Search Results for: food

BY ALAN OSBORN
ONE of Britain’s best-known food safety experts, Deirdre Hutton, has been appointed to the board of the newly formed European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Ms Hutton, who is chairman of the National Consumer Council, led a recent DTI panel on the Food Chain and Crops for Industry and was a member of the government’s Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food (the Curry report).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL, ALAN OSBORN, MONICA DOBIE AND PHILIP FINE

IF there is one striking characteristic about Washington’s Bush Administration, it must be its almost unprecedented ability to infuriate the entire world with its unilateralism, especially its self-serving trade policies.

For years, the US government has actually played Mary Poppins on food production subsidies, claiming that its handouts do not encourage farmers to overproduce when prices are low.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
WE all want to eat safely, which is why governments pass laws to ensure that all food sold measures up to minimum standards of purity and quality. But this can be taken too far. If the safety lines are drawn too tightly or in an arbitrary way, they can be a barrier to imports and thus an impediment to free trade.…

BY MICHAEL FOX
DIPLOMATS at the United Nations’ headquarters in New York say that the troubled Iraq Oil for Food Programme is in danger of running into serious problems once again unless alleged ambiguities and contradictions in the current system are sorted out.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE UNITED States Food and Drug Administration has told three online pharmacies – Ashland Drugs, Mississippi, Bird’s Hill Pharmacy, Massachusetts, and the Compounding Pharmacy, Illinois – to stop selling nicotine impregnated lollipops via the Internet. The FDA said it acted because the nicotine sweets are dispensed without a doctor’s prescription, contain a non-approved form of nicotine called salicylate, and because the products could be accidentally used by children.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
PRESSURE is being applied to the European Union’s national governments to support both an increase in biofuel combustion and biomass energy production. A European Parliament’s industry committee report has called for EU Member States to ensure bio-combustibles, such as sunflower and colza fuels, supply two per cent of the fuel market by 2006 and 5.75 per cent by 2010.…

KEITH NUTHALL
WATER companies may be able to help the European Union and its Member States improve standards in the sector within developing countries, as part of an initiative to be launched by Brussels at the oncoming World Summit on Sustainable Development, in Johannesburg, this August and September.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE FUTURE Harvest Centres, a network of global food and environmental research organisations, has launched a new online search tool in Rome allowing users to search the rich reserves of online material about harvest performance worldwide. *More information: http://infofinder.cgiar.org…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
THE WORLD Health Organisation will hold an “expert consultation” after the Swedish National Food Administration claimed accumulations of the toxin acrylamide have been found in baked and fried food, including biscuits and cookies, to “determine the full extent of the public health risk.”…

BTY MARK ROWE
THERE is a clear moral argument that individuals and companies should nurture the Earth’s precious resources. But such a stance also makes profound economic sense since it reduces a company’s waste and improves efficiency. This is particularly the case for a tobacco company where every stage of the production, distribution and consumption of tobacco products has environmental implications.…