Food Production in the News

UK farmers are rallying to spread the word that food prices are on their way up over yonder, thanks to the European Parliament recently backing legislation to scale back the use of certain pesticides. According to this article in The Telegraph, farmers are saying that 10 per cent of chemicals will have to come off the market in the next few years and that in the UK, this "could halve potato crops, reduce wheat yields by a fifth and cause the loss of the entire carrot crop". There's an article in The Guardian about the predicted possible loss of the entire UK carrot crop. Are we supposed to believe that carrots really cannot be grown without pesticides? I buy organic carrots here in Canada and they're not a whole lot more expensive than conventionally grown carrots. Root vegetables are notorious for leaching metals and chemicals out of the soil (not to mention the contamination coming from pesticides sprayed on the plants above ground), so buying organic is always the safest bet anyway.

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The Fooducate blog had a story on Sara Lee's introducing a new labelling system for its products. In it, they included a link to a short history of food / nutrition labelling (mostly in the US). It's worth having a look, if only to see how ridiculously splintered labelling efforts have become as different companies set their own respective standards for their multitudes of products.

Canada's Bill C-517 killed, Canadians denied mandatory labelling of GM foods

Well, after receiving no attention whatsoever in the mainstream media, it looks as if the private member's bill, Bill C-517, An Act to Amend the Food and Drugs Act (mandatory labelling for genetically modified foods) was kicked to the curb before even getting to the second reading stage to determine whether it should be passed on to a committee. Those who voted it down include Convervative MPs Preston Manning and Peter MacKay, as well as Liberal MPs Michael Ignatieff and Paul Zed (from Saint John, NB) and if you click on the link above, you'll get a complete list of which MP thinks you shouldn't have a right to know what goes into your food. There were 101 ''yays'', 156 ''nays'' and 18 paired votes. That's close enough that all it would have taken was a bit of reporting on this to get people's attention so that they'd pressure their MPs to vote to push it forward. Greenpeace Canada has more about it here.