Agriculture, Beverages & Food

Global Horizons is one of the biggest companies in the business of importing temporary foreign workers to do jobs in the U.S. ranging from agriculture to nursing. Their workers endure similar working conditions to undocumented workers, prompting government investigations. Global Horizon Responds Read More

Nine Somali immigrant employees at poultry processor Gold'n Plump Poultry Inc. alleged in a federal lawsuit that they were discriminated against because of their race and their religion at the company's Cold Spring plant. Read More

Leading tobacco firms in the US, including British American Tobacco, are to face a class action lawsuit seeking punitive damages of up to $200bn (£105bn) relating to the alleged fraudulent promotions suggesting "light" branded cigarettes are safer, or less addictive, than regular ones. Read More

Two mining companies want to dig for coal under nearly half of Montgomery County. They plan to use a nontraditional but highly efficient process called "longwall" mining that will cause flat-as-a-dime land to sag like a burst souffle. Read More

Fishing communities in the Caribbean island of Trinidad are protesting a $US1.5 billion aluminum smelter that will process raw material from Brazil, Jamaica and Surinam. Cedros Peninsula United, a local organization, says that the factory uses technology that has had serious environmental impacts in countries from China to Iceland and the U.S. Read More

Every time the rain comes down, muddy water laden with phosphorus, arsenic and other contaminants flows into the Illinois River from chicken farms nearby and just across the border in Arkansas. Read More

In the summer of 1997, Tyrone Hayes, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, accepted what seemed a harmless offer to join a panel of eight other scientists investigating the safety of the common weed-killer atrazine. The panel had been commissioned by atrazine's inventor and primary manufacturer, the Swiss-based chemical giant then called Novartis and since renamed Syngenta. The company wanted to know if its product threatened "non-target" organisms, including fish, reptiles, and amphibians-creatures whose fate had remained largely unexplored through the half century in which atrazine had become the most heavily used herbicide in the United States as well as one of its most widespread environmental contaminants. Read More

When claims were first published on the front pages of Indian newspapers this month that Coca-Cola and PepsiCo beverages were contaminated with pesticides, executives at the two companies were breezily confident that they could handle the issue. Three weeks later, though, they are still struggling to win back Indian consumers. One-quarter of India's component states have imposed partial bans on their products, and a complex legal battle to overturn those bans is only just beginning. Read More

Royal Dutch Shell, the world's top marketer of biofuels, considers using food crops to make biofuels "morally inappropriate" as long as there are people in the world who are starving, an executive said on Thursday. Read More

A consumer group is suing the operator of the KFC to try to stop it from frying foods in an artery-clogging trans fat. Read More