" I heard it through the AgLine"

March 24, 2010

 

 

·        Food safety reform expected to take center stage

·        Oregon scientists battle new crop insect menace

·        World’s thirstiest countries left high and dry

·        Aussies successful with silicon fungicide spray

·        Last Supper helpings get ‘supersized’ over time

 

 

Food safety reform expected to take center stage

 

(FoodNavigator.com) – Now that Congress has finally reached a conclusion on health care reform, could food safety reform be a little closer? Director of food safety solutions at DNV Kathy Wybourn thinks so.

 

The Food Safety Enhancement Act passed the House in July, while its companion bill in the Senate, the Food Safety Modernization Act, passed unanimously through the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee back in November. Since then, it has been awaiting a full hearing in the Senate, and some commentators have said the delay has been exacerbated by other big ticket items being debated in Congress.

 

But Wybourn said that legislation is expected to be on the President’s desk by the summer.

 

She told FoodNavigator-USA.com: “We need to change something. We can’t keep seeing the same thing over and over.”

 

The US food industry has been subject to a spate of food safety recalls, including the ongoing hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP) recall, and the peanut product recall that involved thousands of products last year, after salmonella-tainted peanuts sickened hundreds and killed nine. Calls from industry to update food safety laws have intensified as consumer confidence in food companies has gone down and recall costs have mounted.

 

Wybourn said: “I think the laws need to be updated, modernized to current times, and they haven’t. But I don’t think it’s going to be Washington alone.”

 

Standardizing food safety

 

While she supports granting the FDA additional powers, Wybourn is also a strong advocate of standardized food safety practices and checks across the food industry, led by industry.

 

“It’s getting everybody aligned with food safety,” she said, adding: “Don’t fight standardization: it’s necessary.”

 

The seriousness of problems with the US food safety system was underscored earlier this month, when a report showed that the United States was among the top five worst offenders for food safety incidents in the world – alongside China, Turkey, Iran and Spain.

 

Wybourn said she thought most Americans would be surprised to find the United States on the list.

 

“I think the focus is on imports into the US,” she said. “…The perception from consumers is that imports are less safe than domestic food, but I think it’s a perception and I don’t know if it’s supported by stats.”

 

Of course, imported foods do pose food safety risks, and it is impossible for FDA officials to inspect all foreign facilities, but as the Plos One report showed, the United States also has its own food safety issues to deal with.

 

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Oregon scientists battle new crop insect menace

 

(The Oregonian) PORTLAND — It's a tiny fruit fly with an exotic name and a taste for some of Oregon's most valuable crops. And since its surprise and destructive appearance last August, the state's leading entomologists have been engaged in a frantic, crash course to find it, understand it and control it.

 

First found in Oregon late last summer, the spotted wing Drosophila has emerged as the most serious insect threat to high-value fruit and berry crops. It's too late, experts say, to wipe it out.

 

The spotted wing Drosophila — Drosophila suzukii, to be formal — is probably here to stay. Its arrival slams home the hard truth about the risk that accompanies international trade and travel. The more goods and people cross borders, the more likely that invasive pests will come along for the ride.

 

The spotted wing is a native of Asia — Japan's farmers have battled it since 1916 — that appeared in California in 2008 and quickly migrated to Oregon and Washington.

 

Named for the distinctive spot at the tip of males' wings, the fly is unusual because it attacks ripe and ripening fruit. Most fruit flies go after overripe or damaged produce.

 

The female, equipped with an unusual serrated-edge ovipositor, cuts into the skin and deposits one to three eggs. The eggs poke a pair of tiny breathing tubes through the surface and feed on the fruit from the inside as they develop into maggots. Within a few days, healthy fruit collapses into a gooey mess.

 

Katy Coba, director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture, calls it the "Dracula" fruit fly. "It's so new that we're trying not to panic, but we're very, very concerned," she says.

 

With good reason. West Coast farmers produce 76 percent of the nation's raspberries, blackberries, strawberries and cherries. California researchers estimate that a 20 percent damage rate would cost West Coast farmers $511 million in lost crop value, including $31.4 million in Oregon.

 

One peach grower in Marion County says damage to his late-variety peaches was nearly 100 percent, causing him to shut down his orchard 10 days early and costing him 20 to 30 percent of the revenue he normally expects.

 

Within weeks of confirming the fly's presence in Benton County last summer, researchers determined it had spread to 14 other counties, from Jackson County in southern Oregon, up the Willamette Valley to Portland and east up the Columbia Gorge to Hood River, Wasco and Umatilla counties. It was found in blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, cherries, peaches, plums and grapes.

 

"You name the fruit, it will attack it — that's the big problem," says Helmuth Rogg, supervisor of the state's pest management division.

 

Wine grape growers sustained minor damage last year, but most of the crop was harvested by the time the fly emerged, says Chad Vargas, vineyard manager for Adelsheim Vineyard in Newberg. Vineyards will be have to vigilant this year, as grapes are a likely host for the fly to breed in, he says.

 

"There will be an industry-wide effort in trapping to help monitor the thing," Vargas says.

 

The flies live only a couple weeks but are capable of producing 10 generations per season. The females are busy; one raised for study at a U.S. Department of Agriculture lab in Corvallis laid 160 eggs in a single day.

 

"This particular pest is so prolific, so abundant, there's no way to get rid of it anymore. So we have to deal with it," Rogg says.

 

California came to the same conclusion. By the time it was detected there, "eradication was deemed impossible," researchers wrote in 2009.

 

Researchers and other officials believe the fly came to Oregon in infested fruit, probably from California, which in turn got it from somewhere else. While international agreements require various inspections and treatment of fresh fruit exports, and travelers between states are supposed to surrender fruit at the border, the "rigorousness of inquiry and enforcement" remains a variable, says Scott Goddin, a U.S. Commerce Department official in Portland.

 

The flies, and their impact, are snowballing.

 

Florida officials reported finding the fruit fly shortly after Oregon did last summer. In February, the European Plant Protection Organization issued an alert for the bug, saying it had been found in Italy.

 

Australia recently warned that imported Oregon fruit must be fumigated with methyl bromide, and it wants proof that the treatment will kill spotted wing Drosophila. Some farmers may buy crop insurance to protect against damage this summer.

 

While standard insecticides will kill the fly, that means additional cost for growers and increased scrutiny by consumers. And certified organic growers are left in a lurch: they don't use sprays that conventional growers do, and it's not clear what will be effective for them.

 

Meanwhile, bee hive owners who provide pollination service up and down the West Coast are concerned that an increased spray regimen will wipe out their bees.

 

Against that backdrop, a team of researchers and entomologists in Corvallis are pressing to understand and outwit the fruit fly.

 

It's research in a rush, carried out in sophisticated fly-rearing cabinets with light and temperature controls and outdoors with traps jury-rigged from plastic soda containers, a slosh of apple cider vinegar and sticky fly paper.

 

The team, drawn from Oregon State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is trying to determine how well spotted wing Drosophila survived the winter, predict when it will emerge this spring and learn about its food preference, reproduction rates and life cycles.

 

Key team members are Amy Dreves, an OSU Extension entomologist, Vaughn Walton from the university's Department of Horticulture and USDA researchers Denny Bruck and Jana Lee.

 

Mark Bolda, a University of California-Davis berry specialist who was the first to identify spotted wing Drosophila on the U.S. mainland in 2008, says Oregon growers will do well to conduct a three-prong attack.

 

"Irradication, we can't do — it's so widespread," he says, but growers should monitor their fields with traps, use insecticidal sprays to knock down the fly population and clean their fields of fruit that might become egg hosts.

 

Bolda has met with the OSU-based researchers and is optimistic that they'll emerge with a solid control program.

 

"Those are good people," he says. "That Oregon group is impressive."

 

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World’s thirstiest countries left high and dry

 

(The Washington Post) – The world's most water-deprived countries are also receiving some of the least help from the World Bank to improve conditions, according to a study that the bank's independent evaluators released on Monday. The study said water shortages are being felt in more than 40 countries and are at risk of getting worse.

 

About a third of the bank's total lending -- more than $54 billion -- was linked to water shortages between 1997 and 2007, but there was little correlation between the flow of funds and the depth of a country's water problems, according to the report from the bank's Independent Evaluation Group.

 

Ethiopia, Haiti and Niger, for example, all ranked at the bottom of a Water Poverty Index analysts used to measure the availability of water in a country against demand. All three had received only about $20 per capita in World Bank funding for water projects -- compared with the more than $140 per capita provided to Guyana, a country classified as "water-rich."

 

There is "no clear relationship between Bank water lending and water stress" in a country, the report noted, outlining the mismatch as one of several areas the bank needs to address in helping the less developed and developing world tackle water shortages that are expected to grow severe in coming decades.

 

Within five years, the number of people without access to clean drinking water may reach 800 million, and the number lacking basic sanitation could hit 1.8 billion, the IEG said in a statement accompanying the release of the report.

 

Jamal Saghir, the bank's director of energy, transport and water, said the evaluation report overlooked what he described as a rapid shift in the bank's priorities toward water projects overall and particularly in funding for the nations facing the worst problems.

 

He said that bank funding for water projects had tripled since 2003 and that about 60 percent of the funding for active projects was going to water-poor nations.

 

"We've been moving on this," Saghir said.

 

The study found that although the World Bank in general was managing water projects better than in the past and completing them successfully, it needed to do more on basic issues such as sanitation and help countries control demand by charging appropriate tariffs to farmers and other heavy users.

 

The issue is a politically sensitive one, particularly in nations that subsidize the water rates paid by farmers to sustain sometimes inefficient domestic farming operations and protect the associated jobs.

 

"We are not saying that in Bank projects the poorest farmers have to cover the full cost of the water they are using," said Ronald Parker, the lead author of the report. But "we would like more frankness on this topic. . . . Countries have begun a process of rationalization that in the way they use water, there are tradeoffs to make."

 

Bank analysts, he noted, are preparing more direct assessments of water policy, so that countries can understand how a farm irrigation program in one part of the country might affect the water supply in a distant urban area -- and the costs involved in each.

 

The misalignment of bank funding and water needs is not only the bank's fault, said Parker and Vinod Thomas, head of the Independent Evaluation Group, an arm of the World Bank that assesses the effectiveness of its programs. Countries set their own priorities when deciding what projects to fund and may have different ideas about what is most urgent.

 

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Aussies successful with silicon fungicide spray

 

(abc.net) – Researchers say they have found a way to reduce the amount of fungicides used on crops in north Queensland.

 

They are encouraging farmers to use a silicon spray on their crops as an environmentally healthier alternative to pesticide.

 

Plant pathologist Chrys Akem from the Department of Primary Industries (DPI) says a researchers have developed a variety of crops such as squash, cucumber and pumpkins that are resilient to fungus.

 

He says reducing fungicide use is not only good for the environment, it will also save farmers money.

 

"Sprays are quite expensive and when you use them very regularly, the fungus try to fight back and has long resistance so that with time, even though you spray, you don't get any control," he said.

 

"So basically our study was to look at other alternatives that we could use to reduce the number of fungicides we use."

 

He says a recent study found bugs are deterred by the silicon when it is sprayed on the plants.

 

He says the substance also acts to strengthen the plant once it is absorbed.

 

"[Silicon] basically protects the plants, because silicon is liquid formulation," he said.

 

"Silicon particles are like sand and the bugs, when they come and land on the leaf they find it very difficult to chew when they have the grainy 'sand' embedded in the leaf tissue, so that's how effective it is."

 

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Last Supper helpings get ‘supersized’ over time

 

(Los Angeles Times) – The Christian faith holds several acts of "super-sizing" to be miracles accomplished by Jesus Christ -- a handful of fish and loaves of bread expanded to feed thousands; a wedding feast running low on wine suddenly awash in the stuff. Now a new study of portion expansion puts Jesus once more at the center.

 

In a bid to uncover the roots of super-sized American fare, a pair of sibling scholars has turned to an unusual source: 52 artists' renderings of the New Testament's Last Supper.

 

Their findings, published online Tuesday in the International Journal of Obesity, indicate that serving sizes have been marching heavenward for 1,000 years.

 

"I think people assume that increased serving sizes, or 'portion distortion,' is a recent phenomenon," said Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and author of "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think." "But this research indicates that it's a general trend for at least the last millennium."

 

To reach their conclusion, Wansink and his brother Craig, a biblical scholar at Virginia Wesleyan College, analyzed 52 depictions of the meal the Wansinks call "history's most famous dinner party" painted between the year 1000 and the year 2000.

 

Using the size of the diners' heads as a basis for comparison, the Wansinks used computers to compare the sizes of the plates in front of the apostles, the food servings on those plates and the bread on the table. Assuming that heads did not increase in size during the second millennium after the birth of Christ, the researchers used this method to gauge how much serving sizes increased.

 

And increase they did.

 

Over the course of the millennium, the Wansinks found that the entrees depicted on the plates laid before Jesus' followers grew by about 70%, and the bread by 23%.

 

As entree portions rose, so too did the size of the plates -- by 65.6%.

 

The apostles depicted during the Middle Ages appear to be the ascetics they are said to have been. But by 1498, when Leonardo da Vinci completed his masterpiece, the party was more lavishly fed. Almost a century later, the Mannerist painter Jacobo Tintoretto piled the food on the apostles' plates still higher.

 

New York University nutrition researcher Lisa R. Young called the Wansink study fun. But as the author of "The Portion Teller," a history of portion size through the 20th century, she also pointed to the three decades that ended the millennium as a "tipping point" for humankind.

 

There is scant evidence that the body mass index of people in developed societies soared into unhealthy ranges for most of the 1,000 years studied, Young said. But there is little doubt, she added, that that changed in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s -- coincidentally, when portion sizes began a dramatic run-up.

 

The Wansinks, however, suggest that portion growth may have a provenance far older than industrial farming and the economics of takeout food.

 

Instead, they suggest, it's a natural consequence of "dramatic socio-historic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food" over the millennium that started in the year 1000 A.D.

 

"The contemporary discovery of increasing food portions and availability may be little more than 1,000-year-old wine in a new bottle," the Wansinks wrote.

 

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