The WTO’s Doha Round of trade talks slowed to a halt last week. Here’s why it’s good for food sovereignty and security.

On July 17, the Food and Drug Administration lifted its warning about raw tomatoes after their investigation determined that tomatoes currently in the marketplace are free of the carrying the Salmonella Saintpaul strain that has sickened over 1,200 people across 42 states. Now their attention is turning to raw jalapeño and raw serrano peppers.

The salmonella outbreak from fresh tomatoes has sickened hundreds so far — with many more sicknesses presumably going unreported — in 36 states, and the FDA has still not identified the source of the pathogen. Sabin Russell, the San Francisco Chronicle’s medical reporter, yesterday revealed that a major reason is that tomatoes from many regions are mixed together as they move through the stages of commerce. The practice is known as “repacking.”

With millions in the tropics rely on the banana as a staple food, the spread of the Panama disease is a serious issue. If it hits a region, like Uganda, that depends on bananas, a humanitarian catastrophe could ensue.

Finding organic and fair-trade bananas in Montreal.

If you want to fight global warming with your diet, it is better to change what you eat than where it comes from, according to a recently published article in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Several years ago, Brazil filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO) claiming that United States cotton subsidies violated international trade agreements. In 2004, the WTO ruled in Brazil’s favor. More recently, the U.S. lost its appeal, and so now Brazil can propose retaliatory trade sanctions on products from the U.S.

The European Union is changing the rules for chemicals, requiring that industry demonstrate that a chemical is safe before using it in consumer products. This approach, sometimes called “the precautionary principle,” is in stark contrast to the approach in the United States, where a chemical is considered “innocent until proven carcinogenic.”

In today’s New York Times, Andy Martin reports from Rome on an emergency summit called to address food shortages, climate change, and energy, while a recent New Yorker essay puts the food crisis in context of Thomas Malthus’s famous predictions that population growth would be curbed by famine.

The ETC Group , a Canadian organization that has been following the worldwide corporate concentration of seed ownership for decades, says the biotech industry has begun patenting genes that give plants the ability to respond to drought, heat, cold, abiotic stress, and salt resistance, called “climate-ready” genes. … My Irish ancestors understood all too well that if you give the King power over the fertility of the land, and if you make the farmers serfs to the ruling class, when something like a disease or a drought comes along, there will be famine.

A look back at past food crises can tell us a lot about the origins of today’s global riots over high food prices — and what we need to avoid them in the future. Guest post by U Tennessee ag economist Daryll Ray.

The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is currently hosting a witty installation by Beijing-based artist Zhan Wang. It’s a sculpture of San Francisco made entirely of kitchenware — tongs, graters, pots, serving dishes, tea kettles, and so on. Naturally, each piece is made in China.
The photo above shows the Financial District as viewed […]

Taras Grescoe says he wrote “Bottomfeeder” (Bloomsbury USA, May 2008) for a somewhat selfish reason: he wanted to taste the world’s great seafood dishes — like bouillabaisse in Marseilles, fish and chips in England, bluefin tuna sashimi in Tokyo — before they disappeared or were dramatically changed by our plundering of the oceans. Whatever his motivation, Grescoe has given us a fascinating book that I hope will inform many about the dire state of the oceans, expose the dreadful environmental consequences of badly managed aquaculture, and prompt us to make better seafood choices.

It’s time to call your congressperson today and tell them to vote against Section 11305 in the current mess of a Farm Bill. Inserted at the behest of pesticide manufacturers, it is titled “No Discrimination Against Use of Registered Pesticide Products or Classes of Pesticide Products,”

In-depth, offbeat, or thought-provoking features about aspects of SOLE food, from eating locally to farms marketing to methods of food preservation.