Search Results for: food

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 PHILIP FINE

THE US government wants to limit pharmaceutical manufacturers to a one-month window in which to challenge a generic patent. Washington says multiple, consecutive patent challenges have been costing American billions of dollars in drugs costs. The Bush administration estimates that its planned regulatory changes will save consumers an estimated US$35 billion over 10 years.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AGRICULTURAL economists may disagree, but predicting trends in world food markets is not necessarily rocket science. A dose of healthy common sense can be as good a guide for the future demand for commodities as any amount of slide rules and complex economic equations.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Croatia’s Zagrebacka Banka (ZABA) have created a risk-sharing loan facility for Croatian food processors, producers and traders totalling Euro 71.4 million.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
ALTHOUGH an investigation by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency did not discover another case of BSE, following the lone outbreak that has devastated Canada’s beef exports, further instances may well follow, a member of the International Committee on Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy has warned.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UN Food and Agricultural Organisation and the European Commission have agreed to create a “closer strategic partnership” regarding development and humanitarian aid.…

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
EVEN the most ill-informed layman knows that modern farming is often a technically advanced and scientific business, but the extent to which new technologies are being used to maximise production is not so-widely known, even within the industry itself.…

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. The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control are expanding the National Laboratory Response Network and the Food Emergency Response Network.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
WHAT a complex and mysterious thing wheat is! Scientists tell us that modern wheat is a hexaploid, which means that the long-distant ancestors of wheat “hybridised in a way that combined three copies of the original genome to produce a genome with over 150,000 genes.”…