Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “United States Department of Agriculture”
Lawsuits filed against agribusiness giant Monsanto are mounting, with the latest one being filed last week in Delaware. That lawsuit is just one of a growing number of suits alleging a link between glyphosate exposure and cancer. Glyphosate is the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. Three law firms are representing the plaintiffs in the case, which claims that Monsanto …
Consumer awareness and environmental concerns seem to be driving the country’s organic lifestyle trend. Photo credit: USDA California makes up the biggest slice of the country’s organic market with a stunning $2.2 billion in sales (41 percent of the national total), trouncing second place Washington’s $515 million in sales, according to the latest Organic Survey from the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service …
Recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved the first genetically modified “arctic” apple, developed by the Canadian biotech company Okanagan Specialty Fruits Inc., which is designed to resist browning. Check out the difference between a non-browning Arctic® Golden and a conventional Golden Delicious here: YouTube.com. While apple growers fear the new apple, the company says these apples will prove to …
Pretty much every branch of the US government has had trouble implementing President Obama’s flagship scientific integrity policy. In 2011, the US Department of the Interior (DOI) appointed the scientist Dr. Paul Houser to be its first ever Officer of Scientific Integrity. Within a year he was fired. Believing his dismissal was for drawing attention to a scientifically questionable Department policy, …
Good news: The number of Americans using food stamps in 2014 declined slightly from the previous year. So why does the 2015 Index of Culture and Opportunity say this indicator is headed in the “wrong direction”? There are a couple of reasons. For one, the food stamp program (officially known now as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) is …
Usually, we don’t stop to think about how the whole economy works together. A major reason is that we have been lacking data to see long-term relationships. In this post, I show some longer-term time series relating to energy growth, GDP growth, and debt growth–going back to 1820 in some cases–that help us understand our situation better. When examining these …
Center for Food Safety (CFS) filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), alleging that APHIS has violated FOIA by routinely failing to respond to requests for records related to genetically engineered (GE) crops, unlawfully delaying its responses, and withholding public disclosure of information. APHIS …
A federal appeals court on Thursday overturned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) approval of a controversial pesticide, saying the agency violated federal law by giving a green light without obtaining or reviewing reliable studies on the neonicotinoid’s impact on honeybees. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal’s ruling (pdf) in the case, which was brought by environmental law firm Earthjustice, …
A food safety advocacy group sued an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday, saying it illegally withheld public information on genetically engineered crops. The lawsuit, brought by the Center for Food Safety (CFS) against the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), claims the regulator has routinely failed to respond as required to requests for records …
The world has been abuzz with the dramatic losses of cultivated honey bees due to colony collapse disorder1 as well as declines of native pollinator species across the globe.2,3,4 Scientists have recently begun calculating the extent to which food crops depend on animal pollinators including bees, butterflies, and bats,5 with one study assigning an economic value to the “ecosystem service” …
