By Carey Gillam

(Reuters) – Critics of genetically modified crops are making new demands for government mandated labeling to identify foods on grocer shelves that contain ingredients from transgenic corn, soybeans and other crops.

Labeling drives are underway on both state and federal levels, and on Tuesday several U.S. consumer groups released a survey and results of a petition drive that they say shows overwhelming consumer support for labeling of foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMO).

March 27 (Reuters) – Critics of genetically modified crops
are making new demands for government mandated labeling to
identify foods on grocer shelves that contain ingredients from
transgenic corn, soybeans and other crops.

Labeling drives are underway on both state and federal
levels, and on Tuesday several U.S. consumer groups released a
survey and results of a petition drive that they say shows
overwhelming consumer support for labeling of foods containing
genetically modified organisms (GMO).

By Carey Gillam

(Reuters) – Scientists, environmentalists and farm advocates are pressing the question about whether rewards of the trend toward using more and more crop chemicals are worth the risks, as the agricultural industry strives to ramp up production to feed the world’s growing population.

The debate has heated up in the last several weeks, with a series of warnings and calls for government action including a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

By Carey Gillam

(Reuters) – Scientists, environmentalists and farm advocates are pressing the question about whether rewards of the trend toward using more and more crop chemicals are worth the risks, as the agricultural industry strives to ramp up production to feed the world’s growing population. The debate has heated up in the last several weeks, with a series of warnings and calls for government action including a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Critics say they fear the push to increase global crop production is translating into mounting health and environmental dangers. As usage expands in some areas, agricultural chemical residues have turned up in water supplies and air samples of U.S. farming communities.

Kansas City (Reuters) – Every time someone calls former U.S. government scientist Gerald Zirnstein a whistleblower, he cringes a little. When he coined the term “Pink Slime” to describe the unlabeled and unappetizing bits of cartilage and other chemically-treated scrap meat going into U.S. ground beef, Zirnstein was a microbiologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He made the slime reference to a fellow scientist in an internal – and he thought private – email. But that email later became public, and with it came an explosion of outrage from consumer groups. Descriptions of a mix of fatty beef by-products and connective tissue, ground up and treated with ammonium hydroxide, then blended with ground beef have led the nation’s largest supermarket chains to ban the product. McDonald’s said it would stop buying hamburger containing what the industry calls “finely textured beef,” and the USDA has said school districts can opt out of feeding it to children.

For food safety advocates, the campaign to reject Pink Slime has been wildly successful. Zirnstein said even though he never intended to publicize this issue, he does hope the furor will bring about change. “You look through the regulations and a lot of that stuff was never approved for hamburger. It was under the radar,” said the 54-year-old Zirnstein, who lives outside Washington, D.C. with his wife and 2-year-old son. “It’s cheating. It’s economic fraud,” he said in a telephone interview. Zirnstein, who worked in a meat plant growing up in Kansas, said the situation came to his attention a decade ago. In 2002, he was working as a USDA food scientist and was assigned to a project to determine what was going into ground beef and whether the ingredients met federal regulations.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Utilizing biotech “drought-tolerant” corn to boost global food production would be a less-effective tactic than planting conventional corn and improving agronomic practices, a veteran plant scientist said on Tuesday.

“The technology has gotten a tremendous amount of attention. We think undue attention,” said Doug Gurian-Sherman, a plant pathologist and senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in an interview at the Reuters Food and Agriculture Summit.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Consumers are shunning carbonated soft drinks in favor of bottled water, even in the face of recent price increases, Nestle Waters North America’s top executive said.

“It’s convenience we are talking about,” said Kim Jeffery, president and chief executive of Nestle Waters North America, at the Reuters Food and Agriculture Summit in Chicago on Monday.

By Carey Gillam

(Reuters) – A group of plant scientists is warning federal regulators that action is needed to mitigate a growing problem with biotech corn that is losing its resistance to plant-damaging pests.

The stakes are high – corn production is critical for food, animal feed and ethanol production, and farmers have increasingly been relying on corn that has been genetically modified to be toxic to corn rootworm pests.

By Carey Gillam

(Reuters) – A federal judge has ruled in favor of global seed giant Monsanto Co, dismissing a lawsuit brought by a consortium of U.S. organic farmers and seed dealers who said their industry is at risk from Monsanto’s growing market strength.

U.S. District Court Judge Naomi Buchwald, for the Southern District of New York, threw out the case brought by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) and dozens of other plaintiff growers and organizations, criticizing the groups for a “transparent effort to create a controversy where none exists.”

By Carey Gillam

(Reuters) – Monsanto Co said on Friday that it had settled a long-running legal battle with residents of West Virginia who claimed they suffered environmental and health problems tied to pollution from a former Monsanto chemical plant.

St. Louis-based Monsanto, which has shifted from a concentration in the chemical business to agricultural seeds, said it would commit to more than $90 million in clean-up, remediation and medical monitoring to resolve a series of class action lawsuits involving a plant once located in Nitro, West Virginia.