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Silent on Public Health?

Big Win for GM Crops in Europe

As spring comes to Germany, the Czech Republic, and Sweden, farmers will be planting Amflora, a genetically modified potato, on at least 620 acres.

Produced by BASF SE of Germany, Amflora is the first genetically modified organism (GMO) to win approval from the European Union since 1998.  BASF SE is the world's largest chemical company.

The decision, the first since Monsanto's MON810 maize was approved for cultivation in Europe, came after the portfolio for GMO issues was transferred to the EU's health and consumer affairs department from its environmental directorate.

Read more from: 

http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/03/big-win-for-gm-crops-in-europe/

GCARD 2010

28-31 March 2010, Montpellier, France

Source:Crop Biotech Update
Author:n/a

Some 1,000 World Food Prize L aureates, ministers, farmers, community development organizations, scientists, and innovators will gather March 28-31, 2010 in Montpellier, France for the first Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD), according to this article. The G8 group of nations called for this conference to identity agricultural research priorities and required actions to improve agriculture. World Food Prize Laureate Monty Jones, who is leading the team organizing the conference, said, "This meeting marks the beginning of a global transformation in agriculture." "Agriculture has to be able to change at a speed and scale never before contemplated, and many of these reform processes are already underway. Our discussions and the new forms of research that arise from them will enable us to better pinpoint how to deploy limited agriculture dollars to meet a range of development needs-whether it's to develop new drought-resilient maize varieties in East Africa, new partnerships that link women farmers to markets to sell their harvests, or making much better use of water in regions where water scarcity is a serious threat," Jones said. The conference website can be viewed online at the link below.

For more details  http://www.egfar.org/egfar/website/gcard

Shared from: Food Security and FS-AgBiotech (FS-AgBiotech) News  http://www.merid.org/fs-agbiotech/

Deutsche Presse-Agentur

9 February 2010.

Hanoi - Vietnam will file suit with the World Trade Organization to challenge the US's imposition of anti-dumping tariffs on Vietnamese shrimp, a government official confirmed Tuesday.

'The US has applied a method of calculating anti-dumping duties that is not suitable with WTO regulations,' said Bach Van Mung, director of the Ministry of Industry and Trade's competitiveness department.

In November 2004, the US imposed tariffs of between 4 and almost 26 per cent on Vietnamese frozen shrimp from different companies. Some companies' tariffs have since been lowered.

Le Van Quang, chairman of the shrimp committee of the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers, said it would challenge the US Department of Commerce's use of a method known as 'zeroing' in assessing whether or not a company is dumping products at below-market rates.

The US method first calculates the market price of a given good in the exporter's home country, and compares that to the company's sale price of the product in the US.

If the sale price is lower than in the home country, the US registers the difference as a negative number, while if it is higher, the US registers it as zero. Significant overall negatives can trigger anti-dumping tariffs.

Most countries contend that export prices higher than domestic prices should be averaged against lower prices to determine whether or not a company is generally engaged in dumping. In a string of recent cases, the WTO has found that zeroing violates its rules, though it has sometimes upheld certain uses of the practice.

The state-run newspaper Tuoi Tre on Monday quoted Deputy Trade Minister Le Danh Vinh as saying oy would be the first time Vietnam filed a protest with the WTO since it joined in 2007.

Vinh said the WTO mechanism mandated a 60-day discussion period between the parties before it steps in to resolve the dispute.

Vietnam exported 1.67 billion dollars of shrimp last year.

The US was the second-largest importer of Vietnamese shrimp, importing 395 million dollars' worth in 2009, down 15 per cent from 2008. Vietnam is the fifth-largest shrimp exporter to the US.

Retrieved from http://archive.wn.com/2010/02/09/laosdaily/index.html

The Daily Tribune

31 January 2010

The Philippines-The National Food Authority (NFA) has immediately sealed off the 20,000 bags of rice previously unloaded from the Vietnamese boat MV Trai Thien 66 to pave the way for an investigation into reports that the rice shipments from Vietnam was laced with ammonium sulfate.

NFA Administrator Jessup Navarro yesterday said he had ordered a halt to the unloading of the shipment’s remaining delivery until the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) completes the analysis of the substance mixed with the rice shipment.

Navarro added the NFA has also committed to fully cooperate with the PDEA and other government agencies in charge of combating illegal drugs until those responsible for the reported shipment of are finally captured.

The MV Thrai Thien 66, which directly sailed from Vietnam, was loaded with 76,000 bags of imported rice intended for Bacolod City, Negros Occiental province.

Navarro said exporting countries like Vietnam directly charter ships to deliver their rice cargo to the Philippines which are then unloaded at various ports nationwide.

He said it was the NFA’s quality control officer who discovered the substance in the shipments.

“It is a strict policy of the NFA to continuously conduct random sampling of rice shipments to check if the imported rice adhere to the required quality specifications before unloading them from the vessel,” he said.

Navarro said the NFA immediately alerted the Bureau of Customs (BoC) upon the discovery of the other cargo aside from rice, which was supposed to be its exclusive load.

The BoC, in turn, notified the PDEA for the appropriate analysis of the bags of ammonium sulfate mixed in the shipment.

Ammonium sulfate is an inorganic salt with a number of commercial uses, the most common of which is as a soil fertilizer. It is also used as an agricultural spray adjuvant for water soluble insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, as well as a food additive and as flame retardant.

Relatedly, Makati City Mayor Jejomar “Jojo” Binay has called for a thorough review of the government’s agricultural policy in the wake of rising rice importations and the influx of cheap food items due to the country’s accession to several free trade agreements.

Binay said last year was a sad year for agriculture as the NFA imported 2.3 million metric tons (MMT) of rice, a historic high that made the country the world’s biggest rice importer.

Worse, he added, total agricultural output last year grew by an insignificant 0.37 percent while the population growth rate hit 2.36 percent.

“What this means is that for the past several years, government has not improved farm yield modestly so much so that it has to blame climate change and the typhoons for the disastrous performance,” Binay said.

The Makati mayor, also the vice presidential candidate of the United Opposition (UNO) in the forthcoming national elections, wondered why the country’s collective rice yield continues to lag in spite of the P43.7 billion that the government has plunked in for the Fields program.

Binay asserted that the administration has failed to stop the steady reduction of farm land, arguing that the loss of about 50,000 hectares of fertile land for other purposes would contribute to chronic food crises.

“It’s tragic that the more we convert land planted to rice and other crops into plantations for the foreign market, the higher is the rate of our food importations,” he said.

Binay warned of a food crisis in the wake of the country’s accession to several free trade agreements, all of which reduce the tariff on imported food items, including the Asean Free Trade Agreement that will start this year and the accord for a tariff-free trade with China.

He proposed for the adoption of a food policy that addresses higher farm yields through the development of better-yielding, more nutritious rice, better infrastructure, including farm-to-market roads (FMRs), post-harvest equipment and irrigation facilities.

“The reason farmers are reluctant to be more efficient is the import-led food policy of the government, using the argument that there is practically a constant 10 percent annual rice production deficit. This argument has led to historic-high rice importations and the corollary reduction in farmgate palay prices to the level that could not recoup their production costs,” he said.

According to him, the “country’s total rice importation is roughly equivalent to the total volume of post-harvest losses, based on documents from government and the private sector.”

“We have to do more to recover more grains, and drying palay in basketball courts and highways are a surefire formula for higher post-harvest losses,” he further said.

Binay also called for the development of better post-harvest facilities and more efficient milling equipment since the recovery rate for the cono-type milling machines used widely in the country is 62 percent at best.

Retrieved from  http://www.tribune.net.ph/nation/20100131nat1.html

Andrew Clark

The Observer

Sunday 31 January 2010

A combination of bad harvests and speculation has sent the price of cane soaring - and provoked protests and violence in Asia.

Will that be one lump or two? Or, perhaps, none. A sugar rush is gripping the global commodities ­market. The price of the world's favourite sweetener shot to its highest level for 29 years this week in a worrying surge that has sparked political strife and street protests in parts of southern and south-east Asia.

A militant women's group staged a breakfast demonstration outside ­government offices in the Philippines on ­Tuesday, demanding intervention to bring down sugar prices. Protesters banged utensils at a rally in the Indian state of Bihar, and in Pakistan the authorities have rationed sugar, prompting violent confrontations as anger spills over at the perceived greed of producers.

Raw sugar traded on New York's Intercontinental Exchange surged in price by 128% last year, while white sugar on ­London's Liffe trading floor jumped by 123%. In the US markets on Monday, the price of a pound of raw sugar touched 30 cents for the first time since 1981, far above the range of 12 to 15 cents prevalent between 2007 and early 2009.

Toiling in a generally low-profile ­corner of the commodity markets, sugar traders are suddenly in the spotlight. But the immediate blame for this spike in prices lies in a factor indisputably beyond human control – the weather. A late monsoon disrupted sugar harvests in India, while too much rain disrupted supplies in the world's biggest ­sugarcane-growing nation, Brazil.

"It was the wettest harvest season here for decades," says Andy Duff, a commodities analyst at Rabobank in São Paulo. "There was less cane harvested than previously anticipated and the quality was lower than anticipated."

For the second consecutive year, ­global supply has fallen short of demand and many nations with sugar stockpiles are running short. The global financial crisis has not helped, making it harder for growers to finance outlay on fertiliser and equipment. In South America, ­environmental incentives have seen some sugarcane diverted into ­production of ethanol fuel.

Meanwhile, demand is robust – fuelled by population growth and rising incomes in emerging markets such as China. In poorer nations, a good chunk of every extra dollar earned is directed at food.

Population drift to the towns also adds to the appetite for sugar, according to Duff: "Increasing urbanisation drives changes in diet. It's associated with more consumption of sugary snacks and processed food."

Analysts at Commerzbank describe the sugar situation as "the perfect storm". In a research note, the ­German bank suggests the price still has "immense upside potential" and could even reach 40 cents per pound – a level exceeded only twice, during sugar crises in 1975 and 1980.

Tom Mikulski, a market strategist at commodities dealer Lind-Waldock in Chicago, says: "Unless we have a massive jump in production, I don't really see this market breaking any time soon."

For consumers, the link between ­commodity prices and supermarket costs is complicated. Sugar, more than most traded products, occupies a financial niche in which Wall Street and the high street are worlds apart. To protect European sugar growers, the European Union routinely keeps sugar prices artificially high – so shoppers in Britain and on the continent are used to paying a premium anyway.

The US has a similarly protectionist setup, limiting imports to safeguard its own farmers. But snack manufacturers such as Mars, Hershey and Krispy Kreme have been urging the Obama administration to raise import quotas, warning that a shortage of sugar could lead to job losses.

But in developing countries, the price of sugar has historically been lower and the recent spike in cost has been a shock. A columnist in the Manila Standard Today newspaper complained this week that a kilo of white sugar in public markets in the Philippines had jumped in cost from 40 pesos to between 50 and 60 pesos since Christmas. And a kilo of sugar on the black market in Pakistan, where sugar consumption is among the highest per person in the world, can reportedly fetch more than a day's pay.

"If you look at the impact, sugar comprises a greater share of the food basket in developing markets," says Sudakshina Unnikrishnan, an expert in agricultural commodities at Barclays Capital. "We don't really expect these problems to be a precedent set for developed countries, which have a kind of artificial system by which prices are set."

Since sugar inflation began to take hold in mid-2009, the news from growers has been consistently bad. In addition to poor harvests in India and Brazil, smaller producers such as Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam have come up short. "It's not that demand has grown extraordinarily this year – it's been ­growing in line with long-term trends," says Unnikrishnan. "The problem has been underperformance on the ­production side – and the big surprise is that, in spite of price rises, demand has held up."

In an unusual move from Brussels this week, farm commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel announced that the European Union intends to export 500,000 tonnes of sugar to the global markets above and beyond its usual quota to try to ease a squeeze in supply. This faced swift condemnation from other sugar producing nations, which complain that European farmers are unfairly subsidised. Brazil's sugarcane industry association, Unica, said it was a short-sighted breach of international trade rules.

Sensing an opportunity, speculators have shown little mercy. Hedge funds have piled into sugar, aggravating lurches in the price. Blaming speculators, ­however, would be a cheap shot, according Jonathan Kingsman, founder of the specialist sugar broker Kingsman, based in Switzerland.

"The speculators are involved and they'll always be involved, but there are fairly solid fundamentals to this market," says Kingsman. "There's not enough sugar to go around."

A calming in prices, he believes, will ultimately happen once growers react to the prospect of higher income and plant more crops: "Price is the best possible fertiliser," he says.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jan/31/sugar-prices-commodities

TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT

Conference on EU Trade Policy towards developing countries

The Directorate-General for Trade of the European Commission is organizing the above conference on EU Trade Policy towards Developing Countries, which will take place in Brussels on 16 March 2010. The conference will promote debate and gather input from stakeholders on how EU trade policy could take better account of, or be tailored towards, developing countries' needs.

How could EU trade policy take better account of developing countries’ needs and situations? What are the upcoming challenges and opportunities in a world shaped by new emerging economies? The Conference will provide an opportunity for interested stakeholders to raise their opinion and participate in the debate.
Registration to attend the Conference opens till 5 March 2010

http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/press/index.cfm?id=512