" I heard it through the AgLine"

March 17, 2011

 

 

·        Nuclear crisis sparks fear over Japanese food

·        ‘Strange’ parasite decimating bee populations

·        Court dismisses Dole-Nicaragua lawsuit

·        AFBF: EPA Chesapeake regs threaten ag

·        Oregon growers planting giant cane for fuel

 

 

Nuclear crisis sparks fear over Japanese food

 

Hong Kong, China (CNN) -- Governments are taking precautions and conducting thorough inspections of Japanese food, which is popular worldwide and available at high-end stores around Asia, and specialty shops in Europe and the United States.

 

Hong Kong's Center for Food Safety has conducted radiation tests on at least 34 samples of fresh vegetables, meat and fish from Japan. The center reports all test results were satisfactory.

 

"As far as radiation is concerned, I think the most at-risk articles are those fresh products, perhaps dairy products, fresh fruits and vegetables," Dr. York Chow, Hong Kong's Secretary for Food and Health, said earlier this week.

 

"In case we detect anything, of course, we will ban those products from Hong Kong."

 

Thailand's government is focusing on Japanese imports of meat, milk, fish and seaweed.

 

A radiation physicist from the Office of Atoms for Peace has told CNN the agency will work with Thailand's health ministry to do random checks of imported food from Japan.

 

India on Tuesday also ordered radiation tests of Japanese food at its ports and airports. Only food originating from Japan after March 11 will be tested.

 

Tokyo resident Paul Yang said his family is not changing its eating habits.

 

"I am not worried about the safety of Japanese produce," the father of two said. "The majority of farm produce and agricultural products come from warmer areas, therefore farther away from the Fukushima area (where the nuclear reactor is)."

 

"Also, many of the products are labeled with their origin of production so we would know if it is from Fukushima. Right now, the radiation level within 20 to 30 kilometers (12 miles to 18.6 miles) of Fukushima is high, but as soon as you move away from the origin of radiation, the effects of it fall dramatically," Yang said.

 

"The closest location that produces significant amounts (of fresh produce) for Tokyo, for example, is Chiba or Ibaraki prefectures, which is approximately 150 to 200 kilometers (93 miles to 124 miles) from Fukushima."

 

While Yang is not worried, the perception of possibly tainted produce is already having a knock-on effect.

 

"We're already hearing talk in our office about women stopping to buy Japanese cosmetics," said Kirby Daley, a senior strategist of Newedge Group. "We're talking about Japanese food imports being stopped and we're not going to be trusting the sushi."

 

Daley told CNN's World Business Today program that the talks will affect a weak economy.

 

"These are all anecdotal, but this is what will weigh on the economy for a long time," Daley said. "And the economy is not that strong to start with."

 

Peter McGuire, an independent market strategist based in Australia, says it is too early to say whether the quality of Japanese food will change because many products shipped before the earthquake are still on store shelves.

 

"We just have to see the severity of this. It's so hard to speculate," he said.

 

One item that's selling out: Japanese baby formula.

 

In Hong Kong, many parents bought extra boxes of the formula manufactured before Friday's earthquake and tsunami.

 

Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director of Center for Science in the Public Interest in the United States, said she is not worried about Japan's food safety for two reasons.

 

"Japan is a net importer of food and (it) has one of the best food safety systems in the world," she said in an email to CNN.

 

De Waal also compared the Fukushima situation with the 1986 Chernobyl accident and its impact on food.

 

"Following the 1986 Chernobyl accident, the U.S. tested nearly 8,900 samples of both animal and nonanimal based imported foods coming from the affected area over a five year period," De Waal said. "They found 1.4% (of imported foods) were contaminated above the regulatory limits, with the majority of these being in the animal products side. They also tested samples of food from U.S. Embassies in the region and found the highest numbers of positive samples in vegetables (both leafy and nonleafy), some fruit and spices."

 

De Waal described Chernobyl as a "much worse disaster, as the cloud went over a large agricultural area of Europe."

 

"Therefore, findings are illustrative of a worse case scenario, not the current situation involving food exports from Japan."

 

She cautions that the most vulnerable agricultural sectors during a nuclear emergency are dairy and vegetables.

 

"It is important that all food animals in the affected areas be sheltered along with their food and water sources," DeWaal said.

 

Cooking or boiling radiation-contaminated food does not make the food safe to eat, she said.

 

Most experts seem to agree that the biggest confidence-builder is Japan's strict food regulations.

 

Japan's food safety standards are "one of the highest in the world," said Jean-Yves Chow, a senior food and agribusiness research analyst at Rabobank International.

 

However, Chow said, "In food safety, zero risk does not exist."

 

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‘Strange’ parasite decimating bee populations

 

(LiveScience.com) – First they were fungi, then protists — and now they are fungi again. Once thought to be primitive, it now seems they have evolved backward, becoming simpler rather than more complex.

 

Microsporidia — single-celled parasites that include bugs implicated in the disappearance of honey bees — are strange. So far, about 1,300 species have been formally described, according to Patrick Keeling, a professor at the University of British Columbia who studies them. They are known to infect fish, birds, insects and even us, and Keeling only expects to see their ranks grow.

 

"There are probably as many microsporidia as there are animals," Keeling said. "We haven't found them in corals or sponges yet, but I don't think anyone is actively looking."

 

Evolution of an oddity

 

The first microsporidian identified was found infecting silkworms. In 1870, Louis Pasteur, the French chemist who invented the process of pasteurization, blamed it for a disease that had decimated the industry. Initially, they were classified as fungi, then renamed protists, a catch-all group for complex micro-organisms. As protists, they spent the better part of the 20th century in what Keeling refers to as a "grab bag," an unnatural group containing single-celled parasites later reclassified as animals and green algae. [10 Most Diabolical and Disgusting Parasites]

 

Members of microsporidia appeared to lack mitochondria — the energy-producing centers found in complex cells — and in 1983, this inspired scientists to propose that they were actually very primitive organisms that had evolved before mitochondria appeared among complex cells, Keeling wrote in 2009 in the journal PLoS Pathogens. 

 

But new molecular evidence eventually challenged this, culminating in the discovery of tiny relics of mitochondria, called mitosomes, within microsporidia, according to Keeling. Rather than being primitive, it seems these organisms have become simpler — one could say more streamlined — than their ancestors. As a result of the new information, the tiny parasites were also, eventually, reinstated as fungi, which are complex organisms that cannot generate their own food, unlike plants. The group includes yeast, mold and toadstools.

 

"We know they are somehow related to fungi — there is a bit of an argument about whether they are fungi properly or just close relatives to fungi," Keeling said. "Fungi are not simple organisms; they are very complex organisms that are very closely related to animals."

 

In recent decades, microsporidia have inspired interest for another reason.

 

"It really wasn't known to be a problem for people until the AIDS crisis, then they found patients were dying of this diarrhea that was untreatable," said Emily Troemel, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego.

 

Microsporidia only grow inside a host organism's cells, making them much trickier to study than other pathogens, like most bacteria, which can be grown in a petri dish and manipulated. Troemel's lab is getting around this problem by looking at transparent roundworms whose guts have been infected by a microsporidian dubbed Nematocida parisii, or "nematode killer from Paris," because it was discovered in roundworms found in Parisian compost pits.

 

Radical simplicity

 

About four microsporidian genomes — their entire genetic blueprints — have been published, and Troemel is involved in coordinating an effort, based at the Broad Institute in Massachusetts, to sequence 11 more.

 

One thing is clear — microsporidia have tiny genomes. The first species sequenced frequently infects rabbits, and contained only 2,000 genes, half the number contained by the familiar bacterium, E. coli, which resides in our guts.

 

"The whole genome was just one big surprise. It is so small and so highly compacted and there was an amazing reduction in the number of genes," Keeling said.

 

The genetic code for a microsporidian responsible for human infections that cause diarrhea, Enterocytozoon bieneusi, contains another startling simplification. This parasite does not have any genes needed to convert sugars into energy, a fundamental process that allows cells to feed themselves.

 

It is tempting to compare stripped-down microsporidia with viruses, which, outside their host cell, are nothing but inert genetic material wrapped in a protein coat. (Viruses are also widely considered nonliving.) Keeling balks at this comparison, saying that microsporidia can be deceptive, but with E. bieneusi, the comparison gets a little warmer.

 

"No other organism is known to completely lack any form of energy metabolism except for viruses, if you consider them to be 'alive,'" he said. To feed itself, this microsporidian imports chemical energy, called ATP, from its host cell.

 

Microsporidia have an appropriately dramatic technique for infecting a cell. Their spores, the only stage to survive outside a host cell, have a thick, rigid wall with a tube coiled up inside it. In response to cues that are poorly understood, the spore ruptures its wall and the tube shoots out like a harpoon, and pokes into the future host cell. The remaining contents of the spore, including its command center, the nucleus, are then pumped through the tube into the host cell.

 

The most famous victims

 

The mysterious disappearances of honey bees began in the fall of 2006 in Florida and spread. Beekeepers found their colonies suddenly empty, except for the queen and a few workers, with no traces of dead bees. In the years since it was named, colony collapse disorder (CCD) has continued to devastate the insects crucial to pollinating crops in North America.

 

Jerry Bromenshenk, a research professor at the University of Montana, and colleagues have linked vanishing colonies in North America with a virus-fungal tag team. The virus is insect iridescent virus, named for the effect it creates in infected tissues, and the fungi is Nosema ceranae, a microsporidian. In a study published in October 2010 in the journal PLoS ONE, the team described finding this combo in bees from failing colonies, and by testing both pathogens in bees, they found that together, they were more lethal than if they infected bees separately.

 

Until 2007, N. ceranae infections had only been reported in Asian honey bees, not among the Western honey bees used in North America and elsewhere. The microsporidian has now been discovered in old samples going back to the 1990s, but it's possible the pathogen has been around even longer, according to Bromenshenk and colleague Colin Henderson, of The University of Montana College of Technology.

 

N. ceranae is now found nearly everywhere honey bees are kept, Bromenshenk said. He cautioned, however, that CCD does not appear to be behind most problems with honey bees elsewhere in the world.

 

Honey bees and other pollinators worldwide are facing a plethora of challenges: habitat alteration, urban sprawl, pollution, chemicals used in agriculture and the arrival of foreign species. "So there are lots of new pressures on these insects that could be behind some of the problems that are being seen," Bromenshenk said.

 

It's not the only microsporidia to infect honey bees. For instance, Nosema apis infects honey bees and has been around for a long time, although it has not been connected with CCD. Another microsporidian, Nosema bombi, has been found in elevated levels among declining species of bumble bees.

 

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Court dismisses Dole-Nicaragua lawsuit

 

(fruitnet.com) – Dole Food Company has announced that the Los Angeles Superior Court has issued its final order in a case brought about by Nicaraguans claiming to have been banana workers on Dole-contracted farms in the country during the 1970s.

 

The lawsuit, Tellez vs. Dole Food Company, related to claims by the plaintiffs that they suffered from sterility as a result of exposure to the agricultural chemical Dibromo Chloropropane (DBCP) in the 1970s, before the chemical's banning in 1977.

 

The Statement of Decision formally vacated an earlier judgment and dismissed with prejudice the lawsuit as a result of the court's finding that the 'Tellez' judgment, made in October 2008, was the product of 'a fraud on the court and extrinsic fraud perpetrated against defendants by (plaintiff's lawyers) and their agents'.

 

According to the court ruling, the fraud took the form of the plaintiff's lawyers coaching their clients to lie about working on banana farms, forged work certificates to create the appearance that they had worked on Dole-contracted farms, and faked lab results to create the impression that the Nicaraguan clients were sterile.

 

In addition, the court concluded that plaintiff's lawyers and their agents had tampered with witnesses, threatened them and had carried out other fraudulent action.

 

The statement formalized Judge Victoria Chaney's 15 July 2010 oral ruling, and was issued after the court held more than 20 hearings as part of a 'year-long evidentiary process' that took in the sworn testimony of 27 protected witnesses describing the fraud, heard fact witnesses and experts and reviewed the more than 400 exhibits submitted by the parties.

 

At issue in the process was the earlier US$1.58m judgment against Dole in favor of four of the original 12 Nicaraguan plaintiffs claiming sterility from DBCP exposure.

 

"The fraudulent claims in Tellez lacked any credibility whatsoever and, like other DBCP lawsuits, never should have been brought in the first place," said C. Michael Carter, Dole's executive vice-president and general counsel. "The written findings represent a tremendous effort by the Court to get to the right decision from the real facts in this case, despite every effort by plaintiffs to derail the process.

 

"There is simply no reliable scientific basis for alleged injuries from the agricultural field application of DBCP, and Tellez and other similar cases should never have been filed," reiterated Carter. "Despite that fact, Dole continues to seek a reasonable resolution to pending litigation and claims in the US and Latin America."  

 

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AFBF: EPA Chesapeake regs threaten ag

 

(AFBF) WASHINGTON, D.C. – America’s farmers and ranchers are being challenged by an onslaught of regulations, guidance and other requirements being issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to Carl Shaffer, president of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau.

 

In testimony today on behalf of the American Farm Bureau Federation before a House Agriculture subcommittee, Shaffer said that nowhere is the impact of EPA activity more obvious than in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, where EPA’s recently finalized Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) guidelines could push hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland out of production.

 

“EPA itself projects that roughly 20 percent of cropped land in the watershed (about 600,000 acres) will have to be removed from production and be converted to grassland or forest in order to achieve the required loading reductions,” said Shaffer, a member of the AFBF board and executive committee.

 

Shaffer said EPA’s over-reaching focus on agriculture is particularly troublesome because agriculture has worked successfully with the Agriculture Department to reduce its environmental impact on the Chesapeake Bay.

 

“Use of crop inputs is declining,” Shaffer said. “No-till farming has reduced soil erosion and resulted in more carbon being stored in the soil. Milk today is produced from far fewer cows. Nitrogen use efficiency has consistently improved. Farmers are proud that their environmental footprint is dramatically smaller today than it was 50 years ago, and we are committed to continuing this progress.”

 

Shaffer, a Columbia County (Pa.) green bean, corn and wheat farmer, said agriculture’s success in reducing nutrients in the Chesapeake Bay is well documented, but EPA has ignored the substantial effort and progress of recent years. A new report from USDA’s National Resource Conservation Service outlines the progress made by agriculture.

 

“EPA moved forward with an aggressive and unnecessarily inflexible new plan to regulate farming practices in the Chesapeake Bay watershed,” Shaffer said. “In the last two years, EPA has set in motion a significant number of new regulations that will fundamentally alter the face of agriculture, not just in the bay, but nationwide. These new regulations will determine how farmers raise crops and livestock and will increase the likelihood of expensive lawsuits filed by activist organizations.”

 

Shaffer warned that policies already in place or being considered by EPA will greatly extend federal control over crop farmers and livestock producers, regardless of their size or footprint.

 

“Farm Bureau believes that EPA is intentionally working to circumvent Congress’ deliberate decision to leave regulation of non-point sources to the states,” Shaffer said.

 

In his testimony, Shaffer said EPA’s “pollution diet” for the Chesapeake Bay unlawfully micromanages states, as well as the farmers, homeowners and businesses within the region by imposing specific pollutant “allocations” on activities such as farming and homebuilding, sometimes down to the level of individual operations.

 

“The federal Clean Water Act does not authorize such binding (EPA) allocations,” Shaffer testified. “Instead, the Clean Water Act requires that states decide how to improve water quality, including allocations of loading among sources, and to take into account economic and social impacts on local businesses and communities. EPA claims to be working in ‘partnership’ with the states,but by including its own ‘allocations’ in the TMDL, it is exercising control by unlawfully limiting the states’ flexibility to change and adapt their plans. We believe EPA should be held accountable to the laws that prescribe how it regulates production agriculture and that it should rely on sound science in its proceedings.”

 

AFBF and the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau recently filed suit challenging the EPA’s authority to implement its TMDL measure in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

 

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Oregon growers planting giant cane for fuel

 

(East Oregonian) – A handful of Morrow County, Ore., growers will plant giant cane, a fast-growing woody grass that Portland General Electric hopes will replace coal at the Boardman Power Plant, as early as the end of this month.

 

PGE is contracting with growers — including GreenWood Resources, which manages the poplar tree farm near Boardman — to produce between 100 and 250 acres, which will then go toward a test burn at the coal-fired plant next year.

 

However, a host of unanswered questions about giant cane remain, including whether it is safe to grow in Oregon and whether local growers can produce enough to keep the power plant running.

 

At a joint panel discussion last week, the Oregon State Weed Board and the Oregon Invasive Species Council wrestled with whether to label giant cane an invasive species.

 

California and other southern states consider giant cane a noxious weed because it spreads quickly and displaces native vegetation. It has no known biological predators.

 

The Oregon Department of Agriculture placed giant cane on a "watch list" of possible troublemakers in 2007. In its latest assessment, released last month, the ODA looked at giant cane again as a crop, not just a sparsely planted ornamental, and arrived at the same conclusion. Using a complex scoring system, the ODA determined giant cane garnered a middling score as an invasive weed. Among other reasons, giant cane has not so far spread in Oregon even though it is planted in gardens, and it does not produce seeds this far north.

 

PGE and Morrow County have agreed on a plan for controlling giant cane during the experimental growing phase. Giant cane can spread in wetlands and near waterways, for example, so those areas are prohibited from growing the plant.

 

Dave Pranger, the Morrow County weed control supervisor, has determined whether irrigated circles in the county are suitable for giant cane.

 

"From everything that I've been told ... if we stay within the guidelines of the control order, I don't see it as being a problem," he said.

 

Pranger added that, should giant cane stray from a circle, Roundup or another glyphosate herbicide will kill it.

 

Of possibly more concern, he said, is giant cane's potential as a competitor for other crops in the county. If giant cane works as a fuel, PGE will need a lot of it — more than 50,000 acres a year.

 

That will take many irrigated circles in Morrow and Umatilla counties, circles that now produce vegetables, corn and other crops. This is turn may reduce supply for local food processors.

 

PGE says giant cane is not meant to compete with high-value crops such as potatoes. Rather, it could be another rotational crop, such as alfalfa. Wayne Lei, PGE's director of research and development, said the company has no intention of harming Eastern Oregon's economy.

 

"Clearly, we want to be very sensible to the needs of the local farmers out there," he said.

 

Lei added that giant cane could preserve jobs at the Boardman Power Plant, which is scheduled to close in 2020, and add jobs at new torrefaction facilities. Giant cane must be torrefied, or dried, before PGE can burn it in the coal-fired plant.

 

The Hermiston Agricultural Research and Extension Center also is growing giant cane this spring, and will be part of a local giant cane advisory board. Should PGE's idea prove successful, it could turn the Boardman Power Plant into the largest biomass-fueled energy producer in the country.

 

Morrow County Judge Terry Tallman said he favors giving giant cane a try. But he expressed doubts as to whether local growers could produce enough. When asked whether the county would step in to protect food processors, he said no — the market should take care of itself.

 

"It ends up, ultimately, being a contract between PGE and the grower," he said. "If PGE can't meet market demands, they've got to go somewhere else or they've got to find another substance."

 

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