Tag: food

Global Crop Prices Log Biggest Quarterly Jump Since Ukraine Invasion As Sticky Inflation Hits Grocery Bills

The Bloomberg Agriculture Spot Index (BCOMAGSP) posted its largest quarterly gain since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, as Black Sea disruptions, a crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, and mounting El Niño risks have formed what could be considered a perfect storm poised to drive food prices higher.

BCOMAGSP, which tracks 10 major crops including corn, soybeans, wheat, coffee, sugar, cotton, cocoa, and others, jumped 13% in the third quarter.

Beyond the Russia-Ukraine fighting and disruptions to grain shipments from the Black Sea region, the next big threat to the crop space is a strengthening El Niño, on track to rank among the strongest on record. This puts various types of crops in major growing belts around the world at risk and has sent harvest yields plunging. 

Already, India’s weakest monsoon season in a decade has added to concerns about harvests and food prices.

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Food Labeling Should Not Be This Hard

Knowing what’s in your food or whether what you’re about to eat comports with a medically prescribed diet can be difficult. There’s no reason why the government should make it harder. But that’s exactly what the United States Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration are doing when they prohibit companies from conveying information about FODMAP content on food labels.

Although not inherently harmful to most people, FODMAPs are a broad category of short-chain carbohydrates and sugar alcohols believed to trigger gastrointestinal symptoms in individuals living with irritable bowel syndrome and possibly several other functional gastrointestinal disorders.

In technical terms, FODMAPs are fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. More practically, people with IBS might want to be careful around most standard dairy items, honey, several cereals and artificial sweeteners, and a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and spices.

When consumed, these items can lead to luminal distension by causing increased amounts of water to enter the gastrointestinal tract and increased gas production by bacteria living in the colon. In some individuals with IBS and other functional gut disorders, this may trigger or exacerbate certain symptoms of their condition (e.g., intense pain and changes in intestinal motility), possibly through neurons in the gut responding abnormally to these physiological responses to FODMAP consumption. 

Hence, some patients with these conditions choose to limit their FODMAP intake or are encouraged to do so by their health care provider. Some go on strict low-FODMAP diets long term. Others temporarily do so for two to eight weeks then work to reintroduce specific FODMAP-containing foods into their diet to determine what they can tolerate. Broadly speaking, a lot of patients with relevant conditions find that the diet helps alleviate their symptoms.

Low-FODMAP diets though are generally considered sort of bland. They also tend to require a certain amount of time and education to be effective. Looking at a table of high- and low-FODMAP foods to make decisions about what to eat may not require an advanced degree in nutrition, but it is not difficult to imagine how having to break out such a table to evaluate every item you consider purchasing at the grocery store could become rather burdensome, especially if you’re new to the diet.

Fortunately, there are organizations and companies out there to help. Monash University, for example, has labs that both study the effectiveness of low-FODMAP diets and test food items for FODMAP content. Monash also offers several resources to help those on low-FODMAP diets make informed meal choices and works with companies that wish to offer low-FODMAP food options. If a company wants to submit a product to Monash for evaluation and Monash determines the item is low in FODMAP content, the company can then use a trademarked label to convey this information to consumers.

However, as one US company learned, even if one of the world’s leading FODMAP research facilities tells you your food is low in FODMAPs, this isn’t exactly the kind of thing you can just put on a label in the United States.

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Americans Were Hungry. FDR’s Government Was Killing Pigs to Raise Prices.

In 1933, about one-quarter of America’s workforce was unemployed. Hunger and malnutrition were widespread, families had lost homes and savings, and millions were trying to survive an economic catastrophe.

Franklin Roosevelt’s government responded to part of that crisis by paying farmers to destroy things Americans could use.

From the Library of Congress:

In a country with abundant resources, the largest force of skilled labor, and the most productive industry in the world, many found it hard to understand why the depression had occurred and why it could not be resolved. Moreover, it was difficult for many to understand why people should go hungry in a country possessing huge food surpluses. Blaming Wall Street speculators, bankers, and the Hoover administration, the rumblings of discontent grew mightily in the early 1930s. By 1932, hunger marches and small riots were common throughout the nation.

In June of 1932, nearly 20,000 World War I veterans from across the country marched on the United States Capitol to request early payment of cash bonuses for their military service that weren’t due to be paid until 1945. The marchers, who the organizers called the “Bonus Expeditionary Force” but who became widely known as the Bonus Army, spent several days in Washington, D.C., pressing their case, but a Congressional bill to pay the bonus was defeated. On July 28, U.S. troops and tanks commanded by General Douglas MacArthur dispersed the marchers and destroyed their makeshift camps in the city.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act rested on an economic theory that sounded tidy in Washington. Farm prices had collapsed because farmers were producing more than markets could absorb.

Reduce the supply, officials reasoned, and prices would rise, and higher prices would restore farm income.

Farmers desperately needed help. The question is what Washington chose to do with that desperation.

In the summer of 1933, the government launched an emergency hog program. Federal officials bought about 6.2 million young pigs and another 222,000 sows to remove them from future markets.

Pigs that couldn’t economically be processed for food were turned into grease and tankage. About 100 million pounds of edible pork did reach relief programs.

The USDA’s own history says officials expected the slaughter to provoke public outrage but considered the action necessary. Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace later acknowledged how disturbing the policy looked, describing the destruction of growing production as a grim consequence of an economy Washington believed had become badly unbalanced.

The administration understood exactly what it was doing.

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Mamdani Blindsided by Fresh Lawsuit — The NYC Mayor Now Has to Fight in Federal Court

New York City Zohran Mamdani will soon have to defend his socialist schemes in federal court.

That’s because of a fresh lawsuit that accuses his socialist supermarkets of “unfair competition” against local grocers.

The National Supermarket Association and two of its members – City Fresh Market in Harlem and C-Town Supermarket in the Bronx – are taking the mayor to court for violating antitrust laws. 

The litigants are filing their lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, which is not exactly renowned for its concern over civil rights.

The association’s president, Anthony Peña, told The Post that the millions of dollars going to the government-backed stores are a form of “unfair competition.”

“We are arguing that everyone has to be able to access these subsidies,” Peña said. “It’s not about us being afraid of competition. We are against unfair competition.”

The group represents 450 independent grocery stores in New York City. It is filing the complaint with the America First Policy Institute, which is chaired by Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s former top economic advisor.

“Independent supermarkets have invested in our neighborhoods, created jobs, paid taxes and served local families for generations,” Peña added. “They deserve a fair and level playing field – not competition against a government-subsidized program operating under different rules.”

The Mamdani grocery plan is now facing two major legal offensives — an August state-court challenge consisting of two separate MBC filings, and a new federal antitrust lawsuit from independent supermarket operators.

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ANOTHER PAXTON WIN: Ken Paxton Announces 7 MILLION FREE EGGS Will Be Distributed to Struggling Texas Families Following Trump DOJ and State’s Antitrust Crackdown

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Tuesday that more than seven million free eggs secured through antitrust settlements with three major producers are being distributed to food banks across the Lone Star State.

More than 1.7 million eggs have already reached Texas food banks, while another 5.322 million are scheduled for delivery in the coming weeks, according to the Texas Attorney General’s Office.

“BIG NEWS: After securing 7 million eggs for the people of Texas, I am excited to announce that Texans will now have an opportunity to receive cartons of free eggs in communities across the state,” Paxton announced on X.

The massive food distribution resulted from settlements Paxton secured in June with Cal-Maine Foods, Centrum/Versova, and Hickman’s Egg Ranch.

The agreements resolved claims brought by President Trump’s Justice Department and 17 state attorneys general over an alleged scheme to manipulate an influential egg-price benchmark between 2022 and 2025.

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Greens promise to nationalise 120 supermarkets, costing $2.8 billion

The Green Party is promising to nationalise 120 Woolworths and Foodstuffs supermarkets to create a new Government-owned supermarket, KiwiMart, if elected.

The Greens say the Parliamentary Library costed the policy at $2.8 billion, comprising the cost of nationalising 120 stores and two distribution centres at $1.3b, with a further $1.5b to capitalise KiwiMart as a commercially viable competitor. KiwiMart would have a mandate to prioritise affordability.

Green Party co-leaders Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson announced the policy this morning in Auckland, saying it would help break up the power of the supermarket duopoly. The Green Party would create its supermarket chain by forcing the sale of 120 stores to the Government.

“Two companies control what almost everyone in this country eats, and they take about a million dollars a day in excess profit out of our shopping baskets. That is money that should be in people’s pockets,” Swarbrick said.

“Everyone agrees we need competition in the grocery sector to drive down prices, but successive governments have failed to lure one. That’s why today we are announcing the real solution: a supermarket owned by all New Zealanders, for all New Zealanders.”

In 2021, the Commerce Commission’s market study into the grocery sector draft report suggested a Government-backed new supermarket chain might be an option to increase competition – although the final report, published a year later, did not recommend it.

Overseas, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is a popular figure in the global progressive movement, ran on a platform of establishing publicly owned grocery stores in the city. The first stores are set to open late next year.

KiwiMart was one of several in the Greens’ wider policy targeting food affordability.

Other policies included a bill to ban excessive pricing at supermarkets, which could be extended to other sectors like energy and fuel; increasing funding for the Commerce Commission and hiking penalties for firms; a National Food strategy that would include legislating people’s right to “adequate and nutritious food”, establishing a $150 million a year “Fair Food Fund” for community foodbanks and expanding the school lunches programme, Ka Ora Ka Ako to 150,000 more children.

Co-leader Davidson said the Greens would also revert to the old school lunches model with locally made meals that had high nutritional value. The cost of expanding the programme and reverting to the old model would be $2.2b over the four-year forecast period.

“One in five children in this country live in a household that runs out of food. The Luxon Government’s response was to cut what it spends on a child’s lunch, hand the job to a handful of big companies, and destroy up to 2000 local jobs doing it,” Davidson said.

“Half of those lunches now fail to meet nutrition standards. Children who miss meals are two to four years behind their classmates in maths, reading and science. We will restore Ka Ora, Ka Ako, put it back in the hands of schools and local providers and expand it so 150,000 more tamariki [children] get a decent lunch every day,” she said.

The total cost over four years for the plan was about $6.2b.

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Lobbyist for China-Owned Smithfield Foods Failed to Disclose CCP Ties on Farm Bill Filings

Greenberg Traurig lobbyist Christopher DeLacy spent quarter after quarter telling Congress that no foreign entity had an interest in Smithfield Foods’ Washington work, including Farm Bill reauthorization and “issues related to foreign ownership of agricultural land,” while the company is 86.9 percent owned by China-based WH Group, 万洲国际, whose leadership includes CCP-tied figures and chairman Wan Long, a former PLA soldier.

Independent journalist Laura Loomer exposed the failure to disclose CCP ties in a report on Loomered.

The Center for Responsible Food Business filed a complaint over the foreign ties with the House Clerk and Senate Secretary last month. The form had indicated no foreign ties repeatedly since 2023.

Just over two weeks after the complaint was filed, the firm amended its second-quarter 2026 Lobbying Disclosure Act report, which covered $120,000 in lobbying of the House, Senate, and Treasury.

Smithfield is the largest pork producer on U.S. soil and holds tens of thousands of acres of American farmland.

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How Big Ag Seized Control Over Media, Research, Policy and the Marketplace

Industrial agriculture is increasingly adopting the same public relations, lobbying and information tactics long used by Big Oil, investigative journalist Amy Westervelt said on the “Real Organic Podcast.” Those strategies help corporations influence research, media and policy, making it easier to “shape the information that voters are getting,” she said.

Journalist Amy Westervelt has spent years documenting how the oil industry used public relations, think tanks and university partnerships to shape public opinion and influence public policy.

But in a recent interview on the “Real Organic Podcast,” Westervelt said she increasingly sees many of those same tactics in industrial agriculture.

“I am finding so many parallels in the agriculture space,” said Westervelt, host of the investigative podcast “Drilled” and author of the forthcoming book, “Brought to You By: Inside Big Oil’s Total Information War.”

She said large agricultural companies, like their counterparts in the fossil fuel industry, have established research centers that help generate academic support for policies that benefit industry.

“It’s like they need a certain amount of … credible information from academics to be able to make the policy argument for certain things,” she said.

Throughout the interview, Westervelt suggested these efforts are part of a broader corporate strategy designed not simply to influence markets, but to shape public debate before policy decisions are ever made.

‘Corporations start to have multiple problems with democracy’

Westervelt traced the origins of modern corporate public relations to the early 20th century, arguing that growing public scrutiny prompted businesses to rethink how they protected their interests.

“Corporations start to have multiple problems with democracy” as new laws, investigative reporting and broader voting rights threatened business interests, she said. That’s when you see “the birth of corporate PR.”

Rather than simply selling products, corporations sought to mold public opinion before voters could demand greater oversight, according to Westervelt.

“These companies need a way to shape the information that voters are getting in a way that will make them more likely to vote against their own interests and in the interests of the corporations that have a lot at stake,” she said.

Over time, industries refined those tactics, using increasingly sophisticated methods “to try to shape the context that they’re operating in and to deal with … ‘creeping democracy,’” Westervelt said.

Media ‘not doing its job’ of holding powerful corporations to account

Think tanks have become one of industry’s most effective policy tools, according to Westervelt.

“They train the people who work there to go on TV shows and radio shows to get these particular talking points out,” she said.

Unlike registered lobbyists, many think tanks operate with little transparency, she added.

“These organizations have loads of money. They have a lot of influence, and they’re not really regulated in any way,” Westervelt said. “They’re pretty good at hiding who funds them.”

She said corporate influence doesn’t stop with think tanks. It also extends into universities, where industry funding can help shape the research that later informs public policy.

While much of her reporting has focused on fossil fuel companies, Westervelt said she increasingly sees similar patterns in industrial agriculture. She described the practice as a form of “pre-lobbying,” in which corporations cultivate the evidence needed to support future policy arguments.

As one example, Westervelt described speaking with a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after an oil company funded carbon capture research.

Researchers were invited to submit project proposals, but one scientist wanted to study “the potential health impacts” of carbon capture pipelines, including “what might happen if it leaks,” she said.

According to Westervelt, the principal investigator instead encouraged him to “look for a more positive project.”

Seemingly small decisions like these can gradually shape which questions get asked — and which never reach the public, she said.

“There’s so many little things like that happening all the time that are keeping … really important ideas just out of the … public square,” she said.

Westervelt said those information gaps are reinforced by powerful technology platforms and a media landscape that often fails to challenge corporate influence.

“You do have now tech companies working really in lock step with these big corporations, helping them to drown out everybody else,” she said. “Letting them juice the algorithm, spend a fortune on … advertising, and really drown out kind of anyone that doesn’t agree with them.”

Meanwhile, she added, “the media is not doing its job kind of holding the powerful to account. That’s just not a thing that is rewarded by newsrooms at this time.”

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Trump DOJ Puts Sanctuary States on Notice: ALL State Agencies Receiving Federal Food Stamp and Social Security Assistance Funds Must Report Known Illegal Aliens to DHS Under Welfare Reform Law Passed by Congress in 1996

The Department of Justice just ripped up a 28-year Clinton-era legal dodge that let sanctuary states hide illegal aliens from federal immigration authorities while collecting billions in welfare money meant for American families.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued a formal opinion holding that when a state takes Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) funds, the entire state government, not just the welfare office, must report to the Department of Homeland Security any person the state knows is not lawfully present in the United States.

That is not a new law. That is the 1996 welfare-reform statute Congress actually wrote. The Clinton Justice Department simply pretended it said something else.

“Congress wrote this requirement plainly,” said Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, who leads OLC. “When a state chooses to participate in TANF, it accepts the obligation to report illegal aliens in the United States. Tax dollars intended to help vulnerable Americans should not perversely encourage illegal entry into the United States, but rather should reinforce our laws and our borders.”

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Joshua Craddock, the author of the opinion, was even blunter: the new guidance “does not impose new obligations on states.” It “simply restores the original meaning of the statute Congress enacted.” States that take the money “must abide by federal law, and failure to comply may lead to serious consequences, including loss of program funding.”

All 50 states, the District of Columbia, and several U.S. territories take TANF and SSI. Federal TANF block grants alone exceed $16.4 billion a year.

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Pesticides poison nearly half of world’s farmers each year – study

Nearly half of the world’s estimated 934 million farmers suffer unintentional pesticide poisoning each year, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.

The study, conducted by researchers from the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), analyzed 214 publications from 2006 to 2023 alongside World Health Organization mortality data. It estimated up to 433 million cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning annually, affecting around 46% of agricultural workers worldwide. About 11,000 cases are fatal each year.

The burden falls disproportionately on the Global South, researchers found.

South and Southeast Asia and eastern Africa recorded the highest estimated numbers of cases. In Burkina Faso, nearly 84% of farmers are estimated to suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year.

“Behind these staggering numbers are farmers, workers and families paying a terrible human price for pesticide exposure,” PAN India Executive Director Jayakumar Chelaton said. “This research exposes a crisis that can no longer be ignored.”

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