Antibiotic use may have driven the development of Europe’s deadly E. coli.

Nature.com
by Marian Turner

Women, beansprouts, cucumbers, bacteria, cows: the cast of the current European Escherichia coli outbreak is already a crowd. Enter the phage. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria, and they are star players in the chain of events that led to this outbreak. Bacterial infections often originate from contaminated food, but it is now about six weeks since the start of this outbreak and the trail is going cold. It’s hard to be sure of the culprit — but this simply serves to highlight the importance of understanding how infectious bacteria get into the food chain in the first place. Read Full Article »

Posted in Cornucopia News

National Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement Comments: Due July 28

Action Alert

Corporate agribusiness wants to tell the rest of us how to farm, and shut anyone out of the market who does not follow their one-size-fits-all “food safety” standards for leafy green vegetables. The USDA is supporting their plan, which, if accepted, will allow a committee of industry representatives, lobbyists and other officials to write a set of so-called food safety standards for the entire leafy green farming community—this could competitively injure smaller, local and organic producers.

If passed, leafy green handlers/marketers who sign on to this agreement will require every grower they buy from to follow a uniform set of standards, which will be written with large-scale, monoculture, chemical-intensive farming methods in mind. Farmers do not sign on to the agreement – their buyers (brokers, distributors and supermarket chains) do. Sustainable organic and local growers who take different approaches to food safety will likely be shut out of the market when buyers refuse their buy their crops. Read Full Article »

Posted in Completed Action Alerts, Cornucopia News

Consumers and Independent Producers Lose if Big Ag Wins on Animal Traceability

WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is expected to issue its new proposed rule for mandatory animal traceability very shortly. While USDA already has traceability requirements as part of existing animal disease control programs, the proposed framework goes much further to require animal tagging and tracing even absent any active disease threat. The framework has raised significant concerns among family farm and ranch advocates, who criticize the agency for failing to provide a coherent, factual explanation for the new program’s necessity.

“USDA brags about the success of past programs, but has abandoned the principles that made them successful,” argued Bill Bullard of R-CALF USA. “Past programs were based on sound science and were developed in response to the transmission, treatment, and elimination of specific identified diseases. USDA’s new approach is a one-size-fits-all approach that does not specifically aim at the control of livestock diseases.” Read Full Article »

Posted in Cornucopia News

Reigniting Organic Attack by Corporate Agribusiness Interests

CORNUCOPIA, WIS:  When The Cornucopia Institute, a farm policy research group, officially launched in April 2004, one of its primary issue areas was what it referred to as “The Corporate Attack on Organic Agriculture.”  At the time, Cornucopia’s focus was on the father and son team of Dennis and Alex Avery at the ultra-conservative Hudson Institute’s campaign to discredit organics.  Now, in 2011, after seven years of successfully exposing the genesis of Hudson’s ire, and greatly diminishing its effectiveness, a new generation of “Trojan horse” naysayers has emerged.

The latest attacks come from Mischa Popoff, a Canadian who purports to be an advocate for organics and is publicizing his self-published book entitled Is It Organic?  The author misses few opportunities to impugn the integrity of the organic label, or USDA oversight, while simultaneously defending biotechnology and the industrial agriculture system that organics seeks to replace. Read Full Article »

Posted in Cornucopia News

AP 6-6-11: “In a surprising U-turn, German officials said initial tests published Monday provided no evidence that sprouts from an organic farm in northern Germany were the cause of the country’s deadly E. coli outbreak.”

Quotations attributable to Mark A. Kastel, Codirector and Senior Farm Policy Analyst at The Cornucopia Institute, a farm policy research group based in Cornucopia, Wisconsin:

One of the suspected factors in this tragic outbreak of foodborne illness (now preliminarily cleared) was sprouted seeds from an organic farm. There’s a history of pathogenic contamination of fresh food, including sprouts. Correcting statements made over the weekend, the German government stated on Monday, June 6 that it has not found conclusive evidence that the deadly E. coli outbreak can be linked to sprouts from an organic farm. Read Full Article »

Posted in Cornucopia News