Agriculture, Beverages & Food

The pain and suffering of victims of toxic agrochemicals invaded the international negotiations on biosafety in Curitiba, Brazil this week with the accounts of a Paraguayan mother whose son died from herbicide poisoning and local residents of a neighbourhood in Córdoba, Argentina facing a severe health crisis caused by the fumigation of surrounding fields. Read More

Trace amounts of a little-researched toxic metal have been found in bottled water brands in PET bottles across Europe and Canada, says new research from Germany. Read More

If you think the GM battle is over, think again, says Lucy Siegle. Beware, transgenic crops and Terminator Technology are back. Read More

Tobacco companies, which are able to vastly outspend antitobacco groups, may still be winning the marketing wars. While tobacco companies have abandoned most conventional advertising, they are using other means to get their point across. Antismoking groups, on the other hand, are now struggling to find the money to maintain even a small-scale campaign. Read More

The main public investor in a controversial gas pipeline in Peru's Amazon rainforest that has ruptured four times already appears adamant not to bow to pressure from green groups demanding a full investigation after a study asserted that the pipeline is shoddily built and likely to break again. Read More

A South Korean firm, Posco, last year promised to build a steel plant costing $12bn - the biggest ever single foreign investment in India. The only problem is that many of the people living in Kalinga Nagar, near the town of Jajpur, do not want to make way for the new factories. Read More

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a free-speech challenge by two tobacco companies over California's anti-smoking ads. Read More

Newmont Mining agreed Thursday to pay $30 million to Indonesia in a settlement of a civil lawsuit in which the government argued that the company had polluted a bay with arsenic and mercury. Read More

SHOPPING for fish these days is fraught with confusion. There is so much contradictory information about what is safe and what isn't. Some nutritionists are worried that people will throw up their hands and choose steak instead. Read More

A 1939 magazine add for Monsanto's plastics technology portrays African-Americans in a Southern field picking plastic as they would cotton. That's progress! Read More