Search Results for: food

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EU’s proposed regulation on the assessment of GM foods and authorisation procedures for their sale on European markets has been formally approved by the EU Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. Another regulation on the traceability and labelling of GM organisms and food has also been approved.…

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 PHILIP FINE

AN AMERICAN labour tribunal has ruled that retail giant Wal-Mart broke the law by refusing to bargain with meat department workers whose local union branch had been essentially dismantled by the retailer moving to pre-packaging meat products.

The National Labor Relations Board has ordered Wal-Mart to bargain with a group of Jacksonville, Texas, in-house meat cutters and their union about the effects of the company’s decision to turn what had been a fully-equipped on-site butcher shop into a pre-packaged meat department, eleven days after a majority of the dozen workers voted to unionise.…

BY PHILIP FINE

DEMOGRAPHICS are changing the contents of prepared frozen meat meals in the US. ‘Ethnic’ frozen food sales reached US$2.2 billion in 2001, according to the American Frozen Food Institute. The biggest growth has been Mexican, which grew 20.6 percent to US$488 million, followed by Asian, which include Chinese, Thai and Indian, up 12.3 percent, totalling US$463 million.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation experts will help central and eastern Europe to control ‘western corn rootworm’, a threat to corn production. This US$2.26 million project involves Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Serbia & Montenegro, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovakia.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union’s Scientific Committee on Food is to review the recommended upper levels of daily intakes of individual vitamins and minerals that are usually safe. The review will cover vitamin A (retinol and b -carotene), vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K, thiamin, riboflavin, and other ingredients.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A SOMALI Livestock Board has been established in Somalia, inspecting and certifying quality meat exports from a country with no effective national government since 1991. The move was welcomed by the United Nations Development Programme and its Food and Agricultural Organisation.…

BY PHILIP FINE

THE US government has announced increased funding to help its state food laboratories deal with possible terrorist attacks directly or indirectly involving food poisoning. By expanded their capacities, Washington hopes to increase its effectiveness and efficiency in testing meat and other food specimens to help public health officials deal with potential incidents of biological or chemical terrorism.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
NOW the arguing is over and the dye has been cast, it is time to start work on the practicalities of admitting 10 new countries to the European Union, making this long discussed enlargement work for British and western European farmers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WORLD food standards organisation Codex Alimentarius has asked governments to comment on draft health guidelines on additives and contaminants by September 30, including draft maximum levels for lead in fish, tin in canned food, plus cadmium levels in rice, soy beans, mollusks and peanuts.…