Canada recalls White Rabbit candies over melamine concerns

(CBC.ca) - Canadians should not eat, distribute or sell White Rabbit brand candy, a popular Chinese confection that may be tainted with melamine, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency warned Thursday.

The candy is normally available for sale at retail stores throughout Canada in a variety of flavours, the agency said.

Health officials in Hong Kong and Singapore said they have found trace amounts of melamine, an industrial chemical used to make plastics and fertilizer, in some of the candy.

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Cadbury the latest global firm caught up in China milk scandal

(CBC.ca) - British chocolate maker Cadbury, the latest foreign company affected by China’s tainted milk scandal, ordered a recall of its Chinese-made products on Monday, saying that tests have “cast doubt” on their safety.

Tests “cast doubt on the integrity of a range of our products manufactured in China,” Cadbury said without elaboration in a statement issued from its office in Singapore.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the tests revealed melamine, the industrial chemical at the center of China’s recent milk scandal.

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Hong Kong tests find melamine in Cadbury candies

(CBC.ca) - Tests have found unsafe levels of the chemical melamine in two Cadbury chocolate products made at a Beijing factory, Hong Kong’s food safety agency said Sunday.

British chocolate maker Cadbury ordered a recall of its Chinese-made products last Monday. At the time, the company said its own preliminary tests had “cast doubt on the integrity” of the chocolate.

The two items were among 11 Chinese-made products that have already been recalled by Cadbury in parts of Asia and the Pacific.

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Will Cities Soon Be Able to Feed Themselves?

(AlterNet.org: Environment) - A growing interest in urban farming is sprouting all kinds of new ideas — including growing food in high-rises.

Skyrocketing food costs, worries about food security and an urge to do things ourselves have led to a huge surge in urban farming — gardens in backyards, on roofs, in abandoned lots and even, in the dream of a Columbia professor and his students, in high-rise buildings in the middle of cities.

During World Wars I and II, victory gardens were considered a patriotic effort to take the pressure off the food supply and to boost morale by having people see their labor translated into produce.

An urban farmer in Oakland, Esperanza Pallana, doesn’t necessarily garden as a patriotic effort, but she does enjoy what her work in the garden gives her.

“There are so many things I like about it, besides just having a food supply, though it is like magic to go out in backyard and get eggs that are fresh and delicious and to have a source of honey,” she says. “It’s so satisfying when I sit down to a meal and 75 percent is straight out of the backyard.”

READ MORE HERE [ Source: AlterNet.org: Environment, Emily Wilson, Oct. 2, 2008 ]

Desperate Haitians Eating Mud

(UPI) - People in Haiti have become so desperate for food that many are eating mud, U.N. officials said.

U.N. officials say that food is available in the impoverished Caribbean nation, The Guardian reported. But prices are rising so fast that the Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that food will cost 80 percent more at the end of the year than it did in January.

The high prices come in a country where much of the population is already living on the edge. The United Nations says that two-thirds of Haitians live on less than $1 a day.

In normal times, pregnant women use mud cakes as a source of calcium. Now, they are famine food.

“It stops the hunger,” said Marie-Carmelle Baptiste, who makes mud cakes. “You eat them when you have to.”

The cakes’ raw material comes from a clay deposit outside Port-au-Prince. Baptiste said they have become more expensive to make, but she does not want to raise her prices until she has to because she knows that, for her customers, the cakes are the last resort.

[ Source: UPI ]

Spectre of hunger again haunts North Korea, UN says

(CBC.ca) - Undernourished people are scrounging for wild foods.

Hit by bad harvests and soaring prices, millions of North Koreans are hungrier than they have been in years, and many are seeking wild food in the countryside, United Nations officials said Wednesday.

“We’ve found that many more people are now scavenging for wild foods which provide little nourishment and are difficult to digest,” Jean-Pierre de Margerie, UN World Food Program country director for North Korea, said in a statement. “Food assistance to reach the hungry is urgently needed.”

Famine is a recurring tragedy in North Korea, a nation of 23 million whose economy has withered under an eccentric blend of communism and personality cult.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: CBC.ca ]

Biofuel production boosts food prices by 75%, report suggests

The production of biofuels has driven up food prices 75 per cent, according to an unpublished World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

In an article published Friday, the British daily cites a confidential report authored by Don Mitchell, a senior economist at the bank. The newspaper suggests the report has not been released so as not to embarrass U.S. President George Bush, whose government had suggested biofuels accounted for a three per cent increase in food prices.

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Environment & water - June 30

Years of industrial and agricultural growth have left an indelible imprint on many formerly vibrant U.S. ecosystems. While nature is adept at resilience, the depletion and contamination of natural resources, especially water, may affect human health and wellbeing, a new report suggests.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Energy Bulletin ]

The Food and the Energy crisis, fiction or reality?

In these murky times, where priorities and values have been turned upside down by the political propaganda machines, where revenge is rendered into self-preservation, aggression transformed into courage, fanaticism into a mark of the real man, dissent into betrayal, sadism into protectionism, pathology into normalcy, and pre-emptive war into peace, the push to assassinate the middle class remains active and healthy.

As a result, wages are down, inflation is up, commodities have spiraled out of control, and the greenbacks have plummeted into low records. The US dollar supremacy is in doubt, which might pave the way for a new currency within a new order under the security and prosperity partnership process.

Not surprisingly, the price of oil keeps going up negating the laws of supply and demand, and the food prices has also become so increasingly inflated that a food shortage is promoted creating a worldwide panic.

The question is why? Reshaping economies, indebting nations, and controlling the petroleum of the world is essential for total world domination, where all nations are subdued and impoverished. Therefore, all nations will suffer weakened sovereignty, and become dependent on the global tans-national masters of the universe.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: GlobalResearch.ca ]

Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Bill Engdahl is a leading researcher, economist and analyst of the New World Order who’s written on issues of energy, politics and economics for over 30 years. He contributes regularly to publications like Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine, Grant’s Investor.com, European Banker and Business Banker International. He’s also a frequent speaker at geopolitical, economic and energy related international conferences and is a distinguished Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization where he’s a regular contributor.

Engdahl also wrote two important books - “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order” in 2004. It’s an essential history of geopolitics and the importance of oil. Engdahl explains that America’s post-WW II dominance rests on two pillars and one commodity - unchallengeable military power and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency combined with the quest to control global oil and other energy resources.

Engdahl’s newest book is just out from Global Research: “Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” and subject of this review. It’s the diabolical story of how Washington and four Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide control of our food supply and why that prospect is chilling. The book’s compelling contents are reviewed below in-depth so readers will know the type future Henry Kissinger had in mind in 1970 when he said: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”

READ MORE HERE [ Source: GlobalResearch.ca ]

Yellow Card for Canadian Wild Pacific Salmon

Vancouver, BC Exceptionally low numbers of wild Pacific salmon returning to spawning rivers this season have led to a cautionary “yellow” listing in the David Suzuki Foundation’s third annual assessment of wild salmon stocks.

“This year’s Pacific salmon returns are perhaps the lowest in 50 years,” said David Suzuki Foundation aquatic biologist Jeffery Young.

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Why Fair Trade May Be Our Only Hope

Fair trade might now be necessary not only as a means of redistributing income, but also to feed the world.

I suggest you sit down before you read this. Robert Mugabe is right. At last week's global food summit he was the only leader to speak of "the importance ... of land in agricultural production and food security." Countries should follow Zimbabwe's lead, he said, in democratising ownership.

Of course the old bastard has done just the opposite. He has evicted his opponents and given land to his supporters. He has failed to support the new settlements with credit or expertise, with the result that farming in Zimbabwe has collapsed. The country was in desperate need of land reform when Mugabe became president. It remains in desperate need of land reform today.

But he is right in theory. Though the rich world's governments won't hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and has since been confirmed by dozens of further studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.

In some cases, the difference is enormous. A recent study of farming in Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are twenty times as productive as farms of over ten hectares. Sen's observation has been tested in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Java, the Phillippines, Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay. It appears to hold almost everywhere.

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Is Famine Inevitable?

The fate of global food production has now become the chief terror of the future.

Paul Krugman's "Grains Gone Wild" column may have boasted one of the most hilarious titles ever in the annals of agrichemical economic analysis, but the situation is far from funny: Our food situation is on the precipice of failure. And all it's going to take to get past the tipping point is the slightest of mistakes -- or manipulations.

Much of our current recessionary intrigue has been aided and abetted by market speculation, from the oil and food sector all the way to the White House itself. For the last seven years, the Bush administration has placed climate crisis on the back burner in existential pursuit of resource wars and an "American way of life" that has turned from a dream of Hummers, housing and bling into a nightmare of price hikes, foreclosures and layoffs. Mission accomplished.

But someone will have to pick up the pieces, which are going viral fast. In that chaos, food has stopped being our other energy problem and become a chief terror of the future. And considering increasing prices, decreasing dollars and a world that will soon house many more people but feed even less of them, we're probably in for a famine or two before all is said and done.

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Food summit delegates vow to ease hunger

World leaders at an international summit in Rome Thursday vowed to reduce trade barriers and boost agricultural production to tackle the growing global food crisis. The UN summit’s final declaration was delayed due to political squabbling, according to observers.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: CBC.ca ]

Canadian and U.S. Conservation Community Invites Retail Businesses to Move Forward on Sustainable Seafood Initiatives

(Halifax, Vancouver) - SeaChoice, Canada’s sustainable seafood program, and its five member organizations, joined nine U.S. environmental groups today in releasing the “Common Vision for Environmentally Sustainable Seafood”. These organizations- which all have a strong history of working with the seafood industry and policymakers- have partnered to form the Conservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions.

The Common Vision outlines realistic steps companies can take to develop and implement a comprehensive, corporate policy on sustainable, wild-caught and farmed seafood. This initiative provides businesses that buy and sell seafood with a clear path for moving ahead with sustainable seafood purchasing.

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