" I heard it through the AgLine"

March 3, 2010

 

 

·        Food-borne illnesses pegged at $152B

·        CF reopens Terra fertilizer bidding war

·        Weed killer ‘castrates’ frogs, study claims

·        Add GM maize in food, feed to EU OK list

·        You got your rain, now what’s your problem?

 

 

Food-borne illnesses pegged at $152B

 

A report sponsored by the Produce Safety Project at Georgetown University puts the health-related price tag at $152 billion a year. That's more than four times an earlier USDA estimate.

 

(Los Angeles Times) – It turns out that tainted food can not only make people sick, but it can also cost them a bundle in the process.

 

A new consumer research report released Wednesday has found that the health-related costs of food-borne illnesses total $152 billion a year, including the costs of medical bills, lost wages and lost productivity. That total is more than four times that of earlier estimates calculated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

 

The findings come as regulatory efforts to patrol the country's food sector are growing amid reports of a string of costly -- and sometimes fatal -- outbreaks of food-borne illness involving peanuts, jalapeno peppers, spinach, beef and other foods.

 

The report, sponsored by the Produce Safety Project at Georgetown University, provides a comprehensive examination of health costs associated with flaws in the nation's food safety system and "demonstrates the burden of food-borne illness," said Sandra Eskin, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts' Food Safety Campaign, a supporter of the study.

 

In 1997, the USDA reportedly pegged the public cost of sickness and death from eating tainted food at $35 billion a year. But that research looked at the fallout from only a handful of food-borne pathogens and didn't include as many long-term effects from such illnesses, including how they can affect a person's quality of life.

 

The Produce Safety Project identified 27 pathogens, said Robert Scharff, an economist who authored the newly released report. Researchers say some of the pathogens, such as norovirus or salmonella, are responsible for making a million or more Americans sick each year; others, such as botulism, sicken far fewer people.

 

Yet in most cases, researchers still can't pinpoint why or how people get ill from what they eat. The study attributes just over 80% of the illnesses and two-thirds of the costs to unknown food-related causes, a determination made by statistical analysis of symptoms associated with food-borne sickness such as diarrhea, Scharff said.

 

Costs varied significantly by state and were influenced by regional differences in diet and health, varying prices for medical care and regulators' ability to quickly respond and curtail food contamination outbreaks.

 

Officials from the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the safety of most of the nation's food supply, said they hadn't yet reviewed the report's findings.

 

The report is aimed at pressuring Congress to pass more stringent food safety legislation by making the case that such oversight is a matter of national economic well-being as well as public health, according to backers of the report.

 

A food safety bill that would increase inspections, fund research and force the industry to beef up its record-keeping cleared the House of Representatives last summer. A similar measure unanimously cleared a U.S. Senate committee in November. But momentum for the bill has stalled, as Congress remains embroiled in a fight over healthcare.

 

An official for a major produce lobbying group sounded a note of caution about the findings because they do not distinguish between illness caused by mishandling food in the home and sickness triggered by defects in growing, processing and distributing food.

 

Industry research shows that most illnesses are caused by consumer mishandling of produce, so the public shouldn't expect food safety legislation to be a panacea, said Ray Gilmer, spokesman for United Fresh Produce Assn., a Washington, D.C.-based trade group.

 

Gilmer said his group supported both the House and Senate versions of the food safety bill, but "the legislation only addresses what the industry can do."

 

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), a key backer of the House bill, called the figure documented by the report "shockingly high." DeLauro said she hoped "that the sobering numbers of this report will compel the Senate to act immediately."

 

On Tuesday, Senate sources said there was still no firm date for a vote on the bill.

 

State lawmakers, however, have been trying to pick up the slack by pushing a flurry of food safety legislation. In the 2009-10 legislative year, 553 bills involving changes to food safety have been introduced in 48 states, said Doug Farquhar, program director for agriculture at the National Conference of State Legislatures. California lawmakers have introduced 37 bills, he said.

 

"This national push is not only coming from concerned consumers but the agriculture industry as well," Farquhar said. "When it comes to food safety and the food business, it's straightforward: When you have an outbreak, profits plunge."

 

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CF reopens Terra fertilizer bidding war

 

(The New York Times) – The battles among fertilizer companies have been rejoined. CF Industries told shareholders in January that it was done chasing its big rival, Terra Industries. The nearly yearlong pursuit included some ungainly moments, as when CF’s nominees to Terra’s board rejected one of CF’s many offers.

 

But an about-face by CF has brought it back with a new unsolicited bid worth $4.7 billion, or $47.40 a share. This leaves uncomfortable questions all around.

 

Terra needs to respond soon. The company did not seem very interested in being sold to CF a few months ago. But then in February, Terra accepted a slightly higher cash bid from a Norwegian competitor, Yara International.

 

CF’s new bid contains a stock component, but it is currently worth about 15 percent more than Yara’s $4.1 billion. At the very least, Terra’s shareholders may wonder whether the company’s board could squeeze more out of Yara.

 

CF also has some explaining to do. It explicitly stated just six weeks ago that continuing to raise its bid for an unwilling target would not be prudent. Now it is doing just that.

 

True, CF’s earlier analysis assumed that Terra wasn’t interested in selling to anyone — and the math has changed somewhat. Even so, CF might have been smarter not to come back into the fray.

 

Even Terra’s advisers have stated in a fairness opinion that the company is worth at most $47.55 a share. Under three different measures — discounted cash flow, industry multiples of earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, and a look at similar transactions — the CF bid comes in close to the top valuation. Investors seem to be worried that CF could be overpaying. The company’s shares fell 4 percent by midday on Tuesday before recovering most of their losses.

 

Muddying the situation even more, CF is knee-deep in a battle to preserve its own independence. It is fending off a bid from a fourth fertilizer concern, Agrium. With consolidation in the sector so obviously frenzied, CF shareholders may wonder why the company appears so eager to be a buyer instead of trying to extract a large premium for itself.

 

Formidable Lobbyists

 

America’s big banks aren’t being broken up. Nor does it appear there will be strict new limits on their activities. And while lenders may have to cope with a new consumer regulator, its power and scope is shrinking daily. Surely if there is any group from Wall Street deserving of fat bonuses this year, it’s the industry’s lobbyists in Washington.

 

The banks smartly recognized regulatory reform was inevitable after the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. So rather than try to stop it, the industry helped mold and massage any changes into a shape it could tolerate. And the latest indications from Congress suggest they’ve been successful.

 

Wall Street’s crew on K Street — lobbyists’ answer to advertising’s Madison Avenue — has been formidable. It includes the American Bankers Association, the Financial Services Roundtable, the Financial Services Forum and the United States Chamber of Commerce. They set their sights early on defeating a White House proposal to create a powerful and independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

 

The lobbyists have successfully scaled back various iterations of the plan. One would make the regulator part of the Treasury Department, and force it to consult with existing watchdogs before imposing restrictions.

 

Republican alternatives are even weaker, alternately housing a consumer unit either in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Federal Reserve. Expect a diluted compromise between diluted compromises — just as seems the case for the Volcker Rule idea to limit proprietary trading by banks.

 

The Independent Community Bankers of America, an advocate for smaller lenders, helped force large banks to prefund any future possible bailouts. And the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, which represents brokerage firms, along with the insurance industry, derailed strict Senate regulation of retail investment brokers.

 

There is one mark against the lobbyists. The International Monetary Fund recently found that banks that spent more to influence policy over the last decade were more likely to take more securitization risks, have larger loan defaults and experience sharper stock falls during crucial points of the crisis. The lobbyists may have to tackle that to earn next year’s bonus.

 

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Weed killer ‘castrates’ frogs, study claims

 

(CNN) – Atrazine, a weed killer widely used in the Midwestern United States and other agricultural areas of the world, can chemically "castrate" male frogs and turn some into females, according to a new study.

 

New research suggests the herbicide may be a cause of amphibian declines around the globe, said biologists at the University of California-Berkeley, who conducted the study. The findings are being published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Researchers found that long-term exposure to low levels of atrazine -- 2.5 parts per billion of water -- emasculated three-quarters of laboratory frogs and turned one in 10 into females. Scientists believe the pesticide interferes with endocrine hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone.

 

"The effects of atrazine in the long term have been shown to demasculinize or chemically castrate [frogs], combined with complete feminization of some animals," said lead researcher Tyrone B. Hayes, a biologist and herpetologist at the University of Berkeley.

 

"We need to reconfigure how we evaluate chemicals in the environment and the impact on environmental health and public health," he said.

 

Hayes found that 10 percent of the exposed genetic male frogs developed into functional females who copulated with unexposed males and produced viable eggs. The other 90 percent of the exposed male frogs expressed decreased libido, reduced sperm count and decreased fertility, among other findings.

 

Syngenta, a Swiss company that is the largest manufacturer of atrazine, has challenged the validity of Hayes' study.

 

"We haven't seen these kinds of responses that Dr. Hayes reports," said Keith Solomon, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, who has served as a consultant to Syngenta. "Some of these studies are poorly conducted and are entirely inconsistent."

 

The new study's implications for atrazine's effect on humans is unclear. But some scientists are concerned the herbicide may pose risks to reproductive health.

 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year launched a comprehensive evaluation of the herbicide to investigate any possible links between atrazine and cancer and to determine whether new restrictions are necessary. The EPA's current safety standard for atrazine in drinking water is three ppb.

 

The European Union banned atrazine in 2004 because it was consistently showing up in levels higher than 0.1 ppb -- its threshold for harmful chemicals -- in drinking water.

 

Farmers in the United States continue to use atrazine on crops.

 

The herbicide has been a long-standing favorite among corn, sorghum and sugarcane farmers because it is affordable and can eliminate the need for tilling the soil. Tens of millions of pounds of atrazine are used each year in the United States. Syngenta estimates that 60 million pounds were used during 2008, most of it on corn.

 

A 2006 study by the U.S. Geological Survey found atrazine in approximately 75 percent of stream water and about 40 percent of all groundwater samples from agricultural areas tested between 1992 and 2001.

 

The Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy organization, released a report in August 2009 that documented spikes of atrazine in the water supplies of Midwestern and Southern agricultural areas where the pesticide is primarily applied.

 

Home or municipal carbon filters can remove atrazine from water but some water filtration systems in small towns are not equipped to filter out atrazine. Water systems in a handful of states have sued atrazine's manufacturers in an effort to force them to pay for removing the pesticide from drinking water.

 

Tim Pastoor, principal scientist for Syngenta, told CNN that the EPA's current levels for atrazine are safe and that "there is political pressure to get atrazine re-examined."

 

"Residues of atrazine and all our crop protection products in water do not pose a health risk for consumers," Syngenta says on its Web site.

 

The company also says "ongoing laboratory and field research by university scientists shows that atrazine has no effect on the survival, growth or limb deformities of frogs."

 

But Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the NRDC's health and environment program, believes the research by Hayes and the other University of California, Berkeley, biologists is valid.

 

Sass also is skeptical of Syngenta's claims.

 

"Their tactic is to flood the scientific literature with negative data to negate the other studies," she said. "It's only their studies that show that atrazine is not an endocrine disrupter."

 

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Add GM maize in food, feed to EU OK list

 

(AP via Yahoo! Finance) – BRUSSELS -- The EU on Tuesday approved the cultivation of a genetically modified potato and the use of three types of altered maize in food and feed production, saying they don't pose a health risk.

 

The go-ahead for the Amflora potato -- developed by Ludwigshafen, Germany-based BASF SE -- marked the first green light in 12 years to grow a genetically modified food in the European Union.

 

Critics accused the European Commission of pandering to corporate interests at the expense of public health.

 

The EU executive also approved the marketing of three genetically modified maize products from Monsanto Co. of St. Louis, Missouri for food and feed purposes, but not their cultivation.

 

EU Public Health Commissioner John Dalli said the EU executive is only guided by science in approving genetically modified organisms, an issue of fierce debate in Europe.

 

"Responsible innovation will be my guiding principle when dealing with innovative technologies," he said at a news conference. He added there were no scientific reasons to delay the approvals.

 

While widely used in the United States, genetically modified foods face opposition in Europe where critics see them as a health and environmental risk. Opposition is strong in Austria, Italy, Hungary, Greece and France.

 

Some EU countries ban them -- fearing their seeds will unintentionally spread and alter the natural surroundings -- others don't.

 

The EU head office accepts that ambiguity which erodes the notion of equal access to the entire 27-nation EU market.

 

Martin Haeusling, a Green EU Parliament member, said Dalli showed "flagrant support for industry interests" adding 70 percent of EU consumers oppose genetically manipulated food. "There are serious concerns about an Amflora gene that is resistant to antibiotics," he added.

 

Heike Moldenhauer, a spokesperson for the Friends of the Earth Europe environmental group, said the EU decision "puts profit before people ... There are clear health concerns surrounding this GM potato."

 

The Italian government also objected. "We are against the decision ... that grants the permission to cultivate a genetically modified potato," Italian Agriculture Minister Luca Zaia said in a statement.

 

The German government said the Amflora potato will be grown in eastern Germany but not on an industrial scale.

 

Amflora and the three genetically modified maize varieties had already been approved by the European Food Safety Authority.

 

The first approval request for the Amflora dates back to 2003. Dalli said the potato will produce starch for paper production to help save "raw materials, energy, water and oil based chemicals."

 

He approved the three maize varieties after EU governments failed to come to an agreement effectively leaving the decision to the EU executive.

 

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You got your rain, now what’s your problem?

 

(thestate.com) – For nearly a decade, South Carolina farmers have moaned about how the lack of rainfall has hurt their business.

 

This extremely wet winter, however, some of the same folks are fretting that they can't get into saturated fields to harvest winter crops or prepare for spring planting.

 

"People I talk to say, 'You farmers were praying for rain. What are you praying for now?'" said state Agriculture Commissioner Hugh Weathers. "'We're praying for moderation."

 

Farmers didn't get moderation this winter. (For statistical purposes, meteorologists consider December through February to be winter.) Instead, Columbia received 15.37 inches of rain during those three months, 3.91 inches more than normal. Average daily temperatures also were about 4 degrees below normal.

 

The winter rainfall extremes were more telling in Greenville - 6.27 inches above normal - and Charleston - 9.08 inches above normal.

 

The downpours seemed to have been spaced out so the surface soil never dries out.

 

"Up until recently, it seemed we could only work a day or two each week in the fields," said Charles Wingard at Lexington County vegetable grower Walter P. Rawl & Sons. "Recently, we're up to two or three days a week."

 

In other portions of the state, heavy equipment sank into the wet fields, delaying the fall soybean harvest, which snowballed into delaying winter wheat planting. With winter statistics still being compiled, Weathers expects the state to have the lowest winter wheat harvest in decades.

 

At farms where winter vegetables are harvested by hand, the cold weather has stunted growth, reducing yield, Wingard said.

 

That could hinder the state's economic recovery. Roughly a quarter of S.C. land is in farms, and crops alone - excluding livestock and forest products - brought in almost $800 million in 2006.

 

Now, farmers are struggling to get equipment into fields in time to apply nitrogen before spring planting.

 

"If it were to stop raining today, we might lose only a week or two of spring corn," Weathers said. "But it doesn't look like it's going to stop."

 

The 90-day forecast from the federal Climate Prediction Center calls for above-average rainfall and below-average temperatures in South Carolina. Whether the pattern continues into the summer depends in part on the duration of the El Nino effect, caused by warmer than normal ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific.

 

Some farmers do reap benefits from the wetter, colder El Nino winters. The extreme cold snap in early January was timed right to start the growth of juicy peaches. Also,, irrigation ponds will be full heading into warm weather for the first time in nearly a decade.

 

But irrigation is far from a priority these days. Weathers spoke with a fellow cattle farmer in Saluda County last week who said his feed wagon got stuck, not in a low-lying field, but at the crown of a hill.

 

Wingard said S.C. farmers this winter are rediscovering the truth of an old saying:

 

"Dry weather will wear you out; wet weather will kill you quickly."

 

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