The Center for Food Safety in the United States has sent letters to the top state law enforcement officials of 49 states, urging them to take action against the misleading practice of labeling seafood imports as “organic.”
Alarm about a possible human H5N1 flu pandemic has resurfaced on news wires and across the media after fresh evidence that avian flu, circulating in poultry in the Far East, can be transmitted from person to person.
Full proceedings from The Organic Research Centre’s December 2007 producer conference, hosted in collaboration with Organic Inform, are now available online.
European Food Safety Agency says cloning OK for food safety and the environment
New campaign from European Commission says organic is good for everyone.
ORC research team reports from IFOAM/ISOFAR in Modena, Italy.
Organic agriculture and other forms of ecological agriculture have received a boost in a new report from the House of Commons All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil.
Demand for land to grow food, fuel crops and wood is set to outstrip supply, leading to the further destruction of forests and other valuable habitat.
Defra not to cull badgers – will use vaccination for TB when available
Initial results from test baking of the composite cross populations show that the populations perform consistently between organic and conventional systems, unlike a mixture and a conventionally-bred variety which do well in non-organic but not organic systems
Defra study illustrates problems of locking up soil organic carbon
Cabinet Office report says proper food policy could save 70,000 lives a year
Dysfunctional technology of GM is no answer to world hunger
Is the UK organic sector defying food industry and media sceptics who’ve predicted that the organics and fair trade sectors will be the first to be hit by the credit crunch? And whose figures on the size of the UK organic retail market should we believe anyway?
UK risk of BSE downgraded
Land area under organic management in Wales increased by 15% in 2007 and now amounts to some 90,000 ha on 800 holdings, that’s 6.3% of Welsh agricultural area.
The sorry saga of UK incompetence in the administration of farm subsidy continues. The Farmers Guardian reports that a large number of payments made to farmers under Organic Entry Level Stewardship (OELS) are being reviewed after Natural England found that some had been overpaid by up to £25,000.
A new Defra –funded, Bristol University study says one in four battery-reared chickens has difficulty walking.
Finally supermarkets are properly investigated
This week The Times reported the findings of work in the United States on avian influenza which shows that in addition to the H5N1 strain, a few H7 strains of the virus have also started to evolve some of the traits they would need to infect people easily.
Paul van Aarle of Intervet says that after Bluetongue, we can expect to see Rift Valley Fever and West Nile-virus arriving in Europe before long.
The development of a complex legume based mixture for better fertility building is to become a reality in a new project, led by the Organic Research Centre, Elm Farm. The mixture will be designed to optimise the transfer of nitrogen from the fertility building ley to the subsequent crops in the rotation.
