Thai Seafood: To Buy or Boycott?

June 24, 2014 by Leave a Comment

“Thailand’s seafood industry defended itself Tuesday against allegations that it uses forced and child labor, after the U.S. State Department last week downgraded the country’s ranking to the lowest level in its annual human trafficking report. [For more on the report, see here; more about sex trafficking than seafood…]

“The Southeast Asian nation exports more than $2 billion worth of shrimp each year, much of it to the U.S., where media reports in the Guardian and other publications have brought wider public attention to allegations of forced labor in Thailand’s fishery industry, particularly in the export-focused shrimp sector. The U.S. government’s move to rank Thailand alongside North Korea, Cuba and Iran in the lowest “Tier 3” ranking in its annual Trafficking in Persons Report has further focused attention on the issue and created a public relations headache for Thailand’s military leaders, who seized power in a coup d’état last month

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“French supermarket firm Carrefour CA.FR +0.27% and Norway’s ICA have suspended Charoen Pokhphand Foods from their list of shrimp suppliers after the Guardian reported that “trash fish” caught using forced labor was used as feed on shrimp farms. CP Foods has since said it would audit its entire supply chain.

“Other customers, notably Costco Wholesale Corp. COST +0.95% , have maintained orders, and Thai executives said they intend to visit the U.S. to assure customers that the industry doesn’t use illegal labor and complies with local and international labor laws. “Costco is scheduled to visit us at the end of this month to receive all documents to help them explain the situation to their clients,” Mr. Poj said.

WSJ

 

Filed under Asia, Economy, Food Tagged with , ,

Earning Enough to Eat By

July 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Mark Bittman, a New York Times food columnist and author of a small 4 volume set [The Mini Minimalist] of easy recipes of which I am a big fan, does what more foodies should do — looks at the conditions of the many tens of thousands who work in food services around the country.  Good for you Mark!

 

…a rapidly increasing number of food industry and other retail workers are now fighting for basic rights: halfway decent pay, a real work schedule, the right to organize, health care, paid sick days, vacations and respect. Next week, organizers say, we’ll see a walkout of thousands of workers at hundreds of stores in at least seven cities, including New York and Chicago.

Something is happening here, though exactly what isn’t quite clear. Fast food was never a priority of organized labor — it’s difficult to imagine a traditional union of four million fast-food workers in something like 200,000 locations — but dozens of organizations are now involved, including, to its credit, the Service Employees International Union, which is providing financing and counsel. The upshot: Workers with nothing to lose are demanding a living wage of $15 an hour, and gaining strength and confidence.

Filed under Food, Labor / Unions, Organizing Tagged with , , ,

Food For Thought

January 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment

A young friend of mine sent me a link to the site HomessNation.org ‘by and for the homeless.’

It’s worth opening the link to follow the entire sequence of photos and numbers, but here are the highest and lowest.

Germany: The Melander family of BargteheideFood expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07

Germany: The Melander family of Bargteheide
Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07

AND

Chad: Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23

Chad: Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23

Stunning of course. While our not eating won’t put more food in the bellies of the Aboubakar family, our paying attention to food policy and US policies on agriculture, import/export laws will.

 

[Thx Fiona K]

Filed under Food, Health Tagged with ,

Cops Sent to Arrest Illegal Seed Users

November 29, 2012 by Leave a Comment

In more stunning news of corporate thuggery, and a screaming siren about the abuse of ‘intellectual property,’ Dupont is sending cops to ferret out illegal use of its ‘patented’ seeds.  No longer can a farmer save a portion of his crop for seeding the next year.  If he has Dupont or Monsanto seeds he’s got to pay up every year — like a software license.

By Jack Kaskey – Nov 28, 2012 1:14 PM PT

DuPont Co. (DD), the world’s second- biggest seed company, is sending dozens of former police officers across North America to prevent a practice generations of farmers once took for granted.

The provider of the best-selling genetically modified soybean seed is looking for evidence of farmers illegally saving them from harvests for replanting next season, which is not allowed under sales contracts. The Wilmington, Delaware-based company is inspecting Canadian fields and will begin in the U.S. next year, said Randy Schlatter, a DuPont senior manager.

…Attacks on the modified food industry aren’t new. Farmers criticized Monsanto in the 2008 Oscar-nominated documentary “Food, Inc.” for contracts that keep them from saving seeds. The St. Louis-based company has sued 145 U.S. farmers for saving Roundup Ready soybeans since 1997, winning all 11 cases that went to trial, said Kelli Powers, a Monsanto spokeswoman. The U.S. Supreme Court last month agreed to consider the legality of such planting restrictions.

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Maybe this will encourage at least the smaller growers to stop buying the GM seeds and return to practices more in keeping with economic and ecological sense.  There’s got to be a better way than Round Up to keep pests low and productivity high.

 

Filed under Food Tagged with , ,

Climate Change and the Food We Eat

September 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The SF Chronicle, unique among big, local dailies continues to provide frequent, front-page coverage of the climate change and how our daily lives are, or will, be affected.  This morning it’s what is happening to agriculture in California.

Risks include rising heat, increasing salt in the soil, less water and no insurance.

While wine isn’t in the basic food group as it is in France, it is on most grow-up tables in California.

Napa vintners already are feeling the effects of the changing odds. In 2010, the wine industry had one of its worst years on record when days of record-breaking heat in August were followed by a few freakish days of frost.

“You’re ripening earlier, in a warmer time of the year under a warmer climate, so you’re getting a double whammy,” Weiss said. Even just a week’s difference, he said, can affect the quality of a Cabernet Sauvignon.

Read more:

 

Cherries, I suppose we could do without and still live pretty good lives, but if the cherry in the hot time has the roll of the canary in the coal-mine we’re in serious trouble.

In April, the cherries were blooming in the Colombini family orchard in the San Joaquin Valley, their blossoms a signal that the harvest would be coming in six weeks.

But there was trouble lurking under those delicate blossoms. Jeff Colombini, director of the family company, Lodi Farming, pointed to the erratic blooming of his trees – a flower here and there, but many stunted, half-grown blossoms. That is a sign, he said, of the “stresses that come with not enough chill hours.”

Most of the highest-quality cherry varieties in the state are tuned for a November or December chill, which slows down the metabolism of the nascent fruit and elongates the ripening process that comes with the onset of warmer weather.

For a perfect California cherry, the trees need 1,200 to 1,400 hours of “chill time.” But Joseph Grant, a UC Cooperative Extension farm adviser in Stockton, said that lately, cherry growers have been seeing more like 1,000 to 1,100 hours per season.

Read more: 

Filed under Climate Change, Food Tagged with , ,

Food, Floods and Drought

February 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Krugman looks at Egypt, food prices and the fast changing world climate:

We’re in the midst of a global food crisis — the second in three years. World food prices hit a record in January, driven by huge increases in the prices of wheat, corn, sugar and oils. These soaring prices have had only a modest effect on U.S. inflation, which is still low by historical standards, but they’re having a brutal impact on the world’s poor, who spend much if not most of their income on basic foodstuffs…

While several factors have contributed to soaring food prices, what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate — which means that the current food price surge may be just the beginning.

The question then becomes, what’s behind all this extreme weather?

To some extent we’re seeing the results of a natural phenomenon, La Niña — a periodic event in which water in the equatorial Pacific becomes cooler than normal. And La Niña events have historically been associated with global food crises, including the crisis of 2007-8.

But that’s not the whole story. Don’t let the snow fool you: globally, 2010 was tied with 2005 for warmest year on record, even though we were at a solar minimum and La Niña was a cooling factor in the second half of the year. Temperature records were set not just in Russia but in no fewer than 19 countries, covering a fifth of the world’s land area. And both droughts and floods are natural consequences of a warming world: droughts because it’s hotter, floods because warm oceans release more water vapor.

Read all

Filed under Climate Change, Environment Tagged with , , , ,