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Posts Tagged ‘food’

USDA: Food prices to rise further during rest of 2011

May 13, 2011 Comments off

radioiowa

World instability+Food Prices+Oil+Floods+Droughts+Inflation=A Hungry and Broke You/Me

A federal study finds food prices will take a bigger bite out of Iowans’ food budgets this year. Rick Volpe, an economist with the U-S Department of Agriculture, says a trip to the grocery store will mean either less food in your cart or less money in your wallet.

“It will be hard to pay roughly the same amount you paid in 2010,” Volpe says. “There is no question that the food budget is going up for a lot of households.” Volpe says the highest price hikes will be seen in the supermarket’s meat and dairy cases.

“We’re forecasting a seven-to-eight-percent increase in retail beef prices and six-and-a-half to seven-and-a-half for pork,” he says. “Your milk, yogurt and cheese, we are forecasting about a five-percent increase.”

Volpe says there are several reasons for the hike in food prices but the rising cost of fuel is foremost. Triple-A-Iowa says the Read more…

Categories: Food, Food Crisis, United States Tags: , , , , , ,

Texas cameras to track school lunches

May 12, 2011 Comments off

guardian

FOOD ANALYSIS

Dr Roger Echon of the Social and Health Research Centre displays the digital food analysis equipment which will track chlidren’s eating habits at WW White elementary school in Texas. Photograph: Tom Reel/AP

The next time children in some elementary schools in the state of Texas try to sneak extra french fries on to their tray in the cafeteria queue, the eye in the sky will be watching them.

Using a $2m (£1.3m) grant from the US department of agriculture, the schools in San Antonio are installing sophisticated cameras in the cafeteria that read barcodes embedded in the food trays.

“We’re going to snap a picture of the food tray at the cashier and we will know what has been served,” said Dr Roberto Trevino of the Social and Health Research Centre in San Antonio, which is implementing the pilot programme at five schools with high rates of childhood obesity and children living in poverty.

“When the child goes back to the disposal window, we’re going to measure the leftover.”

The goal is to cut childhood obesity by providing parents and school nutrition specialists with information on what types of Read more…

Categories: Big Brother, Texas Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

FEMA to confiscate food from local farms in emergencies?

May 11, 2011 Comments off

naturalnews

Since our nation’s founding the federal government has, in times of emergency, claimed extra-constitutional powers and authority. Under the guise of acting in the public’s best interests, Washington has taken away privacy rights, free speech, and habeas corpus, among others. There’s no reason to think it wouldn’t happen again.

With that in mind, would it surprise you to find out that if disaster strikes in your part of the country, the federal government is prepared to take over local food supplies, in part by confiscating farms?

It shouldn’t, says “Farmer Brad,” a Texas-based farmer who said in an interview about food security with Mike Adams for Natural News TV that during Hurricane Katrina, an inventory of local farms and what they produced was conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“FEMA was doing an inventory of all the farms around … metroplexes,” he said, which included nearby Houston and other large cities. “They started calling up farms and wanted to know where farms were, and they were being prepared to maybe take food if they need to, from farms, you know, for a crisis like that.”

Brad, of HomeSweetFarm.com, said that while the agency didn’t come right out and say they would confiscate crops and cattle, Read more…

Categories: FEMA Tags: , , , , ,

Leahy Bill Passes Senate –Criminalization of Natural Food & Supplements

May 3, 2011 Comments off

healthfreedoms

A once dormant bill to criminalize natural food and supplement producers is back in action. Attaching a prison sentence of up to 10 years is pretty serious for a possible ambiguous crime of adulteration and misbranding. Senator Patrick Leahy introduced this bill last year as S.3767, The Food Safety Accountability Act. Although amended, it is still too vague and ultimately considered a bad bill, even by the folks who effected its amendment.

Before we could report on the bill’s resurrection, it passed the Senate. In summary, it “Amends the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to impose an additional fine and/or a prison term of up to 10 years for knowingly violating prohibitions of such Act against adulteration or misbranding of any food, drug, device, tobacco product, or cosmetic, or against the introduction in interstate commerce of unsafe dietary supplements, with conscious or reckless disregard of a risk of death or serious bodily injury.” See how wide open that is?

On a side note, the senator is also unpopular for introducing an Internet censorship bill at the same time. S.3084 called “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” (COICA), it would blacklist and terminate certain websites if passed into law. Read more…

Categories: Food Tags: , , , , , , ,

Monsanto wants to start testing GM wheat

April 26, 2011 Comments off

naturalnews

(NaturalNews) Biotechnology giant Monsanto has announced plans to start testing genetically modified (GM) wheat, in spite of prior failures to gain acceptance for the technology.

GM food crops already on the market include corn, soy and sugar beets. Monsanto attempted to introduce GM wheat in the early part of the decade, but abandoned the effort in 2004 when international buyers threatened to boycott U.S. wheat, prompting U.S. wheat growers to reject the technology.

In the face of record high wheat prices sparked by climate-related crop failures, Monsanto has launched plans to develop GM wheat strains that are more drought- and stress-resistant and produce higher yields, according to company executive Claire CaJacob. Rival companies Syngenta and BASF have also announced plans to engineer GM wheat varieties.

“I wouldn’t say we’re jumping in with two feet,” CaJacob said. “But I wouldn’t say we’re tentative. We have traits that Read more…

Categories: Genetically modified Tags: , , , , ,

Europe is facing the worst drought in century

April 26, 2011 Comments off

thewatchers

Traditional Easter fairs in the east and the north of the Netherlands have been cancelled because of the risk of fires posed by the extraordinarily dry weather affecting northern Europe....

Traditional Easter fairs in the east and the north of the Netherlands have been cancelled because of the risk of fires posed by the extraordinarily dry weather affecting northern Europe. In the eastern half of the country, one of Europe’s biggest traders, outdoor family barbecues, smoking and camp fires are a strict no-no.

In the Swiss canton of Zurich, officials began moving trout this week from the river Toess before their habitat dried up. This year threatens to bring “one of the most significant droughts since 1864,” the year when records began in Switzerland. The drought in western Switzerland over the last 12 months is as severe as those recorded in 1884 and 1921. Several cantons have also imposed bans on lighting fire in and close to forests. A grass shortage could also lead to a Read more…

Categories: Droughts, Europe Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Disease hits wheat crops in Africa, Mideast

April 22, 2011 Comments off

AFP

PARIS — Aggressive new strains of wheat rust disease have decimated up to 40 percent of harvests in some regions of north Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, researchers said Wednesday.

The countries most affected are Syria and Uzbekistan, with Egypt, Yemen, Turkey, Iran, Morocco, Ethiopia and Kenya also hit hard, they reported at a scientific conference in Aleppo, Syria.

“These epidemics increase the price of food and pose a real threat to rural livelihoods and regional food security,” Mahmoud Solh, director general of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), said in a statement.

In some nations hit by the blight, wheat accounts for 50 percent of calorie intake, and 20 percent of protein nutrition.

“Wheat is the cornerstone for food security in many of these countries,” said Hans Braun, director of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), near Mexico City, singling out Syria.

“Looking at the political and social situation, what they don’t need is a food crisis,” he told AFP by phone.

Wheat rust is a fungal disease that attacks the stems, grains and especially the Read more…

Categories: Africa, disease and pestilence, Middle East Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Surging Food Prices Could Thrust Millions Into Poverty In Emerging Europe: World Bank

April 16, 2011 Comments off

WASHINGTON, April 16 (Bernama) — The recent price hikes in food and energy could push more than five million people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia into poverty, reports the China’s Xinhua news agency, quoting World Bank’s official.

Yvonne Tsikata, the director for Poverty reduction and economic management of the World Bank’s Europe and Central Asia region said: “The poorest people in the region will suffer the most from the high food and energy price inflation, which reduces their purchasing power’.

She said that the region’s poor often spend half of their income on food, and Read more…

Categories: asia, Europe, Food Crisis Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Study: Half of supermarket meat may have staph bug

April 16, 2011 Comments off

AP

ATLANTA (AP) — Half the meat and poultry sold in the supermarket may be tainted with the staph germ, a new report suggests.

The new estimate is based on just 136 samples of beef, chicken, pork and turkey purchased from grocery stores in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Flagstaff, Ariz. and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Proper cooking kills the germs, and federal health officials estimate staph accounts for less than 3 percent of foodborne illnesses, far less than more common bugs like salmonella and E. coli.

The new study found more than half the samples contained Staphylococcus Read more…

Categories: Food, United States Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

World Bank: Food prices have entered the ‘danger zone’

April 15, 2011 Comments off

telegraph

Robert Zoellick, World Bank president, said food prices are at “a tipping point”, having risen 36pc in the last year to levels close to their 2008 peak. The rising cost of food has been much more dramatic in low-income countries, pushing 44m people into poverty since June last year.

Another 10pc rise in food prices would push 10m into extreme poverty, defined as an effective income of less than $1.25 a day. Already, the world’s poor number 1.2bn.

Mr Zoellick said he saw no short term reversal in the damaging effect of food inflation, which is felt much more in the developing world as packaging and distribution accounts for a far larger proportion of the cost in the advanced economies.

Asked if he thought prices would remain high for a year, Mr Zoellick said: “The general trend lines are ones where we are in a danger zone… because prices have already gone up and stocks are relatively low.”

Rising prices have been driven by the changing diet of the ballooning middle classes in the emerging markets. “There is a demand change going on, with the higher incomes in developing countries. People will eat more meat products, for example, that will use more grain.

“I am not suggesting that the improved diets in the developing world are the source of the problem but it means it takes longer to Read more…

Categories: Food, Food Crisis, world Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,