Beeline to Extinction

According to the recently released annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) and the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), more than a third of U.S. managed honeybee colonies-those set up for intensified pollination of commercial crops-failed to survive this past winter. Since 2006, the decline of the U.S.'s estimated 2.4 million beehives-commonly referred to as colony collapse disorder (CCD)-has led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies

Click to read more ...

Obama’s USDA Less Transparent Than Bush’s

The Environmental Working Group has worked hard to track the billions lavished on the wealthiest and largest farm operations in the country, in the hope that releasing the information would spur public demand for a sane and sensible agriculture policy. By following the money, we’ve exposed the grossly inequitable federal farm spending that enables the biggest subsidy recipients to maximize their haul of taxpayer dollars while skirting tepid regulations.

Click to read more ...

Supremely Important: Genetically Engineered Crops

Fifteen years after farmers and agribusinesses began planting genetically engineered crops in our nation's fields, we still know very little about their long-term environmental, economic, and social consequences.

Click to read more ...

Fears for Crops as Shock Figures From America Show Scale of Bee Catastrophe

The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter

Click to read more ...

UN Based Policy of Doubling Food Production on 'Flawed Data'

The Soil Association says the suggested increase in food production is closer to 70%, rather than the UN's projected 100%

Click to read more ...

7 Diseases That Big, Juicy Steaks Could Give You

By Sara Novak, Planet Green Posted on November 5, 2009, Printed on November 10, 2009 http://www.alternet.org/story/143691/ More and more people are passing on meat for a wide variety of reasons. For starters, it reduces your impact on the planet. Some simply can't bare the despicable factory farming industry in this country. And the third weighing issue on the minds of the more than 2.8 percent of the U.S. population that considers themselves vegetarian, arehealth issues. And studies show that there are plenty of them.

Click to read more ...

Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies

Published on Sunday, November 8, 2009 by the New York Times by Nicholas D. Kristof Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It's a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies - to the tune of six pounds per American per year . That's a lot of estrogen.

Click to read more ...

The High Human Cost of Unsafe Food

Published on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by The Huffington Post by Marion Nestle I think we need a whole lot more public outrage about unsafe food. Maybe the recent front-page articles in the Washington Post and New York Times will do the trick. Both tell tragic stories of women who developed hemolytic uremia syndrome in response to eating a food contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. Both reveal the appalling physical and monetary cost of these illnesses. Recall: we also do not have an effective and affordable health care system.

Click to read more ...

Desperate Food Industry Tries to Tar Michael Pollan and Organic Produce

By Vanessa Barrington, EcoSalon Posted on August 24, 2009, Printed on August 25, 2009 http://www.alternet.org/story/142145/ What do you get when you cross a grassroots movement with a food industry fearful of losing its influence? Bogus studies, campaigns of misinformation and opinion pieces filled with myth and vitriol. You may have noticed an uptick this year in news reporting that organic food isn’t really better for you, opinion pieces by conventional farmers saying that they are tired of being demonized by “agri-intellectuals”, and guilt-inducing ads by Monsanto in highbrow publications like the New Yorker touting the company’s ability to feed the world through technology.

Click to read more ...

Warning: Eating Meat May Cause Sickness, Paralysis and Death

By Tom Laskawy, Grist.org Posted on October 12, 2009, Printed on October 12, 2009 http://www.alternet.org/story/143136/ It's hard to draw any other conclusion from Michael Moss's New York Times blockbuster investigative piece on E. coli in industrial beef, which is centered on the plight of Stephanie Smith, a young dance instructor left comatose, near death and now paralyzed from eating asingle Cargill hamburger. Of course, a "single hamburger" can include meat from hundreds, some would say thousands, of animals.

Click to read more ...