Brazil’s Congress is poised to approve a bill modifying labeling rules for genetically modified (GM) food. Under the new legislation, Brazil would continue to require that products be labeled so consumers can tell whether the food products and animal feed they buy contain over 1% genetically modified (GM) ingredients. But the measure, if approved, would no longer make it mandatory—as is the case now—that the labels of such products feature a “T” for transgenic, inside a yellow triangle. “[The yellow symbol] is associated with danger, which scares and confuses the consumers into thinking foods with transgenic ingredients are dangerous,” says Carlos Heinze, the congressman who authored the bill. “If they were dangerous, the National Biosafety Technical Commission [a regulatory body made up of...
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By 2050, production of arabica coffee, which is made from the smooth, expensive bean grown by millions of farmers in Latin America, will come under severe strain as a result of temperature rises of 2 to 2.5 degrees Celsius, according to a study issued by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and CGIAR, the global food research partnership. Arabica coffee, the world’s most coveted coffee variety, is a mainstay of local economies in large areas of Latin America, including the Central American nations and Mexico. Brazil and Colombia are among the world’s top producers; together with Vietnam and Indonesia, they supply 65% of the global arabica market. Over the next 35 years, however, heat surges related to global warming increasingly will impede the coffee...
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More than two months after hundreds of thousands of decomposing fish washed up on the beaches of Montevideo, Uruguay’s national capital, experts and everyday citizens are discussing the possible causes and implications of the event now known as “the fish crisis.” The dead fish covered Montevideo beaches and floated in the shallows fronting rocky areas. They also littered beaches in Canelones, which is east of Montevideo, and across the River Plate on the coast of Argentina’s Buenos Aires Province. In the first five days of cleanup work alone, some 200 metric tons of dead fish were collected along a 45-kilometer (28-mile) stretch of coastline from Montevideo to Canelones. The fish were of the same species—Brazilian menhaden (Brevoortia aurea). Abundant in the River...
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At last year’s United Nations climate summit in Lima, Peru, the European Union (EU) joined numerous countries in committing to halve tropical deforestation and helping the private sector eliminate, by 2020, the illegal clearing of woodlands in connection with the production of such commodities as palm oil, soy and beef. The pledge, contained in the New York Declaration of Forests, won praise as a step forward in the fight to prevent tropical forest loss, whose carbon releases account for at least 10% of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. But two new reports cast doubt on the EU’s ability to reach that goal. The reports, issued in March by Fern, a non-governmental organization that monitors EU policy on forests, say that over the...
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