NewsTrust - Farming - Most Recent Stories: News (Mainstream)

Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism?

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Andrew Rice - Nov. 22 (Special Report) - Fearing food shortages, investors from wealthy countries are snapping up land in poor countries to grow food there. Is this development or exploitation?

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Lexington: Farmers v greens

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Economist - Nov. 15 (Special Report) - In the Senate, however, every state gets exactly two votes. Sparsely-populated states are thus hugely over-represented: senators representing a mere 11% of America’s population can block any bill, since 60 votes out of 100 are needed to guarantee passage. And many of these states depend on coal, the dirtiest commonly-used fuel.

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Farmers fight climate bill, but warming spells trouble for them

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

McClatchy - Nov. 02 (News Report) - Farm state senators and others soon will get a taste of what their colleagues from Missouri already have piled high on their desks: thousands of letters from farmers urging them to vote against the climate and energy bill. The Missouri Farm Bureau started the letter campaign early, weeks before the bill was fully written and made public. It was followed in October with a pitch from the American Farm Bureau, the nation's largest agriculture lobby, to get farmers to take farm caps, sign their bills and send them to senators with notes that say, "Don't cap our future."

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Mie fish farm admits using hormone disrupter

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Japan Times - Oct. 04 (News Report) - A fishery cooperative in Owase, Mie Prefecture, halted virtually all shipments of its farmed fish after learning that a farm in the region used a banned hormone disrupter as a parasite repellent, the cooperative said Saturday.

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Health Ills Abound as Farm Runoff Fouls Wells

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Charles Duhigg - Sep. 20 (Special Report) - In Morrison, Wis., more than 100 wells were polluted by agricultural runoff from land covered with slaughterhouse waste and treated sewage.

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Drought Puts Focus on a Side of India Left Out of Progress

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Jim Yardley - Sep. 05 (Special Report) - The crisis has underscored the problems facing Indian agriculture as the population expands at the same time that water resources come under greater pressure.

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Scientists discover virus that could explain drop in bee population

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Times - By Mark Henderson - Aug. 26 (News Report) - The research, by a team at the University of Illinois and the US Department of Agriculture, has indicated that a group of viruses called the picorna-like viruses are likely to be involved, though they may not be the only cause. In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists examined the way genes were switched on and off in the guts of bees from hives that later fell victim to CCD.

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Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Bryan Walsh - Aug. 23 (Special Report) - The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices. But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animals and humans. Those hidden prices are the creeping erosion of our fertile farmland, cages for egg-laying chickens so packed that the birds can't even raise their wings and the scary rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among farm animals. Add to the price tag the acceleration of global warming — our energy-intensive food system uses 19% of U.S. fossil fuels, more than any other sector of the economy.

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Wish you weren't here: The devastating effects of the new colonialists

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - Aug. 08 (Special Report) - A new breed of colonialism is rampaging across the world, with rich nations buying up the natural resources of developing countries that can ill afford to sell. Some staggering deals have already been done, says Paul Vallely, but angry locals are now trying to stop the landgrabs.

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'Organic has no health benefits'

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

BBC News - Jul. 29 (News Report) - Organic food is no healthier than conventionally produced food, a large independent review has concluded.

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Naked girls plow fields for rain | U.S.

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reuters - Jul. 23 (News Report) - hPATNA, India (Reuters) - Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday

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Crops, ponds destroyed in quest for food safety

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau - Jul. 13 (News Report) - Dick Peixoto planted hedges of fennel and flowering cilantro around his organic vegetable fields in the Pajaro Valley near Watsonville to harbor beneficial insects, an alternative to pesticides. He has since ripped out such plants in the name of food safety,...

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Farm Groups Prevail as House Climate Bill Puts USDA in Charge of Ag Offsets

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Allison Winter - Jun. 24 (News Report) - The Agriculture Department will have the lead role in overseeing agriculture offsets under the House climate bill, a major victory for farm groups that pushed lawmakers to take the lead away from U.S. EPA and a defeat for environmental groups that fear the agriculture agency may be too lax in oversight.

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Americas | How Texas manure ethanol plan fell flat

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

BBC News - By Jamie Coomarasamy Washington correspondent, BBC News - Jun. 23 (News Report) - There are some things that don't change in Hereford, Texas. The country music that's played on the local radio station and the brown plastic bull, which welcomes you to town, above the slogan "Hereford, Beef Capital of the World". But one thing has appeared on the skyline since I was last in the panhandle three-and-a-half years ago - the gleaming, silver silos of the Panda ethanol plant.

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Dusty fields in Fresno County

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Bettina Boxall - Jun. 22 (News Report) - A day after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was scolded in Fresno for not doing enough about this summer's farm-water shortages, he went to Mendota to issue yet another drought-related disaster declaration.

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As Iraq runs dry, a plague of snakes is unleashed

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - Jun. 21 (News Report) - Swarms of snakes are attacking people and cattle in southern Iraq as the Euphrates and Tigris rivers dry up and the reptiles lose their natural habitat among the reed beds.

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A 'time bomb' for world wheat crop

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Karen Kaplan - Jun. 14 (News Report) - The spores arrived from Kenya on dried, infected leaves ensconced in layers of envelopes. Working inside a bio-secure greenhouse outfitted with motion detectors and surveillance cameras, government scientists at the Cereal Disease Laboratory in St. Paul, Minn., suspended the fungal spores in a light mineral oil and sprayed them onto thousands of healthy wheat plants. After two weeks, the stalks were covered with deadly reddish blisters characteristic of the scourge known as Ug99.

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Job Fight: Immigrants vs. Locals

Sat, 23 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Miriam Jordan - May. 23 (Special Report) - Slaughterhouse jobs can be difficult and dangerous. Now, with U.S. unemployment at a 25-year high, they are also fiercely coveted. American workers -- who for years have largely avoided fruit-picking, office-cleaning and meat-processing shifts -- are increasingly vying for these jobs with immigrants, creating flashpoints in places like Shelbyville.

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Farms Start to Feel Credit Pinch

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Lauren Etter - May. 19 (News Report) - The credit crunch is trickling down to the farm as agricultural lenders tighten credit standards, leaving some farmers short of money to feed their animals or put in crops as the planting season nears its end.

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Land grab: The race for the world's farmland

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - By Margareta Pagano - May. 03 (News Report) - In Africa they are calling it the land grab, or the new colonialism. Countries hungry to secure their food supplies – including Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, South Korea (the world's third biggest importer of corn) China, India, Libya and Egypt – are at the forefront of a frantic rush to gobble up farmland all around the world, but mainly cash-starved Africa. Over the past few months, Saudi Arabian investors have paid $100m for an Ethiopian farm where they hope to grow wheat and barley, adding to the millions of acres they already own in the war-ravaged country, as well as in neighbouring Sudan. The Saudis also have land in Indonesia and Thailand for growing rice. China owns vast tracts of overseas land, mainly in Algeria and Zimbabwe, and one estimate suggests that more than a million ethnic Chinese farm workers will be living on the continent this year. Kenya and Tanzania have leased land while the Ugandans have been big sellers, allocating two million acres of land to Egypt for wheat and corn.

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India and Pakistan: Tomato diplomacy

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - By Ben Arnoldy - Apr. 24 (Special Report) - It’s not all rotten tomatoes between India and Pakistan. While diplomatic relations have turned frosty between the nuclear rivals, trade ties have borne fruit: tomatoes especially.

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The Next Generation of Biofuels

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Melinda Wenner - Apr. 21 (Special Report) - Once the next generation of biofuels becomes available, you could swing by the local energy station and fill up on a liquid that is virtually identical to gasoline. It would be made by U.S. companies, not shipped from the Middle East. And even though biofuels release carbon dioxide when they are burned, the organisms they are made from draw an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide from the air—making biofuels essentially carbon-neutral.

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U.S. Food Safety No Longer Improving, Data Show

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Apr. 09 (News Report) - After decades of steady progress, the safety of the nation’s food supply is no longer improving. And in the case of salmonella — the dangerous bacteria recently found in peanuts and pistachios — infections may be creeping upward, the government reported Thursday.

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Industrial farms could leave eastern Wash. with dry wells

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Scott Streater - Apr. 09 (Special Report) - At issue is a proposal by Easterday Ranches Inc. to build a feedlot for 30,000 head of cattle that would withdraw a shade under 1 million gallons a day from the ancient Grande Ronde Aquifer during the driest months of the year.

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Water shortages go global

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Apr. 08 (Special Report) - An alarming number of the world’s great rivers no longer reach the sea. They include the Indus, Rio Grande, Colorado, Murray-Darling and Yellow rivers. These are the arteries of the world’s main grain-growing areas. Freshwater fish populations are in precipitous decline. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, fish stocks in lakes and rivers have fallen roughly 30% since 1970. This is a bigger population fall than that suffered by animals in jungles, temperate forests, savannahs and any other large ecosystem. Half the world’s wetlands, on one estimate, were drained, damaged or destroyed in the 20th century, mainly because, as the volume of fresh water in rivers falls, salt water invades the delta, changing the balance between fresh and salt water. On this evidence, there may be systemic water problems, as well as local disruptions. Two global trends have added to the pressure on water. Both are likely to accelerate over coming decades.

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