wash and polish the vegetables and further storing after processing to create large enough batches for packing left the vegetables damaged and prone to rot.

The system also resulted in a crop that had been grown for low environmental impact acquiring a greater carbon footprint than conventional carrots grown on an industrial scale, according to Mr Holden. Up to half the crop from the two farms was being rejected in the grading for cosmetic appearance and quality.

Mr Holden said he had decided to speak out because his case was typical. “Everyone who has supplied a supermarket own label will have a story similar to mine to tell but most daren’t tell it for fear of being delisted. This is not confined to one supermarket. It is the unintentional consequence of the centralised supermarket distribution system.”

Sainsbury’s acknowledges that dealing with small suppliers is difficult for big supermarkets, but says it works successfully with others and is willing to try to find a solution to the problems of its highest profile organic farmers. It said its overriding concern had to be the quality of the food it sold.

by Felicity Lawrence for The Guardian, UK.

EU acceptance of GE contamination in all crops, gives New Zealand a real opportunity and point of difference in the world as a GE Free crop producer, according to The Soil & Health Association, New Zealand.

In Brussels on Tuesday, EU Ministers at the Agriculture Council decided to allow contamination of organic food with genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The Ministers adopted a new law, which allows organic food containing up to 0.9 percent ‘adventitious or technically unavoidable’ GMO content to be classed and labeled as organic.

“New Zealand has zero tolerance to genetically engineered (GE) contamination and with organic food the worlds fastest food sector growth area, there are fantastic opportunities here for both genuine GE Free organic and conventional growers”, said Soil & Health spokesperson Steffan Browning. “BioGro organic certification standards for example would not tolerate GE contamination, and some British supermarkets are already demanding BioGro. EU consumers do not want GE either.”

“The European Parliament and environmental groups had called for the threshold of contamination of organic food to be 0.1 percent, which is the lowest level at which genetically modified organisms can be technically detected, but due to our increasingly stringent biosecurity and unique geographical isolation, New Zealand’s zero tolerance need not be altered”, said spokesperson Browning.

“Our special position with only limited field trials, that can quickly be eradicated, has to be one of the best opportunities yet for sustainable economic development, with the added bonus of addressing food miles and other environmental trade barriers. Nuclear Free, GE Free & Zero Tolerance, Clean & Green, 100% Pure, BioGro, are winners, not contamination”

“Crop and Food are likely to apply for a further field trial including onions, garlic and leeks this year, but with a likely legal challenge to the recent ERMA decision allowing a GE Brassica field trial, that may be in doubt, leaving just one pathetic GE onion trial to be ripped out, for New Zealand horticulture to be genuinely GE Free.”

“With the onions gone, removing the equally pathetic field trial of GE trees and 200 GE cattle, would allow New Zealand primary producers to walk a very tall GE Free in the world, just as the community has wanted in survey after survey,” said spokesperson Browning.

“A GE Free and Organic 2020, with economic and sustainability benefits, is a far better picture than the contaminated environment that is being hoisted on Europe, and already exists across many parts of the globe.”

Under pressure from The USA, the European governing body has decided to allow a huge amount of genetic modification to enter the organic food chain. Organic foods in Europe can be labeled “GM-free” even if they contain up to 0.9% genetically modified content, European agriculture ministers decided yesterday.

Europe’s agriculture ministers have agreed on a compulsory logo for organic food as new figures showed more and more farmers are switching to the production method in response to consumer demand. The logo will be applied to foods meeting common standards across the European Union from 2009. However, some producers say these standards have been set too low as they permit genetically modified material that accidentally enters the food chain. To be classed as organic, food must contain 95 per cent organic ingredients but can contain up to 0.9 per cent GMOs, to allow for cross-contamination from other crops.

Francis Blake, Soil Association Standards and Technical Director, is quoted, “They have shifted the responsibility and cost of compliance from the makers of biotech crops to organic producers.”

UK Conservative Food and Farming spokesman Peter Ainworth said, “The EU’s plans to allow nearly one per cent GM contamination to go unacknowledged are shocking”

The USDA is considering relaxing legal standards again for organic foods in America. It has drawn up a list of 38 nonorganic spices, colorings and other ingredients that would be allowed in products it legally defines as ‘organic.’

With the “USDA organic” seal stamped on its label, Anheuser-Busch calls its Wild Hop Lager “the perfect organic experience.”

“In today’s world of artificial flavors, preservatives and factory farming, knowing what goes into what you eat and drink can just about drive you crazy,” the Wild Hop website says. “That’s why we have decided to go back to basics and do things the way they were meant to be … naturally.”

But many beer drinkers may not know that Anheuser-Busch has the organic blessing from federal regulators even though Wild Hop Lager uses hops grown with chemical fertilizers and sprayed with pesticides.

A deadline of midnight Friday to come up with a new list of nonorganic ingredients allowed in USDA-certified organic products passed without action from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, leaving uncertain whether some foods currently labeled “USDA organic” would continue to be produced.

The agency is considering a list of 38 nonorganic ingredients that will be permitted in organic foods. Because of the broad uses of these ingredients — as colorings and flavorings, for example — almost any type of manufactured organic food could be affected, including cereal, sausage, bread and beer.

Organic food advocates have fought to block approval of some or all of the proposed ingredients, saying consumers would be misled.

“This proposal is blatant catering to powerful industry players who want the benefits of labeling their products ‘USDA organic’ without doing the work to source organic materials,” said Ronnie Cummins, executive director of the Organic Consumers Association. of Finland, Minnesota, a nonprofit group that boasts 850,000 members.

USDA spokeswoman Joan Shaffer declined to comment on the plan.

Food manufacturers said this week that they were hoping the agency would approve the rules by Friday to continue labeling their products as organic.

A federal judge had given the USDA until midnight Friday to name the nonorganic ingredients it would allow in organic foods, but the agency did not release its final list by the end of the day.

“They probably don’t know what to do” Cummins said. “On the other hand, it’s hard to believe they’re going to make people change their labels, although that’s what they should do.”

Demand for organic food in the U.S. is booming as consumers seek products that are more healthful and friendlier to the environment. Sales have more than doubled in the last five years, reaching $16.9 billion last year, according to the Organic Trade Association in Greenfield, Massachusetts, which represents small and large food producers.

But with big companies entering what was formerly a mom-and-pop industry, new questions have arisen about what exactly goes into organic food. For food to be called organic, it must be grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Animals must be raised without antibiotics and growth hormones and given some access to the outdoors.

Many nonorganic ingredients, including hops, are already being used in organic products, thanks to a USDA interpretation of the Organic Foods Protection Act of 1990. In 2005, a federal judge disagreed with how the USDA was applying the law and gave the agency two years to revise its rules.

Organic food supporters had hoped that the USDA would allow only a small number of substances, but were dismayed last month when the agency released the proposed list of 38 ingredients.

“Adding 38 new ingredients is not just a concession by the USDA, it is a major blow to the organic movement in the U.S. because it would erode consumer confidence in organic standards,” said Carl Chamberlain, a research assistant with the Pesticide Education Project in Raleigh, N.C.

In addition to hops, the list includes 19 food colorings, two starches, casings for sausages and hot dogs, fish oil, chipotle chili pepper, gelatin and a host of obscure ingredients (one, for instance, is a “bulking agent” and sweetener with the tongue-twisting name of fructooligosaccharides).

Under the agency’s proposal, as much as 5% of a food product could be made with these ingredients and still get the “USDA organic” seal. Hops, though a major component of beer’s flavor, are less than 5% of the final product because the beverage is mostly water.

Sales of organic beer, though still a small portion of total beer sales, have been growing even faster than overall organic food sales. They reached $19 million in 2005, a 40% increase over the previous year (2006 figures are not yet available).

Trying to get a share of the market for green products, Anheuser-Busch introduced two organic beers in September, and soon pitched them in fliers to wholesalers.

“Environmentally conscious consumers are looking for certified organic products, including beer, the fastest-growing organic beverage,” the pitch said. “Capitalize on this growing market with Wild Hop Lager and Stone Mill Pale Ale.”

But while the two beers use 100% organic barley malt, less than 10% of the hops they use is organic. Hops are conelike flowers that grow on vines and impart a bitter taste on beer to offset the sweetness of malts.

Anheuser-Busch said it simply couldn’t find enough organic hops.

“There currently is only a small supply of organically grown hops available for purchase by brewers, and we purchased all we could for brewing these beers,” said Doug Muhleman, vice president of brewing operations for Anheuser-Busch Inc.

But that argument doesn’t wash with Russell Klisch, owner of Milwaukee’s Lakefront Brewery, which has been producing beer with 100% organic hops since 1996.

“If we can do it, we think Anheuser-Busch, the world’s largest beer producer with virtually unlimited resources, should be able to follow our example,” he said.

Klisch said there were enough organic hops to satisfy 90% of the current organic beer demand in the U.S., but some brewers were put off by their higher price.

There are no organic hops commercially grown in the U.S.; most come from New Zealand, Britain and Germany. But Klisch has recently contracted with two Wisconsin farmers to grow some on their land. He doesn’t understand why large brewers can’t do the same.

“You’re telling me that Anheuser-Busch can’t find a little plot of ground somewhere to grow organic hops?” he said.

In addition to hops, two other items on the USDA list have attracted particular attention: casings for sausages and hot dogs, and fish oil.

Casings are the intestines of cows, pigs or sheep, which have been used for centuries to wrap meat into sausages and frankfurters.

Although the casings are a tiny portion of the overall sausage, organic purists object to eating anything from animals that are raised on conventional farms, where livestock may be housed in tight quarters and given antibiotics and growth hormones. Further, they note that the USDA’s food safety division has identified cow intestines as a possible source of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease.

But the USDA has already banned part of the cow’s small intestines for human consumption because of the risk of mad cow disease. Barbara Negron, president of the North American Natural Casing Association in New York, said casings were safe to eat.

“It’s a very safe, clean and natural product,” she said. “It’s not an organic product. It’s a natural product.”

It’s very difficult to maintain pure organic eating habits, Negron added, “unless you want to lock yourself up and only raise your own food.”

Fish oil’s presence on the USDA list has drawn objections because it could carry high levels of heavy metals and other contaminants, said Jim Riddle, a former member of the National Organic Standards Board. But fish oil producers said such contaminants could be screened out through proper processing.

The USDA rules come with what appears to be an important consumer protection: Manufacturers can use nonorganic ingredients only if organic versions are not “commercially available.”

But food makers have found a way around this barrier, in part because the USDA doesn’t enforce the rule directly. Instead, it depends on its certifying agents — 96 licensed organizations in the U.S. and overseas — to decide for themselves what it means for a product to be available in organic form.

Despite years of discussion, the USDA has yet to provide certifiers with standardized guidelines for enforcing this rule.

“There is no effective mechanism for identifying a lack of organic ingredients,” complained executives of Pennsylvania Certified Organic, a nonprofit certifying agent, in a letter to the USDA. “It is a very challenging task to ‘prove a negative’ regarding the organic supply.”

Large companies have a better chance of winning approval to use nonorganic ingredients because the amount they demand can exceed the small supply of organic equivalents, said Craig Minowa, environmental scientist for the Organic Consumers Association.

By Scott J. Wilson, LA Times, June 9, 2007

The shortlists for The Observer Ethical Awards 2007 have been announced, the Oscars of British ethical products and lifestyle.

The award category that we’re most excited about this year here at OrganicFoodee.com is Fashion Product of the Year. Our long time friend and very own fashion consultant Sarah Ratty’s eco-chic womenswear label Ciel has been shortlisted for this prestigious award. America’s future president and climate change campaigner Al Gore rubs shoulders with British journalist, blogger and political activist George Monbiot in the Campaigner of the Year shortlist. Best Online Retailer sees organic food delivery service Abel & Cole shortlisted alongside eco-fashion retailer Howies and eco-lifestyle products store The Natural Collection. And in the Best Local Retailer shortlist, we’re delighted to see Brighton’s wonderful community store Infinity Foods.

The Observer newspaper will be announcing the winners on June 8th, so check back to see the final results.

Retail food prices are heading for their biggest annual increase in as much as 30 years, raising fears that the world faces an unprecedented period of food price inflation.

Prices have soared as the expanding biofuels industry, climate change and the growing prosperity of nations such as India and China push up the costs of farm commodities including wheat, corn, milk and oils.

Food companies have started passing on these increases to consumers, but the prospect of sustained commodity price rises means the industry’s profits could be hit as it is forced to absorb the higher costs itself.

Hershey, the US chocolate maker, this month became the first big food company to cut its 2007 profits forecast because of the rising cost of milk, and Switzerland’s Nestlé warned investors last month it would not be able to cope with higher milk costs by simply raising prices.

John Parker, food analyst at Deutsche Bank, said: “There is growing concern within the food industry that the present upswing in soft commodity prices is structural rather than cyclical.”

Few countries have not felt the impact of food price rises. In the US, prices have risen by 6.7 per cent, seasonally adjusted, since the beginning of this year, compared to 2.1 per cent for all of 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If prices keep rising at these levels for the rest of the year, it would be the biggest annual increase since 1980.

The UK’s consumer price index showed annual food price inflation of 6 per cent in April – its highest level in almost six years, and well ahead of overall inflation of 2.8 per cent. Food price inflation is lower in the eurozone at 2.5 per cent but still rising more quickly than overall prices.

In China, food costs are increasing more than twice as quickly as other kinds of prices, up 7.1 per cent last month compared to a year earlier. And in India, annual food price inflation has reached its highest levels since the late 1990s, climbing above 10 per cent year-on-year.

US research firm Bernstein estimates that its Food Commodities index, which tracks a dozen agricultural raw materials including wheat, barley, cocoa and edible oils, will show cost inflation of 21 per cent this year – the biggest rise since the index started almost a decade ago.

By Jenny Wiggins, Consumer Industries Correspondent, Financial Times
May 24, 2007

Between 1940 and 1991, the typical British potato “lost” 47% of its copper and 45% of its iron. Carrots lost 75% of their magnesium, and broccoli 75% of its calcium. This is according to the British government’s own scientifically researched data.

The pattern was repeated for vitamins. A study in Canada showed that between 1951 and 1999, potatoes lost all of their vitamin A and 57% of their vitamin C.

Today’s consumers also have to eat as many as eight oranges to obtain the same amount of vitamin A their grandparents did from a single fruit.

This has to be one of the most troubling consequences of the agrochemical revolution. This is the proven nutritive difference between the intensively grown fruit and vegetables of today and their organically grown equivalents 60 years ago.

Roundup is the most commonly used herbicide in the world. It is widely used on genetically modified plants grown for food, clothing and animal feed. Most genetically modified crops are genetically modified specifically so that they can be sprayed and grown with Roundup. Roundup is a weedkiller, so crops grown where Roundup are sprayed are usually genetically modified so they can survive being sprayed with this poison at the same time as the weeds it is intended to kill. Roundup is found throughout the food chain in most countries, including America, India and France. It has contaminated rivers and waterways in all countries where it is sprayed onto crops, and so it can find its way into food even if the farmer has not sprayed his own fields.

A group of scientists in the University of Caen, France, has published a study on the previously unknown toxic effects of Roundup on human embryonic cells. The study is titled ‘Time and Dose-Dependent Effects of Roundup on Human Embryonic and Placental Cells’ and was authored by Nora Benachour, Herbert Sipahutar, Safa Moslemi, Céline Gasnier, Carine Travert, Gilles-Eric Séralini. It has scientifically proven that Roundup adversely affects human embryonic cells if used at doses that are currently legally recommended. It also finds that the human endocrine system is disrupted by this widely used herbicide. This means if you eat food that has been sprayed with Roundup, it can unbalance your hormones and adversely effect your fertility.

Read the full scientific report in English.

On May 27, 2007 it will be 100 years since Rachel Carson was born. She was one of the very first people to alert the Western world about the benefits of organic farming and the dangers inherent in spraying farms with poisonous checmicals.

Her book, ‘Silent Spring’, was published in America in 1962, and influenced an entire generation. The silence she referred to in the title was her own observation that there was less and less birdsong every spring.

Her combination of thorough research and inspiring rhetoric makes Rachel Carson one of the world’s foremost ecologists.

www.rachelcarson.org

The landlady of a small English pub on the Pennine Way has won her battle with the fast food giant Kentucky Fried Chicken, over her “Family Feast” traditional Christmas Day menu. The battle was joined when KFC’s lawyers at Freshfields, the leading City firm, wrote to Tracy Daly, licensee of the Tan Hill Inn, in North Yorkshire, accusing her of infringing its trademark.

Ms Daly had assumed that the letter, from one Giles Pratt, was an elaborate practical joke.

Her pub was miles from the nearest high street, and the Family Feast she served but once a year. It consisted of a traditional Christmas dinner. There was little chance, she reasoned, that it could be confused with KFC’s Family Feast, a bucket of fried chicken and chips, coleslaw, potato and gravy, with a fizzy drink?

She was wrong.

When she called Freshfields she was told that the matter was extremely serious. A spokesperson for KFC explained that Family Feast was a registered trademark to which it devoted significant resources for promotion and protection. However, the company’s professed intent to tackle the threat posed by the Christmas menu of a tiny country pub caused uproar. Firms of solicitors offered Ms Daly their services free, and commentators on Times Online weighed in behind Ms Daly as she prepared to fight her corner.

“A faceless corporation with no heart and no values . . . trying to bully hard-working pub owners over ownership of a common English phrase” wrote one Times reader.

Ms Daly suggested that the chief executive of KFC ought to make the rather long journey to her pub to experience her “Family Feast” for himself. In return she would agree to eat a KFC Family Feast.

Faced with this, and the public outcry, yesterday afternoon KFC backed down. It issued a statement: “KFC has spoken to Ms Daly . . . and confirmed that it will not take this case any further. This means Ms Daly can continue to use the phrase Family Feast on the pub’s Christmas menu. It’s an unusual situation that has been blown out of all proportion.”

Ms Daly said: “Common sense has prevailed. I’m not going to need my boxing gloves. I’ve invited KFC to come here and have a meal and shake hands.”

Story by Will Pavia for The Times, UK, May 11 2007

1990 McDonald’s served a writ against an English couple who handed out leaflets outside their restaurants, urging people not to eat there. The ‘McLibel’ battle became the longest in English legal history, ending with victory for the couple as the case went to Europe

I really don’t like the look of the nectarine Adam Wakeley is proffering. More specifically, I don’t like the feel of it, because it’s as hard as a bullet and, as any fool knows, that means it will taste disgusting. ‘It’s just right for eating, absolutely lovely,’ he insists, in a way that doesn’t invite dissent. So I have to take a bite. It is the nicest nectarine I’ve ever had in my life, juicy and sweet, which proves that, despite being a consumer of fruit for 30 years (although admittedly I’ve achieved the prescribed ‘five-a-day’ about twice), I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Adam Wakeley, on the other hand, knows everything about fruit. He is joint MD of Organic Farm Foods, the UK’s biggest organic-fruit wholesaler, a £26 million ($50 million) business, supplying the main UK supermarkets with imported organic produce which they sell as fast as he can supply it. Actually it’s in his blood – his father has a large apple farm in Kent (though unlike the fruit that Wakeley deals in, it’s not organic, but more on that later).

Adam is the first cousin of celebrated fashion designer Amanda Wakeley, and his early career also involved a foray into the fashion world – as a male model in the 1980s. In the Wakeleys’ 14th-century farmhouse in Ilmington, Gloucestershire – one of those ridiculously bucolic villages that make Richard Curtis films looks grittily realistic – there are only a couple of clues to this former life: photos of Adam in the downstairs bathroom. Taken by his wife, Melanie, a onetime professional photographer, they are of the slightly film noir, Athena man-holds-baby type, very popular in the 1980s, and actually now rather cool. ‘No, they are not cool,’ huffs Adam, ‘horrible, embarrassing.’ In fact, he claims the whole modelling thing was just useful to get Mel an audience with art directors who might then commission her.

It wasn’t long before he was drawn to the apple business, like his father before him. But while Mel was pregnant with Ned (now 11), something happened that was to change Adam’s whole outlook on farming and its future. Mel was on his father’s apple farm, walking through the yard, when she was inadvertently showered with pesticide; the type of pest inhibitor routinely sprayed on British fruit (the average apple is treated around 60 times before it reaches a supermarket shelf). Just weeks later the couple attended a wedding where the entire party was struck down by salmonella in a case that made the national press – the chef was later imprisoned. Heavily pregnant, Mel was rushed into hospital, and Ned was born by emergency Caesarean, underweight and with a seriously underdeveloped oesophagus. It was touch and go whether he’d survive.

In a house full of children, running between the small orchard and bouncing on a large trampoline, Ned holds his own. But his life has involved countless operations, complex rounds of visits to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, and a number of near-death experiences – he can only eat certain things, and only very, very slowly to avoid choking. There remains little conclusive evidence on the effects of pesticide. In Ned’s case, the salmonella incident didn’t help his chances, but there was little doubt in the minds of the Great Ormond Street specialists that the missing oesophagus was entirely consistent with the apple pesticides Mel had ingested.

In any case, there was absolutely no doubt in Adam Wakeley’s mind. It was a terribly cruel epiphany, but it made him adamant that the organic system, growing without recourse to a variety of agrichemicals, was the only way that farming should or could be carried out sustainably.

You will not find a more passionate advocate of the organic system than Wakeley, but you won’t find a more commercially motivated one either. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I’m not a hemp-wearing, toe-wiggling hippy. I’m the managing director of a £26m ($50m) organic food company. My motivation is to make a profit for my shareholders. But I can do something idealistic, very green, commercially viable and actually, highly profitable.’

In fact, Adam Wakeley has a big apple plan. One he unfurls at the outside lunch table in the courtyard behind the house. Today the Wakeleys are relying on takeaway food. But this being millionaire-belt Gloucestershire, the pies, flans and unfeasibly large artichoke hearts just happen to be from nearby Daylesford Organic.

The outside table is useful, if only because it’s rather big and the Wakeleys are the sort of family who collect extra children at meal times, as their progeny appear with their friends from various corners of the gardens. Often Mel’s parents appear too – they live in a very fine house next door. Lily, dressed in Top Shop’s best, arrives with a couple of friends, Ned appears with a tall blonde (‘Ned has a huge amount of girlfriends,’ Mel informs me) and Jude appears clutching a cola ice pop (‘not sure if that is organic,’ says Adam dubiously).

‘Have some more apple, girl,’ Adam says, and I’m thinking, ‘Not more fruit’, because to be honest I’ve had a month’s quota already. Actually he’s talking to Rocky, one of the hens, who likes to sit on the table around meal times. ‘She’s a lovely, lovely girl,’ coos Adam. When Rocky has strutted off, Wakeley reveals his plan: supermarkets (and obviously consumers) are desperate for organic, UK fruit, without the chemicals and the food miles. ‘Tesco had just three days’ worth of English organic apples on their shelves last year, because that’s all they could get,’ he says. ‘Through our investors we are going to buy large chunks of the right land – normally this means Hereford and Kent and plant with the right varieties. It takes three years to grow the apples, which coincidentally is the time it takes for organic conversion. At the end you not only have home-grown apples but more land in organic conversion. And the beauty of the idea is that I know the size of my markets, because I’m already supplying them with imported fruit. In a nutshell, I will take my imported off and put English on.’

Wakeley’s scheme is now under way on acreage bought by his first investor, but he won’t be growing many of the apples generally regarded as ‘classic’ English varieties. There will be no Cox’s orange pippins for example. ‘It’s the junkie of apples,’ he says. ‘It wouldn’t last a day without chemicals. Take away its fertilisers and pesticides and it will wilt. So we need to go right back and find the varieties which are disease-resistant and have good taste. This is what we have done.’

These are, apparently, varieties from the 13th and 14th century – small trees no bigger than six feet that allow the sun to get round them. I worry that delving so far back into history might make this plan seem a little regressive, a charge often levelled at the organic community. No, insists Adam, they really knew how to grow and sustain strong varieties in those days, though they did not, it is true, have to conform to the supermarkets’ demands for an apple weighing 60-65ml, free of blemish, insect damage and scab marks. ‘Historically, you’d grow fruit and people would eat it,’ says Adam.

Meanwhile, there’s hardly a stampede of UK farmers trying to get into the buoyant organic market, although the Soil Association insists that 66 per cent of organic produce is now grown on these shores. According to Adam, English farmers just don’t get organic. ‘Granted they are up to their eyes in debt, mortgaged to the hilt and on their knees, but English farmers don’t understand why you’ve got to have ponds, hedgerows, compost. They see it as a fad, and as six per cent of the retail market, which means to them 94 per cent of the market isn’t interested.’

To Adam this means 94 per cent ripe for conversion to local, organic fruit, providing it’s done properly – ie by him and his team.

‘We’ve got a team of specialists who know more about organic apple farming than anybody in the world, including Bob Barr, the world’s foremost compost expert because it’s all about the soil. At the end of the day, my future is not challenging guidelines set up by the Soil Association or the supermarkets. That’s not my job.’ Which rather begs the question, what is his job? ‘Easy,’ he says. ‘My job is to reinvent English farming and bring local, organic food into the market place.’ Welcome to Adam’s apple revolution.

Article by Lucy Siegle for The Observer Food Monthly, UK, Sunday April 29th, 2007

America’s bees are disappearing. Not in a gradual way, but in a massive, completely unprecedented and shockingly abrupt manner known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). And if the bees die, who is going to pollinate the crops that feed us?

When John Chapple, one of London’s largest keepers of honeybees, opened his 40 hives after the winter, he was shocked: 23 were empty, seven contained dead bees, and only 10 were unaffected by what seemed to be a mystery plague.

Beekeepers are used to diseases sweeping through their colonies, and, nationally, nearly one in seven colonies dies naturally each winter. But this seemed very different to Mr Chapple, who is head of the London Beekeepers Association and has 20 years’ experience with the insects and their diseases.

“The problem was that most of the bees had just disappeared. It was like the Marie Celeste. There was no chance they had been stolen,” he said yesterday. “The ones that were left did not seem to have been attacked by varroa [the tiny parasitical mite that beekeepers have learned to live with since it arrived from Asia 15 years ago]. I really do not know what happened”.

Mr Chapple’s experience has chimed with other beekeepers. “Many colleagues and bee clubs tell me that they are experiencing something similar. The Pinner and Ruislip beekeepers’ group told me only this morning that they have lost 50% to 75% of their bees. I don’t know what is happening, but the bees are just going,” he said.

Many British beekeepers fear they are witnessing the start of an alarming phenomenon which is sweeping the US and mainland Europe. Colony collapse disorder (CCD) is possibly the most serious disease yet faced by bees.

According to the national bee unit, a branch of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, its “symptoms appear to be the total collapse of bee colonies, with a complete absence of bees or only a few remaining in the hive”. The unit says no one has any idea what is causing CCD. Theories in the US, where 24 states are affected and losses of 50% to 90% of colonies are being reported, include environmental stresses, malnutrition, unknown pathogens, the use of antibiotics, mites, pesticides and genetically modified crops.

Because bees pollinate millions of hectares of fruit trees and crops, the implications for agriculture are enormous. “Approximately 40% of my 2,000 colonies are currently dead and this is the greatest winter mortality I have ever experienced,” Gene Brandi, a member of the California State Beekeepers Association, told the US Congress recently.

In Spain, thousands of colonies are said to have been lost, and up to 40% of Swiss bees are reported to have disappeared or died in the past year. Heavy losses have also been reported in Portugal, Italy and Greece.

Government bee inspectors met yesterday, but Mike Brown, head of the national bee unit based in York, reported no signs of CCD in Britain. “There is no evidence in the UK right now of colony collapse disorder,” he said in a statement. “The majority of inspectors said that they can put the current mortalities in honeybee populations around the UK down to varroa or varroasis.”

“I just don’t know where they get their information,” said Mr Chapple. “They took away some of my bees but I have heard nothing. All I know that something is very wrong with our bees.”

Article by John Vidal, environment editor of The Guardian UK, April 12, 2007

This a tale of two Hastings. There is New Hastings, with a seafront rocking with amusement arcades, chippies, tattoo parlours and shops selling rock candy. And there is Old Hastings, quiet, quaint, higgledy-piggledy in a pretty, orderly kind of way, with secondhand book shops, antique shops and Judges.

The front of Judges has a slightly saggy look, the way old shops should. The name leaps out of a sky-blue fascia, and the windows are filled with fat eccles cakes, curly-whirly Chelsea buns, doughnuts, Viennese hearts, pink meringue pigs, coffee and walnut cakes, apple turnovers and Easter choccies. Green & Black’s Easter choccies, to be precise.

I had never thought of Craig Sams as a curly-whirly man. He was the magus of macrobiotics, the fellow who years ago led the organic healthfood charge with Whole Earth Foods, and who persuaded the nation that you could eat chocolate and feel good about it, so long as the chocolate was Green & Black’s. Sams stood down from most of his corporate responsibilities a few years ago, to cultivate his kitchen garden in East Sussex and to become a big cheese in the Soil Association. But the entrepreneurial spirit runs deep, because two years ago, supported by his wife, Josephine, he took over Judges, a bakery and tea shop in Hastings with a good local reputation, and turned it into … what?

Well, if I didn’t think the couple might find the description objectionable, I’d say a mini-supermarket devoted to things organic. Besides the breads and pastries, it sells an intoxicating jumble of goodies. There’s a small, well-chosen cheese section, a mini-meat section, fruit and veg in baskets, coffee from the Monmouth Coffee Shop, apple juice from Oakwood Farm, Steenbergs spices and shelf after shelf of packets, pots and packages, all tip-top organic – “2,000 altogether,” says Craig, “more than Tesco or Sainsbury’s. And as much as possible is produced locally.”

“And we’ve tasted every one of them,” says Jo. “If it doesn’t taste good, it doesn’t go on the shelves”

It makes money, too – “more money per square metre than Sainsbury’s,” says Craig, dryly.

When they took over Judges, the couple didn’t announce that everything would be organic, because they didn’t want to scare off the regulars. “We let people get hooked, then we told them,” Craig says.

He is particularly proud of his eclectic mix of clientele. It’s not just well-heeled weekenders stocking up on premium products. “We get fishermen, workmen, little old ladies, and first thing in the morning the street’s lined with builders’ vans collecting sandwiches for lunch.” Craig is also working on links to schools and a primary care trust. Ethical principles run as strong in the Sams family as entrepreneurial ones.

Could Judges be a model for other shops of this kind? Put it this way, there was a man from the Soil Association who had come to see how it all worked, and he was filling a basket at the same time.

Judges Bakery 51 High Street, Hastings, East Sussex, 01424 722588

Article by Matthew Fort for The Guardian UK, April 7, 2007

Scientists have developed a test that can detect if unscrupulous traders are trying to pass off non-organic fruit and vegetables as organic to boost their profits.

The chemical test relies on identifying a “nitrogen signature” that is left in food by the conventional fertilisers used in intensive farming.

Organic food, which is a £15 billion global market, is currently regulated by a system of certification and inspection.

Simon Kelly, of the University of East Anglia, said that the test, reported by his team in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, could provide extra evidence when foul play was suspected.

“When the test has been made more reliable then we may get to the stage where it can be used routinely in addition to the organic certification system,” he said.

Article by Roger Highfield for The Daily Telegraph UK, April 9, 2007

As the supply of cheap fuel dwindles, organic farmers in Wales prepare the rural town of Lampeter for ‘energy descent’

There is, as the ads say, no Plan B. The age of cheap oil is drawing to a close, climate change already threatens, and politicians dither. But the people of Lampeter, a small community in the middle of rural Wales, gathered together earlier this week to mobilise for a new war effort. They decided to plan their “energy descent”.

It was in fact the biggest public meeting in Lampeter anyone could remember. West Wales has a long tradition of alternative living, but the scale of this was different. More than 450 people filed into the hall in a place where the total population is just 4,000. They had come to turn themselves into a Transition Town – one of a rapidly growing network of places that have decided not to wait for government action, but to prepare for life after oil on their own.

First, the coordinator of the Transition Town movement, Rob Hopkins, told them how urgent the crisis is. Hopkins, who helped create the earliest Transition Towns in Kinsale, Ireland, and Totnes, Cornwall, and advises the 20 or so others that have signed up, describes himself as an early topper.

He’s one of those who think that in the next five years we will have reached peak oil – the point at which half the world’s oil reserves have been used up. After that production goes into irreversible and rapid decline and our main source of energy starts running out. Since we have not so far identified another viable energy source to replace it, the only rational response, he said, is to plan our energy descent. “Life after oil will have to look very different.”

The world, he explained, divides into early toppers and late toppers. The early toppers, made up largely of former industry geological experts, calculate that world oil production has already or will very soon peak. The end of oil is nigh, in other words.

The late toppers, made up mostly of more optimistic oil companies, governments and economists, predict we have longer, with peak oil some 20 to 30 years away. “I tend to believe the people with no vested interest, but either way this is one of the most dramatic shifts humanity has had to face,” Hopkins warned.

By now the people of Lampeter, from ageing hippies to young activists, were shifting in their plastic seats (made with oil) and drawing anxiously on their water bottles (made with oil) if not reaching for their medicines (made with oil). Hopkins told them they were likely to experience a range of common symptoms that accompany initial peak oil awareness.

One might be an irrational grasping at infeasible solutions. At hydrogen, for example. No good, running the UK’s cars on hydrogen would need 67 Sizewell B nuclear power stations or a wind farm bigger than the south-west region of England. Or what about biofuels? No again, it would take over 25m hectares of arable land to run the UK’s vehicles on biodiesel, and the UK only has 5.7m hectares of arable land. We need to eat too.

Unfortunately, British farming has evolved “into a system for turning oil into food”, reliant on the energy-intensive manufacture of synthetic fertiliser, heavy use of oil-based plastics, and centralised just-in-time distribution systems that also guzzle oil.

After Hopkins, Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who lives near Lampeter, tried to cheer them up. Unlike Hopkins, he said he had been persuaded that the end of oil was not nigh, but only nigh-ish. We may have another 10 to 30 years. And there was lots of coal for energy.

The problem was that if we switched back to sin fuels that increase our emissions, climate change will undo us even faster than peak oil.

The drive for change in Lampeter has come in part from a group of local organic farmers – both Patrick Holden, the Soil Association’s director, and Peter Segger, the businessman who was the first to supply the mass market in Britain with organic foods through the supermarkets, have their land nearby. Both have decided that the future lies in selling more of their produce locally instead of having it trucked round the UK.

Segger and his partner Anne Evans have already switched from supplying the major retailers to selling half their vegetables within Wales.

Holden confessed to a touch of both survivalism and optimism. As an organic farmer who does not use artificial fertiliser, he said he had been feeling smug until he heard Hopkins speak a couple of months ago.

But he realised his produce was also part of the problem once it left his farm, feeding into the system of centralised distribution. Now he is trying to make his farm self sufficient in energy: he has already invested in burying half a mile of pipes under a field to extract heat from the soil that keeps his house warm.

Four hours into planning their energy descent and over bowls of local cawl broth the crowd in Lampeter were considering what they would like to happen – a ban on advertising that encourages consumption; turning the local supermarket into a giant allotment – and what they could they could actually do – install a community wind turbine; encourage low-energy buildings using sheep’s wool for insulation; swap skills.

Someone suggested that a local landowner give the town an acre for a community vegetable garden. There was an awkward silence until someone else remembered a playing field that would serve the purpose, if the council agreed.

There was plenty of inspiration from pioneer towns.

Transition Totnes has introduced its own currency with notes that can only be spent in local shops. Its businesses are being audited by an accountant who provides a wake-up call by identifying parts of their operations that become unprofitable as oil prices rise. The town is planting nut trees which can provide emergency food and timber for construction while also acting as carbon sinks.

Lampeter decided emphatically on a show of 450 hands that it would meet again to plan its next stage. And then its people spilled out on a clear spring night into the car park and, just this one last time, drove home.

How we use oil

· 130kg packaging made from oil-derived plastics is consumed by British households each year. Two-thirds of it is used in food production.

· 57 miles is the average distance a tonne of freight now travels by road. In 1953 it was 21 miles.

· 95% of our food products require the use of oil, and the supply of food accounts for 21% of Britain’s energy use.

· 3.5 litres of oil is needed to produce half a kilogram of steak.

Article by Felicity Lawrence for The Guardian UK, Saturday April 7, 2007

Farmers are growing genetically modified (GM) crops that contain human genes to produce insulin.

The Canadian firm Sembiosys is growing insulin in the seeds of GM safflower, a seed oil plant, in trials in Chile, the U.S. and Canada. The company claims it will be able to sell a plant-based form of insulin within three years. The plants are able to produce insulin because they have been genetically modified to contain human genes.

The GM industry see this as part of a new wave of plants which could help change public opinion in its favour. Experts already claim to have modified tobacco so it produces a vaccine for cervical cancer. However, green campaigners remain sceptical.

Sembiosys chief executive Andrew Baum said: “Sembiosys believes it will be one of the first – or the first – company to get a plant-based pharmaceutical on the market.”

Insulin is used by diabetics to control their sugar levels and maintain a healthy body.

Mr Baum claims one large North American farm growing his safflower could meet the global demand for the drug. He suggests this would lead to a significant cut in the cost of insulin, which is currently manufactured in the sterile conditions of laboratories all over the world.

Consequently, it would be more affordable to Third World nations.

Mr Baum told BBC TV’s Newsnight: “While the first wave of products were really focused on the farmer and improving agricultural economics, there’s an increasing emphasis now in the industry on products that address more direct consumer benefits and consumer needs.

“The goodness of what we’re doing is so clear. People who are dying of diabetes will eventually get insulin.”

Friends of the Earth GM campaigner Clare Oxborrow warned there had already been contamination incidents with experimental pharmaceutical plants. “It’s worrying enough when it’s a crop intended for human consumption,” she said.

“But when it might be a pharmaceutical crop in the future that contaminates the food chain, that raises serious worries and questions about the risks involved for human health.”

Article by Sean Poulter for The Daily Mail, UK

Brazil’s other rainforest, the Atlantic, has also been devastated by felling – but organic soya farmers could be the key to its restoration

Clicaea Ferreira’s grandfather was a man of insight. If it hadn’t been for his vision, she says, then the fragment of forest that covers 50% of her farm in the Campos Gerais region of Parana state, southern Brazil, would have been cut down. Ferreira, speaking to a group of local farmers, gives a clear message: save the forest and go organic. But unusually for impassioned speeches about sustainability, she advocates growing soya.

The faces gathered on Farmers’ Day at the Ferreiras farm would look at home in farmers’ markets around Europe. As the barbecue smoke and sounds of the local school band drift across rolling fields and small woods, the scene owes more to the agricultural landscapes of Europe than the Atlantic rainforest – the Mata Atlantica – it has replaced. And the rhetoric on the twin pillars of organic farming and biodiversity conservation is couched in a familiar European language of environmental and social concern. But step from the recently harvested soya bean field into the forest and all that changes.

Ecological value

Under towering araucaria trees – the umbrella-shaped, monkey-puzzle trees – electric-blue Morpho butterflies strobe from the shadows, parrots and other dazzling birds yell from treetops, the skeleton of a capybara – the largest of all living rodents – lies across a path, and the ground has been raked by the powerful claws of ant-eaters. Wolves, tapir and jaguar are seen in this 500 hectares (1,236 acres) of forest, and the farmers are very proud of its ecological value.

“Once, the Mata Atlantica was a forest that spread for 1,300,000 sq km,” Ferreira says. “It contained 6.7% of all known species of plants on Earth. Now only 7.8% of the forest remains. Between 1920 and 1990, 100m araucaria trees were felled. In 2002, a law was passed protecting the trees, but there is still illegal felling going on. We must stop the felling because it’s killing our future.”

Together with non-governmental organisations, local authorities and some government help, the farmers are reshaping the future by protecting and restoring their native forest. The plan for Campos Gerais is to link forest fragments with wildlife corridors, to plant native araucaria trees instead of exotic conifers and eucalyptus, and to create a buffer zone around the restored forest of organic agriculture using non-GM crops.

Philipp Stumpe, a campaigner at the conservation organisation Preservacao, says Parana state holds most of the remaining Atlantic forest in Brazil. “We were formed two years ago to recover and rehabilitate the Mata Atlantica on private property,” he explains. “This is a voluntary project for farmers to join up the tiny fragments of forest on their land. Our target is to acquire 10,000 hectares in 10 years to add to existing protected fragments. We have set up a tree nursery and will plant 400 hectares of trees in wildlife corridors this year, and we are establishing a seed bank of forest flora, because none exists.”

Apart from the few remaining fragments of the Mata Atlantica, the land in Parana is agricultural and the farmers here are called “red feet”, after the colour of the soil. Since a freak frost in 1975 devastated coffee plantations, farmers have had to diversify, and soya has become the major cash crop. So lucrative has soya farming become in Brazil – supplying animal feed to the processed meat trade – that it spread to the Amazon basin and overtook logging and ranching as the main engine of deforestation in the planet’s most important rainforest. Following a recent report by Greenpeace, and an international campaign, there is now a moratorium on the expansion of soya growing in the Amazon, but that will not affect the intensive growing of GM soya crops in other sensitive ecosystems in Brazil.

A five-hour flight south of the Amazon, there is another side to soya: it is the link between those who reach for the non-dairy options in European supermarkets and the Brazilian organic farmers restoring their native forest.

Ferreira sells the organic, non-GM soya beans she grows to Alpro, best known for its soya milk. Her farm is part of a sustainable development initiative under the auspices of the Socio-Environmental Institute of Agricultural Research and Sustainable Development (Isapades), which is supported by the agri-environment scheme Floresta.

The soya beans are handled by Agrorganica – a fair trade company set up by local farmers and Dutch Organic International Trade, which tests the beans for any GM contamination and processes them before shipping to Alpro in Europe. Dwarfed by the massive silos of the soya giants in Parana, the tiny Agrorganica plant stands as a subversive gesture. But while the main players in the soya industry receive international opprobrium for their environmental record, Alpro’s market is quietly buoyant and growing because of its right-on credentials.

“We have 26 years’ experience of ethically sourcing our beans for soya milk,” says John Allaway, marketing director of Alpro’s UK division based in Kettering, Northamptonshire, “and we can trace the origins of all our ingredients to ensure they are GM free. Only 30% of our soya is organic at present but all the 60 growers we buy from in Brazil are now organic.”

In the 1970s, a Belgian, Phillippe Vandemoortele, hit on the idea that his preparation of soya milk, adapted from a Chinese food tradition, could be the answer to famine and starvation in the developing world. Although this did not catch on with the poor, it did become attractive to the affluent, health and environment conscious in Europe.

Healthy lifestyles

“Looking at the global food supply, plant-based foods offer more solutions to social and environmental problems,” says Allaway, “Animal-based foods use 10 times more land, 100 times more water and 11 times more fuel than plant-based foods. We are committed to healthy lifestyles, fair trade and lowering ecological impacts.”

Ben Ayliffe, forest campaigner for Greenpeace, is impressed by Alpro’s involvement in Brazil. “I think they’re doing well,” says Ayliffe. “They have a very small-scale operation but they have more control on the traceability of their products and they are streets ahead of the rest of the trade working with farmers and funding schools and other projects. It’s not greenwash, they practise what they preach.”

Back in Campos Gerais, farmers chew over what Ferreira and others have been saying about protecting the forest and going organic. A parrot perches in the rafters of the barn and butterflies drift through the hot afternoon. As shadows from araucaria trees reach across the soya fields it seems that old Europe and what looks like a new Europe in South America have a use for each other in the restoration of one of the most ancient and diverse forests in the world.

Article by Paul Evans for The Guardian, UK
Wednesday April 4, 2007

Three new European research projects have just revealed that organic tomatoes, peaches and processed apples all have higher nutritional quality than non-organic, supporting the results of research from America on kiwi fruit reported 26 March 2007.

Researchers found that organic tomatoes “contained more dry matter, total and reducing sugars, vitamin C, B-carotene and flavonoids in comparison to the conventional ones”, while conventional tomatoes in this study were richer in lycopene and organic acids.

Previous research has found organic tomatoes have higher levels of vitamin C, vitamin A and lycopene.

In the latest research, the scientists conclude “organic cherry and standard tomatoes can be recommended as part of a healthy diet including plant products which have shown to be of value in cancer prevention”

A French study has found that organic peaches “have a higher polyphenol content at harvest” and concludes that organic production has “positive effects … on nutritional quality and taste”

In a further study just published, organic apple puree was found to contain “more bio-active substances – total phenols, flavonoids and vitamin C – in comparison to conventional apple preserves” and the researchers conclude “organic apple preserves can be recommended as valuable fruit products, which can contribute to a healthy diet”

New research by Dr Maria Amodio and Dr Adel Kader, from the University of California Davies discovered that organically grown kiwis had significantly higher levels of vitamin C and polyphenols. The researchers said: “All the main mineral constituents were more concentrated in the organic kiwi fruit, which also had higher asorbic acid (vitamin C) and total polyphenol content, resulting in higher antioxidant activity. It is possible that conventional growing practices utilise levels of pesticides that can result in a disruption to phenolic metabolites in the plant that have a protective role in plant defence mechanisms.”
Peter Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association UK, says, “This is a very rigorous study. There is clear evidence that a range of organic foods contain more beneficial nutrients and vitamins and less of things known to have a detrimental health effect such as saturated fats and nitrates.”

New research by Dr Maria Amodio and Dr Adel Kader from the University of California Davies discovered that organically grown kiwis had significantly higher levels of vitamin C and polyphenols. The researchers said:

“All the main mineral constituents were more concentrated in the organic kiwi fruit, which also had higher asorbic acid (vitamin C) and total polyphenol content, resulting in higher antioxidant activity. It is possible that conventional growing practices utilise levels of pesticides that can result in a disruption to phenolic metabolites in the plant that have a protective role in plant defence mechanisms.”

Peter Melchett, the policy director of the Soil Association, said: “This is a very rigorous study. There is clear evidence that a range of organic foods contain more beneficial nutrients and vitamins and less of things known to have a detrimental health effect such as saturated fats and nitrates.”

About 40% of British beef imports are organic and demand is likely to grow by 40% in the next three years according to the British Red Meat Industry Forum. This means even more imports will be needed unless British farmers can produce more, said RMIF advisor Bob Bansback.

Rising temperatures between 1981 and 2002 caused a loss in production of wheat, corn and barley that amounted in effect to some 40 million tons a year according to one of the first scientific studies of how climate change has affected cereal crops.

“Most people tend to think of climate change as something that will impact the future, but this study shows that warming over the past two decades has already had real effects on global food supply,” said Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California.

Prince Charles’ green-fingered influence has extended to Buckingham Palace, where the Queen of England is on the lookout for an organic gardener. An ad for the £13,500-a-year post (about US$27,000) says the successful applicant will help phase out the use of pesticides from the Palace’s gardens, improving “environmental and conservation practices” as well as maintaining a new organic vegetable garden at Clarence House. This comes as no surprise to OrganicFoodees, as Prince Charles is a big fan of all things organic, including his own organic farm.

I have a choice of growing one of two types of peaches, but which one will be decided by Congress and President Bush. Without immigration reform, the better peach will be lost.

One peach is complex; the other is simple. One involves many hands; the other would be the product of technology that controls the process as much as possible.

One peach can have an unbelievable taste if I get it right as I work with the intricacies of nature; the other would be bred for consistency and a “good enough” standard, a uniform product designed for efficiency and longer shelf life.

One fruit requires manual labor — an intensive operation of workers constantly in my fields; the other calls for reducing the need for labor, substituting mechanization whenever possible and creating a system that is not at the mercy of worker shortages.

But whether I can grow a better peach depends on whether I have enough field workers, and that’s where immigration reform comes in. In recent years, farm labor has been tight, with some workers lost to construction jobs and others because of increased border security. Some farmers have responded by increasing wages, yet there were still not enough people willing to work the harvests. Last year, pears in California rotted on trees; two years ago, my raisin harvest was endangered, and for the last three years, I’ve struggled with peach harvests, terrified that just as the fruit was at the peak of perfection, I wouldn’t have enough workers. Some of my best fruit has fallen from my trees.

The agricultural industry supports federal legislation for a guest-worker program that would bring in temporary farm laborers when shortages arise. This remedy would fix short-term problems. However, a long-term solution lies in immigration reform that could change the nature of farming, especially when it comes to specialty crops and small-scale operations like mine.

Without sufficient labor, organic and sustainable agricultural methods are jeopardized. The choice to work with nature as opposed to controlling it demands constant monitoring of the fruit and adapting and responding to the rhythms of the seasons. These systems require many hands. I want the human character to be part of my fields and my produce.

With more hands on my farm, I can grow delicate heirloom varieties, pick riper fruit and work with “just in time” management strategies. Dismiss and devalue these hands and the final outcome changes. A peach may look the same on the outside, but the process used to create it will result in a very different end product. Imagine the taste of a sauce made with minimal human touch, substituting prepackaged ingredients in order to reduce the labor needed.

Agriculture makes a mistake, though, if our sole goal in immigration reform is to seek an abundant supply of cheap labor. Farmers must acknowledge the human capital in our fields. Investments in workers, such as training, can benefit all parties. Skilled positions can then be created for a more willing and able labor pool. With the right kind of reform, workers’ worth would be redefined; they would no longer be invisible.

As undocumented workers emerge from the shadows, new tensions will be created. Communities will change. The social contract in a region — the relationships that connect and bind us — will be tested.

New social justice issues will challenge employers. Workers with faces can’t be as easily dismissed; their calls for better wages, health benefits and working conditions will no longer be whispers. We in the agricultural community have signaled an openness to reform and acknowledged the need for labor to fill “jobs that no one else wants.” We also need to accept the responsibility for that labor.

In the future, could providing better farmworker benefits help define a region and industry? Could we create an appellation based on social justice and market a valued-added product, similar to “fair trade” coffee, which guarantees growers a designated price and decent working conditions? Could I then grow peaches with a conscience? Consumers have been willing to pay more when they understand the story behind their foods, be it organic or in support of living wages.

A grape or peach can acquire a distinctive flavor from terroir — the taste of region. Surely the way that individuals, rural communities and industries include “new Americans” in agricultural systems also will alter the delicate nuances of taste. After all, the true character of a pristine fruit is a result of multiple inputs: weather, soil and water as well as management and labor relations.

As we once again debate immigration reform, agriculture has an opportunity to educate the public about the role farmers and workers have in growing food, in satisfying our hunger. We’re all part of a food system at the dinner table, and the policy we create will affect the nature of each bite.

This article is by a Californian farmer named David Mas Masumoto who is supported by the Kellogg Foundation.

Financial Times journalist Andrew Bounds reports from Bonn on March 13:

‘The battle over biotech crops erupted again yesterday after members of the European parliament blocked a resolution calling for greater use of the technology. MEPs voted to delay the draft motion to allow more time for the agriculture committee to scrutinise it.’

Menahwile, The Irish Independent published on March 12 that the multinational corporation BASF has abandoned plans to grow GM potatoes in Ireland. It is now opting to grow them in Britain where there are fewer restrictions. A BASF spokesperson confirmed that the company would not be going ahead with field trials in Co Meath which received approval from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last year. BASF delayed starting the trial last year citing the onerous monitoring requirements imposed by the EPA.

Friends of the Earth and GM Freeze are calling on the UK Government to suspend plans for these experimental trials of GM potatoes in the UK. The call comes after a Dutch court ordered permits for trials in the Netherlands to be destroyed because the risks to the environment had not been properly assessed. The UK trials of BASF’s blight resistant potatoes are due to take place from this spring at two locations for a period of five years. One site is a research centre in Cambridge, the other is proposed for Hedon/Preston, East Riding of Yorkshire.

George Bush says that ethanol will save the world. But there is evidence that biofuels may bring new problems for the planet. The ethanol boom is coming. The twin threats of climate change and energy security are creating an unprecedented thirst for alternative energy with ethanol leading the way. That process is set to reach a landmark on Thursday when the US President, George Bush, arrives in Brazil to kick-start the creation of an international market for ethanol that could one day rival oil as a global commodity. The expected creation of an “Opec for ethanol” replicating the cartel of major oil producers has spurred frenzied investment in biofuels across the Americas. But a growing number of economists, scientists and environmentalists are calling for a “time out” and warning that the headlong rush into massive ethanol production is creating more problems than it is solving. To its advocates, ethanol, which can be made from corn, barley, wheat, sugar cane or beet is a green panacea – a clean-burning, renewable energy source that will see us switch from dwindling oil wells to boundless fields of crops to satisfy our energy needs. Dr Plinio Mario Nastari, one of Brazil’s leading economists and an expert in biofuels, sees a bright future for an energy sector in which his country is the acknowledged world leader: “We are on the brink of a new era, ethanol is changing a lot of things but in a positive sense.” In its first major acknowledgment of the dangers of climate change, the White House this year committed itself to substituting 20 per cent of the petroleum it uses for ethanol by 2017. In Brazil, that switch is more advanced than anywhere in the world and it has already substituted 40 per cent of its gasoline usage. Ethanol is nothing new in Brazil. It has been used as fuel since 1925. But the real boom came after the oil crisis of 1973 spurred the military dictatorship to lessen the country’s reliance on foreign imports of fossil fuels. The generals poured public subsidies and incentives into the sugar industry to produce ethanol. Today, the congested streets of Sao Paolo are packed with flex-fuel cars that run off a growing menu of bio and fossil fuel mixtures, and all filling stations offer “alcohol” and “gas” at the pump, with the latter at roughly twice the price by volume. But there is a darker side to this green revolution, which argues for a cautious assessment of how big a role ethanol can play in filling the developed world’s fuel tank. The prospect of a sudden surge in demand for ethanol is causing serious concerns even in Brazil. The ethanol industry has been linked with air and water pollution on an epic scale, along with deforestation in both the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests, as well as the wholesale destruction of Brazil’s unique savannah land. Fabio Feldman, a leading Brazilian environmentalist and former member of Congress who helped to pass the law mandating a 23 per cent mix of ethanol to be added to all petroleum supplies in the country, believes that Brazil’s trailblazing switch has had serious side effects. “Some of the cane plantations are the size of European states, these vast monocultures have replaced important eco-systems,” he said. “If you see the size of the plantations in the state of Sao Paolo they are oceans of sugar cane. In order to harvest you must burn the plantations which creates a serious air pollution problem in the city.” Despite its leading role in biofuels, Brazil remains the fourth largest producer of carbon emissions in the world due to deforestation. Dr Nastarti rejects any linkage between deforestation and ethanol and argues that cane production accounts for little more than 10 per cent of Brazil’s farmland. However, Dr Nastari is calling for new legislation in Brazil to ensure that mushrooming sugar plantations do not directly or indirectly contribute to the destruction of vital forest preserves. Sceptics, however, point out that existing legislation is unenforceable and agri-business from banned GM cotton to soy beans has been able to ignore legislation. “In large areas of Brazil there is a total absence of the state and no respect for environmental legislation,” said Mr Feldman. “Ethanol can be a good alternative in the fight against global warming but at the same time we must make sure we are not creating a worse problem than the one we are trying to solve.” The conditions for a true nightmare scenario are being created not in Brazil, despite its environment concerns, but in the US’s own domestic ethanol industry. While Brazil’s tropical climate allows it to source alcohol from its sugar crop, the US has turned to its industrialised corn belt for the raw material to substitute oil. The American economist Lester R Brown, from the Earth Policy Institute, is leading the warning voices: “The competition for grain between the world’s 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and its two billion poorest people who are simply trying to stay alive is emerging as an epic issue.” Speaking in Sao Paolo, where the ethanol boom is expected to take off with a US-Brazil trade deal this Thursday, Fabio Feldman, said: “We must stop and take a breath and consider the consequences.” Biofuel costs When Rudolph Diesel unveiled his new engine at the 1900 World’s Fair, he made a point of demonstrating that it could be run on peanut oil. “Such oils may become, in the course of time, as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time,” he said. And so it has come to pass that US President George Bush has decreed that America must wean itself off oil with the help of biofuels made from corn, sugar cane and other suitable crops. At its simplest, the argument for biofuels is this: By growing crops to produce organic compounds that can be burnt in an engine, you are not adding to the overall levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 that the fuel produces when burnt should balance the amount absorbed during the growth of the plants. However, many biofuel crops, such as corn, are grown with the help of fossil fuels in the form of fertilisers, pesticides and the petrol for farm equipment. One estimate is that corn needs 30 per cent more energy than the finished fuel it produces. Another problem is the land required to produce it. One estimate is that the grain needed to fill the petrol tank of a 4X4 with ethanol is sufficient to feed a person for a year.

Article by Daniel Howden in Sao Paolo. Published: 05 March 2007  in The Independent, UK

Wang Xinqiu is prepared to pay ten times more for organic vegetables than for regular produce in Beijing. It buys her peace of mind.

“Organic food seems safer,” said Wang, a Chinese medicine practitioner, after selecting organic cabbage and ginger at a Carrefour SA supermarket as her daughter, 8-year-old Maria, tagged along. “A big reason I buy organic is I’m concerned that my child could eat something contaminated.”

People in China are developing a taste for organically grown food. More than 60% of the country’s 562 million city dwellers are willing to pay more for produce certified safe or organic, according to research commissioned by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Carrefour are among those taking advantage of the trend. Sales of organic vegetables at one Wal-Mart store in Beijing soared 88 percent in the 12 months through November, the company said. Chinese people in 2005 bought or exported US$13.3 billion of food certified as green, a local standard that limits pesticide and chemical use, Chinese government figures show.

“Chinese consumers really are serious about safe and organic foods, and they’re willing to pay for them,” said Elizabeth Harrington, chief executive officer of E. Harrington Global, a Chicago firm that contributed to the Commerce Ministry research. “Part of it is the negative publicity that has come out in recent years about everything from fake foods to contaminated baby foods to pesticides in apples.”

The Health Ministry declared 144 instances of food poisoning involving 4,922 people in October through December, a 42 percent increase in those affected from a year earlier.

As wages and food production rise, “the issue has shifted from total supply to the quality of supply,” said Huang Jikun, director of the Center for Agricultural Policy at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “People are concerned. There’s more information available and we know what we are eating.”

Song Guangxiong, a professor at North China Electricity University in Beijing, said he learned about the dangers of pesticides from a friend who runs an organic farm near the city. He now buys only organic vegetables.

“There’s going to be a bill for the choices we make,” said Song, 33. “It’s pretty expensive, but I think it’s worth the money.”

Cost will deter many Chinese, said Wang, 42, the traditional-medicine doctor. She can afford organic foods on her US$387 monthly wage, she said.

The US giant discount supermarket chain Wal-Mart started selling organic products in all of its Chinese stores – which now total 71 – in May 2005. Organic grain sales rose 33% in the 12 months through November and egg sales climbed 50%, said Jonathan Dong, a spokesman in Beijing.

“Organic food is becoming increasingly popular,” Dong said. “We see good growth potential in the long term.”

China’s national standard for organic products took effect in April 2005, 15 years after the creation of the green standard.

Yang Fu, 26, moved to Beijing from Sichuan province in 2004 to work for an equipment-leasing company. With more pay and access to organic produce, he has opted for the safest diet.

“I don’t have to worry when I buy organic food,” he said.

Story by Dune Lawrence in Beijing for Bloomberg News

Monsanto is under investigation amid allegations it sanctioned the dumping of toxic waste on sites across the country despite evidence that it would poison the landscape for generations.

The activities of the US chemical giant, best-known for its support and development of Genetically Modified plants (GM / GE), are being examined by the UK government’s Environment Agency and public health bodies. Monsanto manufacture GM seeds and were also the the corporation who produced Agent Orange.

The focus of the investigation is a site in south Wales that has been called ‘one of the most contaminated’ in the country. It appears that toxic chemicals were dumped in the Brofiscin quarry in the 1960s and 1970s despite the fact there was no licence for these materials and the site was not lined or sealed. This meant a cocktail of highly poisonous chemicals has been able to escape into the environment and threatens to poison local streams and rivers. The quarry, which is on the edge of the village of Groesfaen, near Cardiff, first erupted in 2003, spilling fumes over the surrounding area.

Since then surveys have found that 67 chemicals, including Agent Orange derivatives, dioxins and PCBs which could have been made only by Monsanto, are leaking from the site.

The Environment Agency says that if the dumping were to take place today there would be a criminal prosecution and civil action to raise the money needed to clean up the site. However, it appears that much of the dumping was carried out during years when Britain’s regime for environmental protection was more lax. Consequently, there are doubts as to how far any legal action can go or which companies should be liable for clean-up costs that are expected to run into tens of millions of pounds.

A spokesman for the Environment Agency said: “Our overall aim is to understand the current risks to ground water and surface waters and to determine the most cost-effective way forward to protect the local environment and to recover costs from those liable.” The Food Standards Agency, which has responsibility for food safety, together with the local council and health bodies are involved in the investigation.

The Environment Agency spokesman said: “The main focus has been to identify if chemicals deposited at the quarry during the ’60s and ’70s are getting into surface water, groundwater, air or affecting site users. These investigations … have confirmed that these chemicals are making their way into groundwater and surface water.”

The inquiry is looking at identifying which companies were responsible for the illegal dumping in order to make them pay for the clean-up.

The Agency said: “Various individuals and organisations are in the process of being identified as having a possible involvement. They will need to provide evidence that they were, or not, involved in the disposal of chemicals at the site.”

One of those companies under the microscope is Pharmacia Corp, which manufactured PCB chemicals on sites in South Wales in the 1960s and 1970s. Pharmacia is part of Monsanto. Monsanto insists that contractors used by the company were always advised of the type of waste that was to be removed and disposed.

A spokesman said: “We continue to work with the Wales Department of Environment and other regulatory bodies to resolve these issues. While the people involved in the manufacture of PCBs … are no longer with the company and probably deceased, a thorough, non-selective review of all of the documents will show that Pharmacia did inform its contractors of the nature of wastes prior to disposal, and that Pharmacia did not dump wastes from its own vehicles.”

Story by Sean Poulter for the Daily Mail UK, February 13, 2007

Britons spend an average £28 each on cut flowers each year, much of it on Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. With the huge growth in imported blooms, a typical flower arrangement bought in the UK could have travelled a total of more than 27,000 miles to reach florist or supermarket. Most roses given on Valentine’s Day will not have been grown in English country gardens but will have come from the Netherlands.

Flowers found in more exotic mixed bouquets could include Protea or Brunia which could have travelled 2,000 miles from Israel. And many of the carnations sold in Britain come all the way from Kenya, Chile, Ecuador or Colombia.

Environment campaigners are now asking the public to think about the cost to the planet before they splash out – and go for home-grown blooms rather than those which have been transported halfway around the globe. Campaigners warn that as well as adding to greenhouse gases through aviation or road transport costs, moving flowers around the world can also put pressure on precious water supplies in developing countries.

Vicki Hind of Friends of the Earth said: “Our concerns are in terms of greenhouse gases and the use of chemicals and water.”

Andrea Caldecourt, of the Flowers and Plants Association, replied that most of the red roses given on Valentine’s Day come from the Netherlands, and travel by ferry and road rather than air. Other popular choices such as tulips are likely to be home-grown, she said, while scented narcissi often come from Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

Here are the places that most cut flowers in the UK are actually grown:

Roses – Chile
Tulips – Holland
Leucadendrons – Holland
Cape Greens – South Africa
Brunia – Israel
Lisianthus – Israel
Alstroemeria – Kenya
Protea – South Africa

Two Scottish scientists based in Fife have developed a new material made from carrots to replace glass fibre found in everything from fishing rods to car parts. The inventors, Dr David Hepworth and Dr Eric Whale, plan to start selling fishing rods made from the material, called Curran, next month. They then hope to move on to carrot fibre snow boards.

The material is billed as a revolutionising performance product with unique strength and weight. Through a special process, nano fibres found in carrots are extracted and combined with high-tech resins enabling tough, durable components to be moulded to whatever shape, degree of stiffness, strength or lightness required. They also use colourful backgrounds, which have been taken from university research involved in advanced aerospace technologies.

Through their company CelluComp, the duo will initially enter the sporting goods market with the launch in March of Just Cast, a unique, high performance range of fly fishing rods offering lengths of 7.5ft to 10ft.

Dr Hepworth said: “Curran is incredibly versatile and we believe that we are launching at a time when companies are looking for that combination of quality and performance but achieved in a way that is environmentally friendly. The potential of Curran is enormous and if we can replace just a small percentage of carbon fibre in products the effects on the environment could be significant and wide ranging.”

Pesticides campaigner Georgina Downs has won the right to have her legal challenge against the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) heard in the British High Court. She is a member of the public who has independently decided to contest Defra’s policy on pesticide usage. Georgina decided to take this case to court after getting sick while living near fields that were regularly sprayed with pesticides.

She will argue that that there has never been a proper risk assessment into the effects of long-term exposure to pesticides in people who live or work near sprayed fields. This could mean there is no evidence to support UK Government assertions that there are no health risks from crop spraying.

In these last years of oil dependency, a new trend is emerging in which towns prepare themselves to face the challenge of being oil-free.

Following in the footsteps of Kinsale in Ireland, Totnes in Devon has recently declared itself Britain’s first “transition” town. There have been meetings about how all food and energy can be produced locally, and a plan is underway to set up a local energy company, rewrite the local development plan and persuade other towns to join the movement.

Permaculture expert Rob Hopkins is drawing up a 25-year plan to see how Totnes could support itself without oil.

Stroud in Gloucestershire and Lewes in East Sussex, have also recently become transition towns.

www.transitionculture.org

www.transitiontowns.org

Today a delegation representing 74 organic businesses, with a combined turnover of about £950,000,000 (US$2,000,000,000) are meeting at the House of Commons to express their grave concern at Government proposals to allow up to 0.9% genetcially modified food (GM) in organic food without it being labelled.

Last Autumn, the UK Government completed their consultation on the coexistence between GM crops, non-GM crops and organic crops in England. The Government’s consultation document, drawing on opinions expressed by the European Commission (which are not binding on national governments) presupposes a GM content in all non-GM food, including organic food, of up to 0.9%. The Government says that organic and non-GM food containing up to 0.9% GM would not be labelled, leaving consumers in complete ignorance as to the GM content.

The meeting in the House of Commons, hosted by Peter Ainsworth MP, Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, and Jim Paice MP, Shadow Agriculture Minister, was organised by the Food and Drink Federation’s Organic Group and The Soil Association.

During the consultation, the Government met with a number of biotech corporations, including AstraZeneca, BASF Plant Science, Bayer CropScience, Dow AgroSciences, Du Pont (UK) Ltd, Monsanto UK Ltd, and Syngenta Ltd. Not one organic business was consulted directly.

The 27 companies attending today’s meeting include: Abel & Cole, Aspalls, Community Foods, Dorset Cereals, Doves Farm, Fresh, Green & Blacks, Grove Fresh, OMSCo, Planet Organic, Rachel’s Dairies, Rainbow Wholefoods, R B Organic, Riverford, Stonegate, Yeo Valley and W Jordan Cereals.

Alex Smith of Alara, Chair of the Food and Drink Federation’s Organic Group said, “There is overwhelming evidence that one of the main reasons that consumers buy organic is to avoid eating food containing any GM. If the proposals set out by the Government were implemented, very significant new economic burdens could be placed on organic food producers, manufacturers and retailers – the Government envisage allowing routine contamination of all non-GM and organic food chains with up to 0.9% GM. Organic businesses will face enhanced risks of GM contamination, product recall and loss of their most valuable asset, the consumer trust that underlies their brand value.”

Peter Melchett, Soil Association Policy Director said: “The Government wants the full cost of keeping organic food as it now is, at the lowest reliable and repeatable level of detection of GM (0.1% GM), to fall on organic businesses, and therefore on organic consumers. So people who eat organic food will end up paying for a GM policy designed to benefit the GM companies. The Government is putting at risk one of the fastest growing areas of the UK economy. Tesco’s organic sales grew by 39% last year. Organic farm shops and box schemes are seeing similar rates of growth. The Soil Association has pledged to keep GM out of organic food, so the public can continue to put their trust in organic food”.

Peter Melchett added: “We warmly welcome the motion tabled in the House of Commons by the Conservative Front Bench, with all-party support, which states that ‘consumers have the right to choose non-GM foods and that all foods containing GM material, or that come from livestock fed on GM, should be clearly labelled as such’, and that 0.1% GM ’should be the trigger point for GM labelling’. We hope it is not too late for the Government to change their pro-GM stance, which threatens public trust in organic farming and food.”

The 74 companies supporting this initiative have a combined turnover of about £950,000,000. Together they directly employ 8,356 people throughout the United Kingdom. They work with at least 4,790 suppliers, who in turn provide jobs for thousands of people in the UK and abroad.

With its solar heating, energy-saving devices and even a reed bed sewage system, it’s the sort of place of which his father would approve. This is the environmentally-friendly mini-mansion which Prince William and his girlfriend Kate Middleton are expected to make their first home.

The £5million house will be built on the Duchy of Cornwall’s Harewood Park Estate in the Wye Valley and, now Herefordshire Council has given it the green light, work should be completed around 2010 – just as William is expected to leave the Army.

The house will have a library, stables, an orangery, drawing room, dining room and six bedrooms. There is no nursery, but no shortage of space for one.

Prince Charles has taken a keen interest in the project and has insisted the architects marry “architectural presence” with a “strong sustainability agenda”.

A large rainwater-reservoir will be built for washing clothes, watering the garden and flushing toilets. Each bathroom will have water-saving fittings, while both the dishwasher and washing machine will be chosen from a range of energy saving devices. Waste water will be treated using a reed bed system, which breaks down sewage naturally by using the oxygen created by beds of common reeds. Heating and water will be provided by a wood-chip boiler in winter and solar panels in summer, which will be hidden on the roof. Kitchen leftovers can be turned into organic compost.

Reclaimed bricks will be used to build the house, and timber will be sourced from the Duchy’s estate. The roof, made of salvaged Welsh slate, will be insulated with sheep’s wool.

Visitors will be greeted by the sight of a large, rectangular property built around an indoor courtyard with an impressive portico entrance.

Along the outside walls are a series of triumphal arches and carvings of winged lions flanking lyres. This, according to the architect, makes reference to the Greek god Apollo who could heal, purify and promote harmony. Also dotted around the walls are several bronze classical-style heads known as caryatids, while even the four-bay garage block derives from the ‘Choragic monument of Thrysallus’ – a 4th century BC Greek monument on the slopes of the Parthenon in Athens.

News item by Rebecca English for the Daily Mail UK, January 30 2007

75% of British consumers say products have too much packaging and that they feel bombarded by the volume of wrapping and protective material, according to an online survey out today. The survey was carried out by Ipsos MORI among 1,000 adults per country aged 16-64. Packaging has increased by 12% between 1999 and 2005, and accounts for one-third of an average household’s total waste.

The Soil Association warned last week, at its annual conference, that converting more land from food to biofuel production could raise the risk of future famines. Peter Melchett said:

“This [expansion in land used for biofuels] sacrifices food security for an illusion of energy security.”

He went on to say that more could be achieved by converting 18% of arable land to organic farming. The trend for biofuels has sparked a food versus fuel debate, with concern that climate change could reduce the amount of agricultural land, coupled with a rise in the demand for food due to population growth.

John Gapper, columnist for the Financial Times, asked whether the biofuel movement is a space race or a gold rush? He suggests:

“The West wants to emulate Brazil, where cars run on ethanol refined from sugar cane. But there is no cane… [so] arable crops are being taken from people’s mouths and put into their fuel tanks instead.”

The Welsh organic dairy co-operative Calon Wen has become the first dairy company in the UK to be awarded the Ethical Trade Organic Standards Certification by the Soil Association. This new scheme is for organic food producers who ensure fair trading and employment alongside socially and environmentally responsible practices. The certification recognises fair wages, hours of work that are not excessive, and a workforce with a say in what goes on.

Additionally, five memberrs of Calon Wen have chosen to reach out into the world of love beyond internet dating. The Welsh organic dairy farmers are looking for love by printing their photos on their milk bottles.

Ewan Jones is a director of the organic milk co-operative, and is one of the five young farmers (three men, two women) who are advertising themselves on these organic milk bottles, under the caption, ‘Fancy a Farmer?’ The lonely hearts message on a bottle is launched on the Welsh equivalent of Valentine’s Day, Santes Dwynwen Day, which is on 25 January. Ewan is a 30-year old organic dairy farmer, and is cute.

A coalition of Peruvian potato farmers has written to biotech giant Syngenta urging it to drop research into terminator gene technology.

Terminator technology means that all plants grown from a genetically modified (GM) seed stock will produce seeds that are infertile. Many poor farmers in developing countries such as Peru rely on harvesting some of the seeds from their crops in order to replant them and therefore make more food for tghe next season. Terminator technology means that this age-old process is destroyed, and leaves farmers and their communities open to famine if they cannot afford seeds.

Even though there has been a global moratorium on field testing terminator technology since 2000, research continues on a widescale by all the biotech corporations in anticipation of a change in the law to allow them to sell these GM seeds.

Peru is home to over 4,000 potato varieties, and is the ancient land where potatoes originated. The Peruvian farmers fear the process will enter the Andean potato system and destroy their traditional trade.

In 2006, worldwide plantings of Genetically Modified (GM) crops increased by 13% to 252million acres, with these crops being planted in 22 countries, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications.

Six European Union countries planted GM crops in 2006 despite a widely held resistance to GM food by European consumers. They were: Slovakia, Spain, France, Germany, Portugal and the Czech Republic. Small, resource-poor farmers in developing countries account for 90% of farmers growing GM crops.

Edinburgh University Students’ Association has committed to the most radical change in food provision that the Association has ever experienced. A meeting of Committee of Management on the 25th January resolved to aim for the Soil Association’s ‘Food for Life’ targets of 30% Organic, 50% local and 70% unprocessed ingredients. They will be the first Students’ Union in the UK to do this.

Vice-President Services Tim Gee said:

“I know we have excellent chefs, but they often have to work with heavily processed ingredients. Many schools, and even Celtic Football Club have committed to these targets. I want Edinburgh University to lead the way on Organic and Local food in the same as we have with Fairtrade.”

www.eusa.ed.ac.uk

www.soilassociation.org/foodforlife

People in the UK are buying more and more fruit and vegetables. 2005-06 saw the largest increase in purchases in the last twenty years, as shown by results from the Expenditure and Food Survey published today by Defra.

The results also show that people are buying less confectionary, and soft drinks and indicate a decline in purchases of alcoholic drinks both for the household and in pubs and restaurants.

Household expenditure rose for cheese, eggs and milk, with a continuing switch from whole milk to semi skimmed milk. There was also an increase in intake of fibre.

Jeff Rooker, Minister for Sustainable Food and Farming said:

“These are national statistics produced to high professional standards and are an important addition to the evidence base on diet. These healthier trends in food purchases are promising, but we cannot be complacent, and must continue to encourage these trends, through healthy eating initiatives, like the 5 A DAY programme.

“Consumers must remember that the food choices they make can have a big difference not only to their health, but to their environment, and our countryside�?

The Independent UK’s Extra supplement has a feature on Fidel Castro’s Cuba in facts and figures which includes a box titled ‘Organic Revolution’.

Journalist Simon Usborne writes: “The organic revolution was seen by Castro as the only solution to the crisis brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had subsidised Cuban agriculture, and the US embargo.”

Number of “organoponicos” (organic urban allotments) in Cuba: more than 7,000, totalling about 80,000 acres.

Number of such gardens in Havana: more than 200 (which supply the city with more than 90 per cent of its fruit and vegetables).

news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2160411.ece

The BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme interviewed Richard Young, a Soil Association policy adviser.

The presenter, John Humphreys, asked him: “So long as the food is tested what’s the problem?”

Richard explained: “Quite a lot of these chemicals turning up as residues in food, are potentially dangerous to human health and I think most people would be appalled to learn that the vast majority of imported animal products that come into this country are not being checked for drug residues. The government has cut back funding in the area so much so that last year only seven foods were tested for. There was no testing of beef, lamb, pork, butter, milk… There was testing of imported fish, shrimps and some testing of poultry but because it [the Veterinary Residues Committee] is so short of money they were testing certain food when we know from various other sources that there are likely to be other drug residues turning up.

John Humphreys asked: ‘What kind of damage can this stuff [drug residues] do us, if it’s there?”

Young replied: “Some of these drugs are known to be carcinogenic and some of them are mutagenic. Yes [growth hormones] would be one concern…The government is concentrating on [highly toxic drugs] at the expense of other testing and our main concern is that the Committee is being kept short of funding. The food industry is not providing [needed] information and is relying on the government to identify problem areas. We have a vicious circle with no sides actually doing the work.”

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today

Figures from the IGD, the grocery think-tank, predict that the value of retailers’ premium private labels will almost double during the next four years, to a shade under £9bn. A separate report from Datamonitor, the research group, today predicts that retail sales of speciality foods and drinks will hit £4.2bn by 2011, up from £3.6bn last year.

Matthew Adams, Datamonitor’s consumer markets analyst, said: “One of the key ways in which consumers are trying to eat more healthily is by purchasing organic variants of products, rather than standard versions.” IGD predicts the strongest growth in the premium sector, which makes up about 10 per cent of the food and grocery market, will come from organic and Fairtrade ranges.

Organic food may be no better for you than mass-produced farm food, according to the British cabinet minister responsible for the food industry. David Miliband, the environment secretary, says organic produce, which is usually more expensive, is a “lifestyle choice�? with no hard evidence that it is healthier. His comments will be a blow to the UK organic food industry, which is pressing for UK government recognition of what it describes as the nutritional and environmental benefits of its produce. Sales of organic food jumped by 30% last year, with the industry now worth £1.6 billion. A growing number of shoppers believe that it tastes better and is safer.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Miliband said: “It’s only 4% of total farm produce, not 40%, and I would not want to say that 96% of our farm produce is inferior because it’s not organic.�? He insisted that ordinary food should not be thought of as “second best�?, although he described the rise of organics as “exciting�?.

On nutritional benefits, the minister said: “It’s a lifestyle choice that people can make. There isn’t any conclusive evidence either way.�? About 350 pesticides are allowed in conventional farming, with an estimated 4.5 billion litres of chemicals poured onto British crops every year. Campaigners say the average mass-produced apple has 20 to 30 chemicals on its skin.

The Soil Association, which regulates organic food, argues that meat, vegetables and dairy produced without pesticides are likely to be healthier, with some additives used in conventional farming linked to asthma and heart disease. Organic meat also has welfare benefits, guaranteeing that animals are kept in free-range conditions and fed natural diets.

However, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) has refused to accept these arguments. Sir John Krebs, a former chairman of the FSA, angered organic lobbyists when he said that there was no evidence that organic food was more nutritious or safer than conventionally produced food, despite its cost.

Organic produce is up to 63% more expensive than conventional food, according to recent research by Morgan Stanley, the investment bank. The Soil Association says this is because it takes longer to produce and is more labour intensive.

Patrick Holden, Soil Association Director, was invited to give his view on David Miliband’s comments on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Farming Today’ program. He said, “To be fair to the man, the Food Standards Agency do not consider there to be a sufficient body of evidence in front of them to make a definitive judgement. However there’s a whole raft of indicative evidence including there are increased levels of dry matter, vitamins, trace elements and minerals and secondary metabolites in organic food. And I think that sitting on the fence really isn’t good enough given that 75 per cent of the public are now exercising, on a regular basis, their buying power to support organic farming in the market place. To dismiss organic as a ‘lifestyle choice’ is patronising and slightly insulting to members of the public who have made a sophisticated choice to buy organic food…�?

“If the Olympic ideal means anything, it should apply to much more than four weeks of running, jumping and swimming. Friendship, tolerance, vision and healthy, sustainable living are fanfared by Manor Garden Allotments.”

That’s what Cleve West believes, garden writer for The Independent newspaper, and a Chelsea Flower Show Gold Medal winner.

Manor Gardens is an urban garden of allotments in Stratford, East London, that sits in the north central section of the Olympic Park. It was bequeathed to be allotments ‘in perpetuity’ by their original owner, the Right Honourable Major Villiers. However, the London Development Agency’s plan is to remove Manor Gardens to make a footpath to the Olympic stadia and now to house a public television screen, in the process destroying a century of devoted cultivation and a close-knit community rooted in this irreplaceable site.

The eviction date is set for 2nd April 2007. The planning application for the Olympic Park will be submitted to the Olympic Delivery Authority at the end of January 2007. The public can lodge their objections for the next three to four weeks by signing an online petition at:

petitions.pm.gov.uk/manorgardens

Old timers Tom and Albert, have been growing veg and keeping fit here for 54 and 58 years respectively, taking over from their fathers. 10 year old Boris, whose parents are members, nags them to come to the plot and wants to hand his plot down to his son. Members trust in the permanence of the site, which led one plot holder to scatter his brother’s ashes on his plot.

This diverse community includes Londoners of Turkish Cypriot, Greek, Jamaican and African origin as well as people who can trace their ancestors back to the East End for generations. As a community, they welcome the potential for regeneration brought by the Olympic development. Rather than being moved out of the way, they want to offer their contribution which seems to them to be entirely consistent with the Olympic and Government ambitions. They believe to remove the allotment gardens would be to rip out the ‘healthy heart’ of the Olympic Park area as well as to fragment the community.

Even if the Manor Garden community could be protected by relocation, there is growing opposition from people local to the relocation site on Marsh Lane fields. If planning permission is granted, it would only be for seven years after which the Manor Garden Society may be moved again. But gardens don’t work that way. It would take at least twenty years, plus the right conditions, to re-establish the current food production levels and to create a similarly viable community.

As plot holder Armagan and her friend Cavide said:

“We could make the London Olympics different from all other Olympics. Having the allotments in the Olympic Park and preserving them for the Legacy Park would send out the message world wide that the UK really does care after all.”

It’s still to be seen if the LDA and the Mayor of London care about locally grown initiatives like Manor Garden Allotments, of if the Governments own ideas such as the London Food and the Biodiversity Strategies are just talk.

Iain Sinclair, the award-winning writer and a supporter of the campaign to incorporate the allotments, says:

“We don’t want the Olympic Park imagining for us. We don’t want it over-imagined. We want to imagine it for ourselves. Please preserve the soul of the place as represented by the beautiful Manor Garden Allotments.”

David Mackay, author of the original Stratford City plan and lead architect for the Barcelona Olympic Village and Port, flagged London as the most successful Olympics for regeneration. He recently wrote,

“Unfortunately London has lost this opportunity by deciding to agree to cover the existing recreation facilities with the silliest architecture seen for years with no real concern for a legacy. So far as legacy is concerned, we are being asked to look at the Emperor’s new clothes – so delicate that nobody can see them. If carried out, and with only five years to go, the Olympic legacy is more likely to be like a Hollywood set for a ghost town, or an abandoned Expo site.”

Restauranteurs Samantha and Samuel Clark, who own London’s fashionable restaurant Moro, have pledged to show their support by cooking fresh produce grown by the gardeners at Manor Gardens alongside in-house food heroes Hassan and Reg assisted by Adile. Their New Year Feast will be prepared live at Manor Gardens on 16th January 2007, from 3pm until 8.30pm

Everyone is welcome to come and enjoy their cookery demonstration and to show the strength of support for this precious part of Lea Valley’s heritage. Help stop the ‘Green’ Olympics plan to bulldoze 100 year old Manor Garden Allotments in order to make a television screen.

At the end of the day, the TV will be turned on in the Community Shed at Manor Gardens to show the a programme called ‘Disappearing London’, featuring Manor Garden Allotments, which will be broadcast on ITV at 7.30pm.

www.lifeisland.org

People are being urged by Scotland’s new chief scientific adviser, Professor Anne Glover, to accept genetically modified (GM) food as an answer to poverty, hunger and toxic pollution. Professor Glover, herself a genetic engineer, feels that labels such as ‘Frankenstein foods’ are misleading and damaging. She also believes that the potential benefits of GM crops are “huge”.

Hugh Raven, the director of the non-profit organisation Soil Association Scotland, replied:

“There is no evidence whatever that Scottish consumers want GM products in their food supplies. If the Scottish Executive advisers can’t grasp that, in a democracy it’s not very clever to foist potentially dangerous new technologies onto reluctant consumers, God help us all.”

According to a study commissioned by frozen food giant Bird’s Eye, the average Briton eats 20 different food additives every day without knowing it. And for those who regularly eat snacks and ready meals, the figure is likely to be around 50 a day.

The BBC’s ‘Farming Today’ programme continues a two-part report from a remote rural community in Romania. Both programmes are available to listen to online at the link below.

Farming Today reports from Sinca Noua, where farming practices have remained virtually unchanged for centuries. Romania became a member of the European Community on January 1st 2007, so farmers in the village need to work out how to make the land pay its way without ruining a gloriously unspoiled habitat for animals, plants, insects and birds.

Moira Hickey reports on ambitious plans to encourage eco-tourism in the area, and to create a dependable income for farmers without following the rest of Europe down the road to intensive agriculture.

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/farmingtoday

In their December 30th edition, The Guardian newspaper in the UK asked leading figures for their views on the big questions that will shape the coming year.

Commenting on ‘How quickly can we adapt to a post fossil fuel era?’ Patrick Holden, Soil Association director, states:

“The most surprising feature of the post-Stern debate was the complete absence of talk about food and farming. But food and farming are absolutely central to the debate. Why do we spend all this money flying off on Easyjet from the UK to France and Italy? Because of the food.”

“In Britain we live in a post-industrial wilderness. Changing our relationship with food and agriculture is the linchpin to the whole problem. We have to reconnect with food and through food to the earth.”

www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/sternreview_index.cfm

John Vidal wrote in The Guardian, UK:

“Supermarkets fought like rats in a sack for our custom in 2006, but mostly washed their dirty linen in private. No longer. Asda/Wal-Mart has turned on its peers and denounced what it calls “the dirty dozen” – Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrisons, Somerfield, Iceland, Aldi, Lidl, Netto, Budgens, the Co-op, Spar and Kwik Save – for not following its example in refusing to sell eggs sourced from abroad.”

Editorial comment:
We at OrganicFood.co.uk believe this could be the start of an exciting new trend whereby Wal-Mart, like most newly-converted entities, will start to preach green credentials to the market place. Hopefully, this could lead to all UK supermarkets discussing their greenness, raising the standards for all, starting with one of the British public’s favourite food causes: eggs.
YS

One of London’s most fashionable restaurants, used by film stars and members of the Royal family, has become the first in the country to be fined for falsely claiming that meat used in a number of its dishes was organically farmed.

Julie’s Restaurant and Bar was fined £7,500 after its managing director, Johnny Ekperigin, admitted three offences under the Food Safety Act 1990.

The restaurant, in Holland Park, west London, quickly became an institution – initially with the Sloane Ranger and ”Hooray Henry” crowds and latterly with a more bohemian film set – since opening in 1969. It was named after the 1960s interior designer, Julie Hodgess.

Prince Charles, nowadays a vigorous champion of organic food, is believed to have been a regular diner when he was a bachelor and Captain Mark Phillips held his stag night at Julie’s, which boasts a warren of private dining rooms.

With French colonial furniture and sumptuous divans, it is popular for both stag nights and first dates among London’s elite and, according to one food critic two years ago, “the whole place reeks of sex”. Prince Michael of Kent is said to have taken the one-time Royal Ballet principal dancer Bryony Brind, with whom he developed a close friendship, to their first dinner there.

Now, according to the restaurant’s website, patrons include Gwyneth Paltrow, Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell.

West London magistrates court was told that Julie’s claimed three of the dishes on its menu – marinated roast chicken, sausages and spice-crusted rack of lamb – used organic produce. But environmental health officers on a routine visit seized delivery records and discovered that none mentioned that the meat came from organic sources.

Environmental health officers from Kensington and Chelsea council estimated that Julie’s saved £4,184 by buying chicken that had not been produced organically.

Mr Ekperigin, who was also ordered to pay £4,297 costs, was warned that he faced a prison sentence if he was brought before court again on similar charges.

But he denied that he had used non-organic meat in an attempt to save money. He told the court: “It was purely a mistake and I had taken my eye off the ball.”

The Soil Association, one of the approved bodies for certifying organic produce, said it thought the prosecution was the first of its kind. But Steve Belton, its inspectorate director, said he believed that there was “a growing problem” of restaurants taking advantage of the public’s interest in organic food and he called on local authorities to carry out more inspections.

Fiona Buxton, a Kensington and Chelsea cabinet member for public and environmental health, said: “For many visitors to the restaurant this has led to a betrayal of lifestyle. Consumers buy into the idea of organic food either due to the health implications or in support of good animal husbandry. Julie’s Restaurant has cheated them of these values.”

Article by Nigel Reynolds for The Daily Telegraph, UK, December 19th, 2006

A giant brussel sprout weighing nearly one and a half pounds was discovered by market gardener Carol Farley, of Culm Valley Organics, Uffculme, Devon, growing alongside its normal sized siblings. This supersize veg is 50 times heavier than the average sprout. Mrs Farley, said yesterday: “We’ve got over an acre of sprout plants growing which is thousands of plants and this one sprout was growing in the middle on a stalk…We use plenty of farmyard manure to fertilise the plants. Maybe that’s the secret.”

Willy Wonka is the father of nano-food. The great chocolate-factory owner, you’ll remember, invented a chewing gum that was a full three-course dinner. ‘It will be the end of all kitchens and cooking,’ he told the children on his tour – and produced a prototype sample of Wonka’s Magic Chewing Gum. One strip of this would deliver tomato soup, roast beef with roast potatoes and blueberry pie and ice cream. In the right order. Violet Beauregarde snatched it, swiftly ate it and, at the pudding stage, turned bright purple and blew up to three times her size.

Far-fetched? The processed-food giant Kraft and a group of research laboratories are busy working towards ‘programmable food’. One product they are working on is a colourless, tasteless drink that you, the consumer, will design after you’ve bought it. You’ll decide what colour and flavour you’d like the drink to be, and what nutrients it will have in it, once you get home. You’ll zap the product with a correctly-tuned microwave transmitter – presumably Kraft will sell you that, too.

This will activate nano-capsules – each one about 2,000 times smaller than the width of a hair – containing the necessary chemicals for your choice of drink: green-hued, blackcurrant-flavoured with a touch of caffeine and omega-3 oil, say. They will dissolve while all the other possible ingredients will pass unused through your body, in their nano-capsules.

The end of cooking? Probably not. Catch me having friends round for a programmable nanocola? Not more than once. But our reaction to some of the dafter promises of the new science is not really relevant. You may not want it, but the food industry does. Every major food corporation is investing in nano-tech – government in Europe has pumped £1.7 billion in research money into the field over the past eight years. Nano-food and
nano-food packaging are on their way because the food industry has spotted the chance for huge profits: by 2010, the business, according to analysts, will be worth $20 billion annually. And there is already a prototype of a Wonka-esque chewing gum that, using nano-capsules, promises the sensation of eating real chocolate.

The food industry is hooked on nano-tech’s promises, but it is also very nervous. At a conference in Amsterdam to discuss nano-technology, food and health, I found representatives of all the big food corporations, mixing with some bumptious academics, all thrilled with their latest nano-applications, and some less gung-ho bioethicists.

The food people included Unilever, Kraft, Cadbury Schweppes, Tate & Lyle and Glaxo-SmithKline: they were very shy and entirely off the record, if they spoke at all. I was having a friendly chat with a research scientist from Numico, the European baby-foods giant (their brands include Milupa and Cow & Gate) until he found out I was a journalist. Then he refused to tell me his name and asked me to erase the word ‘Numico’ from my notebook. I thought he was going to snatch it away.

It’s obvious why they were edgy. Consumers are not ready for nano-food. Among some scientists in the field there is a real sense that nano-technology, in food at least, is a revolution that may die in its cradle – rejected by a public that has lost its trust in scientists and its patience with industry’s profit-driven
fooling with what we eat.

At the conference, the media was blamed, of course. The only journalist there, I got some eggs thrown at me. Ignorant, sensationalist journalism was holding back progress, fuelling the public’s ‘irrational’ reaction to
novel food processes. But Lynn Frewer, professor of food safety and consumer behaviour at Wageningen University, a leading centre of nano-tech research in the Netherlands, called the scientists to order. It was the public’s irrational fears that needed addressing, she said: ‘It’s human nature. An involuntary risk, however remote, concerns people far more than one over which they have a choice. That’s why the public find gene technology more threatening than eating fatty, unhealthy food.’

After the debates over GMO (genetically modified organisms) and BSE, she said, public faith is very low, not just in the food industry but also the food regulators. ‘The mechanisms to make [them] transparent must be put in place and enshrined – there need to be principles that the public can understand.’

Dr David Bennett, a veteran biochemist now working on a European Commission project on the ethics of ‘nanobiotechnology’, felt the prospect was bleak. He thought public rejection of nanotechnology was ‘almost
certain’. ‘Very little risk assessment has been done on this area, even on some products already entering the market – and it’s an open question whether it will be done. To Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, it’s a
gift.’ And, he went on, the lack of proper assessment of nanotechnology scares me shitless’.

What’s to be afraid of, from a technology that offers so much – healthier food, fewer, better targeted chemicals, less waste, ’smart’ (and thus less) packaging, and even the promise of a technological solution to the problem of the one billion people who don’t get enough to eat? Amid the papers on issues such as ‘application of nano-filtration for demineralisation of twarog acid whey’ (which will boost the yield in ice
cream and yoghurt production) one much-discussed question in Amsterdam was how government should regulate the arrival of nano in the household. There are no new rules in Europe, and some voices – including the man from Unilever’s research labs – dismissed the need for any. Nanotech is natural, he insisted: it uses no new substances, just the same ones smaller. But other scientists in the field disagree.

‘Matter has different behaviour at nano-scales,’ said Dr Kees Eijkel from the Dutch Twente University. ‘That means different risks are associated with it. We don’t know what the risks are and the current regulations [on the introduction of new food processes] don’t take that into account.’

Aluminium, for example, is stable in the ‘big world’ but an explosive at nano-levels. Some of the carbon nano-structures that are being used in electronics have been shown to be highly toxic if released into the environment. Some metals will kill bacteria at nano-scale – hence the interest in using them in food packaging – but what will happen if they get off the packaging and into us? No one seems to know – and as significant a body as the UK’s Royal Society has expressed worries over the lack of research into the health implications of free nano particles being introduced to our environment.

The size question is central to these concerns. Nano particles that are under 100 nano-meters wide – less than the size of a virus – have unique abilities. They can cross the body’s natural barriers, entering into cells or through the liver into the bloodstream or even through the cell wall surrounding the brain.

‘I’d like to drink a glass of water and know that the contents are going into my stomach and not into my lungs,’ says Dr Qasim Chaudhry of the British government’s Central Science Laboratory. ‘We are giving very toxic chemicals the ability to cross cell membranes, to go where they’ve never gone before. Where will they end up? It has been shown that free nano-particles inhaled can go straight to the brain. There’s lots of concerns. We have to ask – do the benefits outweigh the risks?’

Asbestos is the analogy everyone comes up with. Sixty years ago, the stable, cheap building material helped war-devastated Europe put up housing quickly, until it was discovered that asbestos micro-fibres, once free, could cause hideous and lethal damage to the lungs.

Dr Chaudhry has been leading a team of researchers reporting to the government’s Food Standards Agency on nanotechnology and safety. He is worried that the health research is way behind the technology and that a whole range of tests has not been carried out – for instance, on the nano-compounds already being tested for water cleaning in Third World countries. Dr Chaudry’s team has told the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs that it thought companies and researchers introducing nanoproducts should be obliged to notify the authorities about them. DEFRA agreed and launched the list scheme in September, but decided notification should be voluntary, not mandatory. And you and I cannot see the list – it will, out of respect to commercial interests, be kept secret.

This doesn’t sound like the sort of openness that will soothe a concerned public, all too wary nowadays of the reassurances of the food industry and science . But the FSA, which is awaiting the results next year of two research projects into nano-tech, food and safety, says it is confident that existing regulations on ‘novel’ foods, additives and food processes will cover any new products. And, at the moment, it doesn’t believe there is any nano-tech in food in Britain – though some scientists think that is wrong.

As with GM, we may be overtaken by events in the States, where food regulators have, under the Bush presidency, been steam-rollered by a food industry eager to push in the new technology. So far, however, the list of kitchen nano-products actually on American shelves is unimpressive. The
Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington research institute, runs a database of nano-tech products that are commercially available, and the list under Food and Beverage is only 29 products long, compared with 201 under Health and Fitness (I’m excited by the nano-silverised self-cleaning socks). But the list has grown 50 per cent since March, when it was only 19 products long.

Most of these products are self-cleaning and anti-bacterial food-packaging items : cutting boards and so on. There’s a couple of Samsung nano-silverised refrigerators. There are nutritional supplements, under the well-established American brand Nanoceuticals. There’s a Vitamin B12 spray marketed by Nutrition-by-Nanotech. You simply catch a child with an open mouth and spray the stuff straight in: they’ll absorb the nano-sized vitamins directly through the mucal cells. ‘Tastes like candy… Would you believe it, they are asking for more!’ runs the copy line, less than enticingly.

Only three items on the Woodrow Wilson list are listed as food. One is ‘Nanotea’, from a Chinese company, that will increase tenfold the amount of selenium absorbed from green tea (that’s a good thing), through capsules engineered to bypass the stomach and dissolve in your lower gut. There’s Canola Activa Oil, an Israeli invention: nano-capsule-delivered chemicals in rapeseed cooking oil that will stop cholesterol entering the bloodstream – this is exciting technology, utilising nano’s ability to
suspend or dissolve any substance you like in water or in oil. And finally there’s SlimShake chocolate – a powdered drink that uses nanotechnology to cluster the cocoa cells, and thus cut out the need for
sugar.

More important, what of the promise that nanotechnology offers hope to the one billion habitually undernourished on the planet? Nothing yet. Dr Donald Bruce, a chemist who heads a group examining technology and ethics for the Church of Scotland, is doubtful. He sat on a committee 10 years ago examining the moral implications of the introduction of GM. ‘The public were told that genetic modification was going to feed the world. And so we looked for evidence of any application of that science that had addressed the needs of a poor subsistence farmer. We couldn’t find any. The industry went for agronomic benefits, not for people benefits.’

With nano-tech, the food industry has once again got it back to front, he feels. ‘ Such innovation must be consumer-led – the consumer must be able to see what’s in it for them.’ Violet Beauregarde would certainly agree.

Article by Alex Renton for The Guardian, UK

While some experts worry cola isn’t the best ingredient in a healthy lifestyle, Canadian federal Health Minister Tony Clement is setting his sights on the cans.

A few days after tabling the Canadian government’s $300-million plan for managing chemical substances over four years, Clement says soft-drink manufacturers and many other industries will now be forced to prove their products are not putting the health of Canadians at risk.

“The obligation is now with the industry to show that the chemicals can be used safely in a given setting, whether it’s an industrial setting or a household setting,” Clement said in an interview.

Bisphenol A is on a list of about 200 chemicals that must be tested in the coming months. The substance is commonly used to coat plastic bottles and cans.

Recent peer-reviewed studies have concluded it may also be a hormone disrupter that could cause cancer.

“The industry that produces soft-drink cans has to show that that particular chemical, which does have some dangerous qualities to it, does not seep from the can into the liquid that the can is holding,” Clement said.

Coca-Cola Canada coats cans with the substance to prolong the shelf life of its products, said David Moran, director of public affairs and communications at the soft-drink company. The company has always met safety standards based on the existing scientific evidence, he said.

“What we’re doing is following generally accepted international practices that have been scientifically provento be safe in other jurisdictions,” Moran said. “Having said that, we’re a Canadian company operating in Canada and we’ll follow whatever the Canadian government comes up with in terms of new regulations.”

Bisphenol A is normally be identified in products in North America by the triangular symbol for recycling with a “7″ in the middle.

An industry official insisted there was no reason for alarm, because the current review is designed to make use of new techniques to measure and assess products.

“That’s the purpose here – to give consumers confidence,” said Gabby Nobrega, senior vice-president for Food and Consumer Products of Canada.

“You may read one article or you may read one study, but the government process is allowing industry, regulators and everybody to look at the use of substances in the totality of what we know about them, and that’s critical,” she said.

Nobrega noted Bisphenol A is also widely used in a variety of products, including eyeglasses, appliances and automobile parts. Environmental groups suggest this makes it harder to test or find people who have not
been exposed to it.

“That’s one of the problems with environmental contaminants,” said Kapil Khatter, a physician who works as a consultant for Environmental Defence, formerly the Canadian Environmental Defence Fund.

“We’re all getting exposed. So it’s very hard to find an effect because there’s not enough difference between those who are exposed and those who aren’t.”

Aaron Freeman, the director of policy at Environmental Defence, said soft-drink companies should immediately replace Bisphenol A with alternative products that are already available. If there are any health risks found through testing, he said it could take nearly five years of legally required procedures to remove the products from the shelves.

Despite his warnings, Clement said Canada is leading the world by making health issues a priority, thanks to a review of 23,000 chemical substances that began several years ago.

“It’s a case of us, I believe, putting the proper emphasis on human safety, (and) human health,” Clement said.

“Certainly, a group that is most at risk if nothing is done would be children, because their immune systems are not as developed as ours are, and there’s a longer period of time during which they could be exposed to
some of these substances,” he said.

“So I just think that this is about protecting our kids, it’s about dealing with rising incidence of cancer, of other environmental diseases, and so to me, this is revolutionary.”

Article by Mike de Souza for the Montreal Gazette

Around one in five of domestic animal breeds are at risk of extinction, with a breed lost each month, due to a globalisation of livestock markets that favours high-output breeds over a multiple gene pool that could be vital for future food security, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned today.

“Maintaining animal genetic diversity will allow future generations to select stocks or develop new breeds to cope with emerging issues, such as climate change, diseases and changing socio-economic factors,�? the secretary of FAO’s Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, José Esquinas-Alcázar, said.

But of the more than 7,600 breeds in the FAO global database of farm animal genetic resources, 190 have become extinct in the past 15 years and 1,500 more are deemed at risk of extinction according to a draft report, the final version of which is to be presented to an international conference in Switzerland in September that is set to adopt a global action plan to halt the loss.

Some 60 breeds of cattle, goats, pigs, horses and poultry have been lost over the last five years, according to the draft presented to over 150 delegates from more than 90 countries meeting at FAO’s Rome headquarters this week.

Livestock contributes to the livelihoods of 1 billion people worldwide, and some 70 per cent of the rural poor depend on it as an important part of their livelihoods. Globalization of livestock markets is the biggest single factor affecting its diversity, FAO says.

Traditional production systems require multi-purpose animals, which provide a range of goods and services. Modern agriculture has developed specialized breeds, optimizing specific production traits, and just 14 of the more than 30 domesticated mammalian and bird species provide 90 per cent of human food supply from animals.

�?Five species – cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens – provide the majority of food production,�? FAO Animal Production Service chief Irene Hoffmann said. “Selection in high-output breeds is focussed on production traits and tends to underrate functional and adaptive traits. This process leads to a narrowing genetic base both within the commercially successful breeds and as other breeds, and indeed species, are discarded in response to market forces.�?

But the existing gene pool holds valuable resources for future food security and agricultural development, particularly in harsh environments.

The report, the State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources, the first-ever global study of the status of animal genetic resources and countries’ capacity to manage them sustainably, is based on data from 169 nations. The final version will be published to mark September’s International Technical Conference on Animal Genetic Resources in Interlaken, Switzerland.

A poll of 1000 US citizens published on 6 December 2006 reveals that only a quarter realise they are eating genetically modified food and 60% have no idea it’s in their diet, New Scientist magazine reports. The news snippet reads:

‘Despite having consumed genetically modified food in their cookies and apple pies for the best part of a decade, most Americans still don’t know they are routinely eating the stuff.’

Plans to grow genetically modified potatoes in Derbyshire have been abandoned because a farmer fears for his own safety. At the beginning of December the government gave BASF Plant Science permission to grow potatoes in a field near Draycott and in Cambridgeshire. But the Derbyshire farmer has pulled out, as he said he feared protests by environmental campaigners. BASF said it was confident of finding an alternative site. The GM potato crops are to be planted next spring. The trial will last several years. A BASF spokesman said: “BASF is committed to the UK trials of GM potatoes and while it is disappointing that one of the sites is no longer available to take part in this important scientific programme, we are pleased to confirm that we are reviewing a number of suitable locations.”

A United Nations report has identified the world’s rapidly growing herds of cattle as the greatest threat to the climate, forests and wildlife. And they are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes, from acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying coral reefs.

The new UN FAO report ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’ suggests that livestock production alone accounts for 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The burning of fossil fuels to produce N fertiliser (a fuel-intensive process), energy used in the farming and transport of livestock and meat, and clearing of vegetation for ranching/grazing accounts for 9% of the world’s carbon emissions. In addition, ruminant digestion also accounts for a third of methane emissions, a much more powerful greenhouse gas. These emissions from livestock are larger than the global emissions from transport, and the UN predicts that the rising demand for meat will more than double the global impacts of livestock by 2050.

A Soil Association spokesman said:

“This UN prediction supports the conclusion that we must reduce our meat consumption. However, a total conversion to vegetarianism is unlikely to be the answer. Pastures and mixed farming are very important for wildlife and the maintenance of a large soil bank. Although deforestation for ranching must be stopped, the ploughing up of grassland for arable production would release considerable amounts of soil carbon. A negative impact of arable production (and of white meat, which depends on cereal crops, unlike red meat, which depends on grass) is almost certainly not accounted for in this analysis. The Soil Association is advising less but better quality meat. The expansion of organic production, being free-range, more extensive, and of higher animal welfare, supports this necessary change in modern diets.”

Sir David Attenborough has called for a “moral” crusade against wasting energy, drawing parallels with a more conscious approach to food and life.

Sir David, 80, the presenter of the Planet Earth television series and one of the UK’s most highly esteemed BBC broadcasters, told a Commons committee the wartime slogan “Waste Not, Want Not” should be used to persuade homeowners to switch off electrical appliances instead of leaving them on standby.

“I grew up during the war and it was a common view that wasting food was wrong,” said Sir David. “It was not that you thought you were going to defeat Hitler by eating a little bit of gristle but that it was actually wrong to waste food. There should be a moral view that wasting energy is wrong,” he added.

Sir David said he was convinced global warming caused disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. “I have just come back from Australia. People accustomed to living in hot temperatures in the Outback are saying, ‘It has never been like this’.”

He said climate change was a “political hot potato” but he was glad it was being grasped. He refused to be drawn on whether Gordon Brown had gone far enough with his pre-Budget report in tackling climate change.

The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs select committee is investigating how the public can do more to combat climate change.
Sir David Attenborough has called for a “moral” crusade against wasting energy.

Sir David, 80, the presenter of the Planet Earth television series, told a Commons committee the wartime slogan “Waste Not, Want Not” should be used to persuade homeowners to switch off electrical appliances instead of leaving them on standby.

“I grew up during the war and it was a common view that wasting food was wrong,” said Sir David. “It was not that you thought you were going to defeat Hitler by eating a little bit of gristle but that it was actually wrong to waste food. There should be a moral view that wasting energy is wrong,” he added.

Article by Colin Brown for The Independent

According to the National Farmers’ Union, Britain is less self-sufficient in terms of food production than a decade ago. In 1996 farmers and growers accounted for 60% of food supplies – this has dropped to 42% in 2006.

180 schools in diverse communities across England are set to become beacons of good food culture, thanks to £16.9 million Big Lottery funding for a new collaboration of like-minded organisations called the Food for Life Partnership. The positive impacts will go much further, getting schoolchildren and parents across the country cooking, re-skilling dinner ladies, and offering farmers secure markets for local, seasonal and sustainably-produced food.

Led by the Soil Association, The Food for Life Partnership consists of the Focus on Food Campaign, Garden Organic and the Health Education Trust, bringing together unique experience of successful practical work in schools, revolutionising school meals and giving children the chance to grow and cook food, and visit organic farms.

It helps schools think about their food culture and create school meals which are both tasty, nutritious local and organic. Food for Life is based around the whole school approach – which encourages children, parents, catering staff, governors, headteachers and producers to all fully engage in changes to school food provision.

The Food for Life targets are:

1. School lunches should aim to provide food which meets the nutrition standards set by the Caroline Walker Trust and the School Meals Review Panel

2. 75% of all foods consumed should be made from unprocessed ingredients

3. At least 50% by weight of meal ingredients should be sourced from the local region (50 mile radius or the proximity principle applies)

4. At least 30% by weight of the food served should be from certified organic sources

5. Better classroom education on food, cooking, nutrition and health and ensure that all children visit a farm at least once during their time at school

Food for Life was set up by the Soil Association, Jeanette Orrey (former catering manager at St Peter’s Primary School, Nottingham), Lizzie Vann (who runs Organix, a leading organic children’s food company), and Simon Brenman (Organic Networks), a specialist in the organic supply chain.

Jeanette Orrey serves as the Soil Association’s school meals policy advisor, is a board member on the School Food Trust and has won numerous awards, including the Observer Food Award for ‘Person who has done the most for the food and drink industry’ in 2003. But prior to this, she was the dinner lady at St. Peter’s Primary School in East Bridgford, Nottinghamshire for 14 years.

She led a revolution in her school kitchen back in 2000, rebelling against the poor quality of centrally supplied ingredients. She chose to bring catering at her school back in-house, sourcing as much local, organic and fairtrade produce as possible – and all on a very tight budget. Since then, life for Jeanette has sped up and she now travels around the country talking about what has been achieved at St. Peter’s and encouraging other schools to implement Food for Life targets.

In 2005 the Training Kitchen at Ashlyn’s Organic Farm in Essex was opened – there Jeanette offers a two-day practical course on how to transform school dinners using the Food for Life approach aimed at school cooks and catering managers. The courses look at how to cook meals that meet nutritional standards from scratch using local and organic ingredients, menu planning, food purchasing and budget management. Jeanette is also the author of two books, The Dinner Lady and most recently, Second Helpings.

For more information, please visit www.soilassociation.org/foodforlife

When I say that Acorn House is the most important restaurant to open in London in the past 200 years, there is a danger that you might misunderstand me. You might think I mean “important restaurant�? merely in the way that restaurant critics usually mean it, which is that it represents a small potential change in direction for one wing of the catering business – the way people once talked of such joints as Kensington Place, Gordon Ramsay’s Aubergine, the Eagle, St John and Yo! Sushi. But Acorn House is a different kind of important.

Acorn House is life and death important. Because it is London’s first truly environmentally sustainable restaurant. Don’t you dare titter! Don’t you dare yawn and turn the page to see what Robert Crampton has been up to! Don’t you dare curse me for a credulous tree-hugging Cameronian payer of lip service to ideas I do not fully understand!
This stuff matters. The Stern Report is true. Everything we are and have ever been is going to disappear unless we do something very serious about global warming very soon.

If you really are one of those right-wing nincompoops who think that it’s all a big con by the “eco lobby�? to keep themselves in hemp underpants, and that everything will all turn out fine because everything always does, and in fact there’s a completely independent scientist on the White House payroll who has proved that the world is getting colder and what we need is more carbon dioxide to stop the ice-caps getting too frozen, then, actually, you can turn the page. In fact, why don’t you burn it, too. No, I know, why don’t you roll it up into a taper and use it to set fire to a penguin.

The rest of you, who are maybe just beginning to turn off the odd stand-by switch, have stopped revving your engine at the lights to make old ladies cross the road quicker, and no longer leave all the lights on when you go out at night to discourage burglars (because you’ve grasped that burglars are all so wiped out on crack these days that they don’t have the mental quickness to associate the ideas of light and habitation the way they did in the good old days), well, you’re all heroes. But I’ll wager you still go out for dinner occasionally.

And there is nothing in the world so wasteful of resources as a restaurant. Apart, possibly, from a war. If we really cared about the future of humanity we would stay home and cook. Or we would go to Acorn House, which is built from organic and recycled materials, composts or recycles 100 per cent of its waste, demands positive animal husbandry, avoids industrial farming, uses green electricity, buys Fairtrade where it can, and pledges never to use airfreight.

When transporting within London, Acorn uses bio-diesel, take-away containers are eco-sensitive, and they purify water on site, so there are no road miles and no wasted plastic or glass (I’d rather share my table with a child murderer than a man who drinks Fijian water). And if you do want bottled water, there’s Belu, sourced and bottled in Shropshire, carbon-neutral and non-profit-making, with all proceeds going to fund water projects in drought-afflicted areas (Africa, principally, one assumes, rather than London and the Southeast).

I know it might all sound a bit mental and over the top, but it’s not. It’s just sensible. Every restaurant in London could operate like this. And the ones that can’t should close. I understand that you have to take your kids to school in something that, in extremis, would keep them safe from lion attack and nuclear war, but these are just restaurants. We don’t, truthfully, need them at all.

And the thing is, Acorn House isn’t a compromise. It is a great little restaurant. (In fact, all other restaurants are a compromise – we tolerate shortening the life of the race in return for a good nosh.)

I was sceptical at first. So sceptical that I went down for lunch on the day I had booked supper there with my girlfriend to make sure she wouldn’t be disappointed.

It is in King’s Cross, an area that is not only as impoverished by carbon fuel emissions as anywhere in the world (I believe the Euston Road, which begins here, is the most polluted in Britain), but is where all our problems began. For King’s Cross Station, gateway into town for the produce of the mines and factories of the North, made the Industrial Revolution, and all the consequent horrors through which we are now living, possible.

Acorn House is not a cutesy little tree house all in green and beige, but a long, cool, modern room with lots of produce and upmarket condiments and utensils on shelves, uncovered tables laid with linen napkins along both walls, a bar, and a visible kitchen at one end. It reminded me of Ottolenghi on Upper Street.

At lunch they do three soups, eight salads, three pastas and six mains, priced so that a main with two salads comes out at £10, or with three salads, £12. I had mackerel (a very sustainable fish), grilled, filleted and cutely split vertically along the spine to create, from one fish, four firm cigars of oily flesh, nicely punctuated with grill bars. But it wasn’t lovely and hot off the grill. Whether a batch was grilled earlier for lunch service or this had just sat around at the pass, I don’t know, but it made the dish a lot less exuberant than it might have been.

Most notable in the salad was the romanesco. You know romanesco, it’s that stuff they have in Waitrose that looks like a cauliflower crossed with a leprechaun. Here it was dressed with some tomato and looked foresty and festive. There was roast salsify, which I love, and long, straggly leek skins that feel good and roughagey going down, but are so fibrous they do sometimes go all the way through you undigested (I happen to have noticed). The Jerusalem artichokes were not on top form, a bit soft and wan – so I took my revenge by going back for dinner just when, after an afternoon simmering in my gut, the chokes were ready to parp their familiar song of joy.

In the evening, with candles and low light, it looked quite romantic. Celeriac and horseradish soup was chunky and sweet and not afraid of its ingredients (unlike those celeriac mashes you get which are all potato); autumn salad of pheasant, pomegranate and dandelion was rather less than the sum of its parts, and a bit fiddly; but the mozzarella di bufala was staggeringly fresh, given the ban on air travel. It came by train, apparently. Damn fast train. Drizzled with chilli flakes and olive oil and served with fennel and Amalfi olives it was a fine way to save the planet.

My shoulder of mutton was OK, but a bit dry (though I’m all for mutton over lamb for both flavour and sustainability), and needed the wetness of its accompanying quince. Pappardelle with lamb ragout was so-so. But I was deliriously happy to see that fried salmon and barley broth came in at only £13 (or £10 with two salads for lunch), despite being both wild and Scottish. If they can do it here then why does everyone else think they can charge that (and more) for farmed, flabby, world-killing fish?

In the end, not bad cooking, some excellent stuff, and at the end of the meal the bill comes with what you take for a promotional paper match box, but turns out to be a strip of tiny saplings to take away and plant. You see, it’s about turning carbon dioxide back into carbon and oxygen, not the other way round. Have I made myself clear?

Acorn House is only a start, but it is from such little acorns as these that mighty oaks are said to grow. Let’s just hope there’s time.

Acorn House
69 Swinton Street, WC1
(020-7812 1842)
Meat/fish: 10
Principles: 10
Importance: 10
Score: 10
Price: not the earth

Other sustainable restuarants

Duke of Cambridge
30 St Peter’s Street, N1
(020-7359 3066)

Every bit as impressive as Acorn, but done gastropub style. Not only is the (excellent) menu Soil Association certified, but the electricity is wind and solar-generated, the soap is made from neem oil, and they recycle everything.

Bordeaux Quay
Canon’s way, Harbourside, Bristol
(0117 9431200)

Bristol’s organic king, Barney Houghton, proprietor of the celebrated Quartier Vert, recently launched this vast organic restaurant-brasserie-deli-cookery-school. I haven’t reviewed it yet, but don’t wait for me, get down there.

Article by Giles Coren for The Times magazine, December 10 2006

Eggs have hit the headlines again. Not since the Edwina Currie years has the egg industry taken such a bashing. Defra, acting on a tip-off, has discovered that some 30 million eggs labelled as free-range might actually have been laid by battery hens.

The whole industry is left ruminating over the fact that you can’t put a price on reputation. But what sort of reputation did free-range possess in the first place when its biggest virtue seems to be that it is not the battery system and allows little more freedom than barn production? In the battery system thousands of birds sit under artificial lights, crammed into wire cages that legally need be no bigger than 400sq cm. Beak trimming is common, to prevent cannibalism, and hens are given no opportunity to exhibit natural behaviours, as in the opportunity to flap their wings.

The National Farmers Union describes barn production as ‘the halfway house between cage egg production and the free-range system’. But although hens are able to perch and nest, it’s not exactly Cider with Rosie. A barn hen will never go outside and typically the stocking density (number of birds) runs into thousands. And beaks are still trimmed.

Since 2004, egg boxes have had to be more transparent about the provenance of eggs, so that ‘farm fresh’ has been replaced by ‘from caged birds’. But free-range egg boxes often still depict hens enjoying a bucolic life in lush grass. Research by a team from Oxford University in 2003 found that although, legally, free-range birds must be given eight hours of access to the outdoors each day, in practice less than 15 per cent of birds in the large systems (4,000-9,000 birds) were able to get outside. The rest were prevented by aggressive birds manning the exits.

Some good free-range producers such as Woodland Eggs advocate smaller flocks and access to trees (woodland is, after all, a hen’s natural environment). And in Harrods you can watch a livestream of Cotswold Leghorns running round outside before buying their pastel-coloured eggs (www.clarencecourt.co.uk).

Only seven per cent of eggs in UK supermarkets are certified by the Soil Association, which allows maximum stocking density of 2,000 birds (other organic labels go thousands higher), bans beak trimming and the feeding of artificial yolk colourants. The RSPCA’s Freedom Food label is also robustly inspected, guaranteeing higher standards of animal welfare from birth to slaughter.

Thankfully there’s an EU plan to phase out battery production by 2012. Meanwhile the egg industry is lobbying to replace battery cages with a new halfway house, the ‘enriched’ cage, offering a measly extra 200sq cm of space per bird. Battery cage or enriched cage? It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other.

Article by Lucy Siegle for The Observer, Sunday December 10, 2006