Agriculture, Beverages & Food

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the destruction of plantings of genetically modified sugar beets developed by Monsanto Co after ruling previously the U.S. Agriculture Department illegally approved the biotech crop. Read More

"I thought I would find freedom and jobs here, I thought the United States was a civilized nation, the highest in the world. I never imagined this kind of thing could happen here." Read More

Mordechai Orian, president of Global Horizons, a Los Angeles-based labor recruiter, was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for "engaging in a conspiracy to commit forced labor and document servitude" of some 400 Thai citizens who were brought to work on farms in the U.S. Read More

A federal grand jury in Honolulu has indicted six labor contractors from a Los Angeles manpower company on charges that they imposed forced labor on some 400 Thai farm workers, in what justice officials called the biggest human-trafficking case ever brought by federal authorities. Read More

Burger King will stop using palm oil from a leading Indonesian supplier due to concerns about environmental damage. Read More

ADM has moved beyond the days of blatant price-fixing that landed its top execs behind bars. But the company's forays into new global agricultural markets bring charges of complicity in forced child labor and rampant deforestation. Critics assert that the conglomerate's embrace of self- regulation and voluntary guidelines is but a cynical ploy to deter effective reform. Read More

It's been ten years since British Petroleum launched an expensive ad campaign, re-branding its corporate image into the eco-friendly "BP: Beyond Petroleum." We said it then. When a company spends more on advertising its environmental friendliness than on environmental actions, that's greenwash. Three long weeks into the BP oil disaster roiling the Gulf of Mexico, CorpWatch's December 2000 skewering of its new image sadly, bears repeating. Read More

CrocTail is an extension of the Crocodyl.org Wiki web site project, an online compendium profiling the accountability and transparency track records of multinational corporations. Developed with support from the Sunlight Foundation, CrocTail users can search the entire subsidiaries database. In this new version, users can click on different years and see how subsidiary relationships for a company have changed over time. Read More

While it doesn't sound (and need not be) nefarious, activist groups worldwide like the Rainforest Action Network argue that the production of palm oil is currently harming rain forests in Southeast Asia, orangutans, and the environment. Read More

Environmental groups hailed a decision this week by four of the world's largest meat producers to ban the purchase of cattle from newly deforested areas of Brazil's Amazon rain forest. Brazil has the world's largest cattle herd and is the world's largest beef exporter. It is also the fourth largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. Read More