Search Results for: food

BY PHILIP FINE

PRODIGENE, the American company that, last month (November, 2002), accidentally mixed up its pharmaceutical corn with soybean destined for the food supply, has been fined US$250,000 (GBPounds158,000). In addition, the company will reimburse the US Department of Agriculture for all costs to acquire approximately 500,000 bushels of soybeans, destroy the beans and clean the contaminated Nebraska facility where the mixing took place.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EU Council of Ministers has approved in principle new proposed European regulations on the traceability and labelling of genetically modified food.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE CITY of Santa Clarita, California, has launched America’s first nappy recycling programme which will pick up nappies from 500 families in special plastic bags. The recovered material will help make non-food packaging and products including wallpaper, oil filters, and shoe insoles.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A COMPREHENSIVE programme to improve the response of European Union (EU) institutions and member governments to chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear terrorist attacks has been agreed by the EU Council of Ministers.

Following almost a year of debates, the approved plan requires governments and institutions to develop a comprehensive set of contingency actions, including political, economic, diplomatic, military and legal means, covering the prevention of attacks and the limitation of their consequences.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
INDIA and African countries have called for food health import controls allowed by WTO rules to be weakened regarding developing country exporters, claiming they are so tough and bureaucratic, they prevent them exporting healthy food.…

BY PHILIP FINE

NEW Choice Food, an American maker of the jelly mini cups associated with choking deaths of children, was recently ordered to destroy a half-million dollars US (£312,000) worth of conjac gel sweets under the supervision of the US Food and Drug

Administration.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
PROPOSALS by the European Commission to ban state aid for the disposal of slaughterhouse waste and fallen stock could put many British slaughterhouses out of business, said Robert Kennard, a spokesman for small abattoir operators.

Under the Brussels plan, state aid for the disposal of slaughterhouse waste of any kind would be made illegal from the start of 2003, though European Union (EU) Member States would be given leeway in exceptional circumstances to grant 50 per cent aid for the disposal of specified risk material and meat and bone meal with no further commercial use.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE PROBLEM for farmers when considering how to influence international negotiations that are as long, complicated and important as the scheduled five years of discussions over updating the World Trade Organisation’s agriculture agreement, is knowing when to spend money on lobbyists to intervene.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THANKS to the rapid development of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) British businesses are adjusting well to the requirements imposed on them by the Kyoto Protocol, the UK Government is claiming. DEFRA (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) officials say the market has exceeded expectations in volume and smoothness of operation since it began in April this year.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) is predicting the extinction of the virulent cattle disease rinderpest by a UN deadline of 2010. It is trying to eradicate the last traces of the virus in northeast Kenya and southern Somalia.…