The Financial Times is doing what it usually does - providing concise and honest insight into how the elite bosses think, this time around genetically modified crops. The recent op-ed by John Gapper follows a logic that I've been bumping into increasingly.

1. We need to increase food production to feed the world.
2. Yield-increasing science has worked before.
3. The nay-sayers want to reduce output through organic agriculture.
4. Monsanto, on the other hand, is investing in science.
5. Therefore we ought to embrace GM technology to fight the food crisis.

Almost everything about this argument is wrong. ... read more »

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Posted on 13 June, 2008 - 17:36

New Scientist this week tells of one of the new horrors found in the industrial food processing industry. It affects those workers in slaughterhouses who work on swine heads (in an area known, and you decide if this is dark comedy or not, as "the head table").

In order to remove the brains, which are then canned and exported as a pink pig-food, workers use high pressure jets of compressed air. The process results in "an aerosol of brain matter that workers may inhale." ... read more »

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Posted on 11 February, 2008 - 17:26

As the New York Times points out, here and here, biofuels aren't all they're cracked up to be. The revelation was prompted by an article in Science which breaks it down quite nicely. Here's the abstract: ... read more »

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Posted on 10 February, 2008 - 05:59

So what are we to make of the interweb phenomenon of the FreeRice word game? It's run by the same outfit that brought us The Hunger Site, 'where your clicks give bowls of food to the hungry', using much the same business model - sell ads and use the revenue to buy food. ... read more »

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Posted on 18 November, 2007 - 07:15

When the pesticide industry takes its gloves off, people get hurt. Below is a press release from Via Campesina about a recent killing by men with guns hired by Syngenta in response to a protest against genetically modified food.

To write to the authorities condemning this brutal attack, see the Food First Urgent Action (scroll down past the Michael Pollan article...

PRESS RELEASE

21/10/07

Attack of Syngenta?s armed militia results in deaths and wounded in Brazil

During an attack of an armed militia with around 40 gunmen on the peasant? camp at the experimental field trial of Syngenta Seeds multinational, at Santa Teresa do Oeste, at 13:30h of today (October 21st), a Via Campesina member, Valmir Motta, 32 years old, father of 3 children, was executed with two shots to his chest. Other six rural workers are severely wounded and a gunmen was possibly killed. ... read more »

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Posted on 25 October, 2007 - 17:33

When, in 2004, one of my favourite Italian thinkers, Giorgio Agamben, refused to come to the US, I was pleased. He objected to being fingerprinted in order to get his visa. And this close monitoring of our bodies, and the 'biopolitics' (to use the current phrase) that accompanies this surveillance, has some fairly dark origins in fascism.

Which is why it'll come as little surprise that in the United States have been announced technologies that will soon be applied not only to the cattle industry, but to (some) people too. Jim Hightower writes lucidly about how the US government merely wants to protect its citizens from terrorist livestock. ... read more »

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Posted on 3 October, 2007 - 00:20

The Food News gang in Canada have sent along two complementary articles, one suggesting what farming in a post-oil economy might look like, and one that shows that the oil economy, and the way we grow food through it, is giving us less nutritious food. Won't post the text of these, but do jump on over to the respective sites.

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Posted on 2 October, 2007 - 23:20

This splendid article has been sent in by a number of you. It's a fine joining-the-dots piece, linking together farmer suicides with the dirty politics of market-making - and it's a link that binds the fates of farmers in India with those in Iraq. Tremendously well written too.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62273/
Why Iraqi Farmers Might Prefer Death to Paul Bremer's Order 81
By Nancy Scola
AlterNet
Wednesday 19 September 2007

Anyone hearing about central India's ongoing epidemic of farmer suicides, where growers are killing themselves at a terrifying clip, has to be horrified. But among the more disturbed must be the once-grand poobah of post-invasion Iraq, U.S. diplomat L. Paul Bremer. ... read more »

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Posted on 2 October, 2007 - 22:50

An old story seems to have sprouted up again in the food blogosphere. I'm not sure why it has resurfaced, but it's well worth reprinting. Here's the Associated Press version from 21st December, 1999.

Genetically modified food banned in Monsanto staff cafeteria

AP 21dec99

LONDON - Genetically modified food has been banned from the staff cafeteria at Monsanto Co.'s UK headquarters by the company's own caterer, GM food giant Monsanto confirmed Tuesday.

Granada Food Services, whose customers include Monsanto's High Wycombe office near London, recently told clients it would not supply food containing GM soya and GM maize due to customer concerns.

In a statement to clients, Granada said the move was designed "to ensure that you, the customer, can feel confident in the food we serve."

Genetic engineering involves splicing a single gene from one organism to another. GM products, including Monsanto's genetically engineered corn, have recently met with safety concerns in parts of Europe and Asia.

In October, the European Union adopted new marketing rules requiring companies to label food as genetically modified if more than one percent of the product contains GM organisms. Granada's statement said the ban also brings the company into compliance with the new regulations.

Monsanto played down the staff cafeteria policy, and denied it was an embarrassment to have a GM food ban at the head office of a company manufacturing GM crop seeds.

"We believe in choice. At our Cambridge restaurant the notice says some products may contain genetically modified organisms because our staff are happy to eat foods sprayed with fewer chemicals," said Tony Combes, Monsanto's director of corporate affairs.

Combes also pointed out that Granada's GM policy was a blanket ban covering all of its customers and did not target Monsanto specifically.

"It has nothing to do with us really," said Combes. Opponents of GM food said they believe the ban showed a lack of confidence in Monsanto, however.

"The public has made its concerns about GM ingredients very clear. Now it appears that even Monsanto's own catering firm has no confidence in this new technology," said Adrian Bebb, food campaigner at Friends of the Earth.

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Posted on 15 August, 2007 - 13:43

One of India's most incisive and committed journalists won himself an important gong recently. P Sainath, editor for rural affairs at The Hindu, has long been writing about the systemic poverty, despair, courage and organising that erupts from India's land.

In early August, Sainath won the Magsaysay Award. He gave the $60,000 prize money to an association of farmers with whom he has recently been working. He says he'll make enough to live on through the royalties of his book - Everybody Loves a Good Drought. ... read more »

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Posted on 15 August, 2007 - 11:32