Search Results for: Brazil

BY ALAN OSBORN

A NEW crisis over the presence of genetically modified (GM) ingredients in food and livestock feed has once more focused attention on the European Union’s (EU’s) controversial GM policies. It has especially raised the spectre of job losses, farm bankruptcies and higher consumer prices if a relaxation of the current de facto zero tolerance restriction applying to unauthorised GM products is not agreed soon.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

IT is a mind-bending question. How on earth, given the complexity and variety of available biofuels, their feedstocks and manufacturing processes, can their relative ‘green-ness’ be measured efficiently? But, to the delight of mathematicians and technical consultants the world over, this toughest of queries has to be answered.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed giving Brazil additional annual import quotas for its sales of sugar in the European Union (EU) to take account of the expansion of the EU through the accession of Romania and Bulgaria. The Commission wants 550,000 tonnes of extra Brazilian raw cane sugar imported annually for refining.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) may relax its maximum level for total aflatoxins from 4µg/kg to 10µg/kg within tree nuts such as a Brazil nuts and cashews (but excluding almonds, hazelnuts and pistachios). This follows a European Food Safety Authority assessment that "public health would not be adversely affected" by such a move.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

MOST people use a post office, so they are an ideal outlet for spreading important public health messages such as about avoiding HIV. As a result, the Universal Postal Union (UPU), UNAIDS, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the UNI Global Union trade union federation are launching a global awareness campaign using post office.…

BY PACIFICA GODDARD

TRANSPORT infrastructure investments to help grow Argentina’s major (but currently troubled) soy export sector have continued, with the hope that the recent growth in the industry will become permanent.

In the mid-1990’s Argentina was producing a modest 11 to 12 million metric tonnes (mt) of soy per year.…

BY RUSSELL BERMAN

THE AMERICAN bio-based oils and fats sector is watching closely the development of key proposals and recommendations that could significantly alter the way goods are shipped across the country.

One of its most pressing transport concerns is an advancing proposal to end a decades-long antitrust exemption for freight rail.…

BY JAMES FULLER

SMALL island states are always vulnerable in energy sustainability terms, but the growth in renewable energy technologies is giving them a better shot at security of supply. The Caribbean is a case in point, where green energy technologies are being explored across the region.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THERE is a sense, in the rivers of documents pouring from international talks to replace the Kyoto Protocol with a new global warming treaty in Copenhagen this December that the chickens are really coming home to roost.

For the first time – at July’s G8 summit in Italy – there was a common near-universal declaration that humankind has been messing up the climate and has to stop filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.…

BY RAGHAVENDRA VERMA

INDIAN environmentalists and farmers’ groups are warning major drinks companies that by transforming the country’s horticulture patterns and changing its existing fruit supply chain they are playing with fire.

New Delhi-based environmental activist Vandana Shiva is far from unusual in arguing swift social and economic change caused by large scale earmarking of primary production could cause unrest.…