"The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization announced this week that food prices hit a record high last month. Its Food Price Index was 214.7 for December, the highest level since the organization created the index to measure the price of a standard basket of goods in 1990."
"U.S. customs officials said on Wednesday they had found a beetle considered one of the world's most dangerous agricultural pests in a shipment of rice arriving at Los Angeles International Airport."
"With President Obama slated to sign historic food-safety legislation into law Tuesday, the coalition of food industry, public interest and consumer groups that used a public health message to win its passage is now making an argument for its funding."
"A coalition of environmental and farmworker groups said in a lawsuit announced Monday that state pesticide regulators improperly cut off public comment on a controversial agricultural fumigant in order to secure its passage before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's term ended."
"The best news for wine growers Kevin and Karen Kohlman was this: Their vines did not get hit this season by pesticides drifting onto their property from surrounding private industrial forestlands. That’s a change."
"The struggle over huge livestock farms continues to roil in Missouri and Kansas, and no wonder -- a new report shows the two states in the middle of the growing concentration of factory farming."
Alarm bells are being set off by a new study of the families of California farm workers exposed to pesticides. It finds much higher levels of pervasive developmental disorder among children of mothers exposed to higher levels of neurotoxicant organophosphate pesticides.
A California state appeals court ruled that an organic farmer can seek damages from a pesticide company whose product was applied to neighboring fields and contaminated the organic farmer's fields by volatilization rather than spray drift.
The US Dept. of Agriculture says that 898 of these markets are open during some or all of the winter, even in many northern states. The USDA inventory is searchable by state and city, and considerable detail is provided for each market.
"The House of Representatives gave final approval on Tuesday to a long-awaited modernization of the nation’s food safety laws, voting 215 to 144 to grant the Food and Drug Administration greater authority over food production."
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