Search Results for: food

BY KEITH NUTHALL
ANTI-GLOBALISATION activists will not like it, but there are clear signs that September’s World Trade Organisation summit in Cancun might deliver what has eluded political leaders since the WTO’s agricultural liberalisation talks began in 2000: the beginnings of a deal.…

BY PHILIP FINE

HEALTH claims about nuts can now be made following the release of a study finding that the regular consumption of nuts could reduce the risk of heart disease. The US Food and Drug Administration says that research has discovered a 47 per cent lower risk of sudden cardiac death for men who ate nuts at least twice a week compared to

those who rarely or never consumed nuts.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has announced its first Euro 166 million tranche of funding for food and food safety projects, via the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme on research. While not releasing individual budgets for successful projects, it highlighted funding a “key network of excellence” on prion diseases, including BSE.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Food Safety Authority has appointed as deputy executive director Dr Herman Koëter, who will be the organisation’s head of science. He was previously chief of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) programme on the harmonisation of classification and labelling of chemical substances and preparations.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission is taking France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Austria and Finland to the European Court of Justice for failing to adopt an older (and looser) directive on GM food. This includes rules on post-marketing monitoring, public information, plus labelling and traceability.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INDONESIAN government has vowed to protect its beleaguered sugar industry and regulate imports in an effort to increase national production levels. A rate subsidy is to be issued through the Food Security Credit Scheme for People’s Sugarcane worth Rupiah900 billion (US$106 million) and fertilizer subsidies worth Rupiah1.3 trillion (US$140 million).…

KEITH NUTHALL
GERMAN researchers have harnessed electricity from the aggressive bio-chemical reactions generated by the food poisoning bacteria E coli eating sugar. Scientists from Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald claim that generated ten times more electricity using microbial fuel cells using E coli than with previous designs, because of a newly designed anode and the voraciousness of the bacteria.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD food standards organisation Codex Alimentarius has set new guidelines for food irradiation, accepting higher levels that it previously recommended to eliminate bacteria. It also approved general principles on the analysis and management of risks related to biotechnological foods, including pre-market safety evaluations, product tracing for recalls and post-market monitoring.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
ISRAEL and the European Commission have struck a food trade deal, where the Israelis have agreed to widen import quotas for dairy products, apples, pears, rice, sugar and prepared fruit, reducing existing preferential duties to zero. The EU will liberalise its trade regime for Israeli exports of fresh fruit (melons and grapes) and processed citrus fruit.…

BY PHILIP FINE

THE US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that food labels making health claims will have to go through a new government review. They will be vetted through government agencies, such as the Agency for Healthcare Quality Research, relying on consumer and scientific studies.…