India and US reach WTO breakthrough over food
13 November 2014
India and the US have resolved their disagreements on food security issues, paving the way for the implementation of a global trade pact.
The deal to simplify trade procedures was done at a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting summit in Bali in Indonesia last year. But India has been blocking implementation of that agreement. It wanted assurances that its food security programme would not be challenged under the WTO's rules. India's concern was that complaints based on rules limiting farm subsidies might undermine its spending on food stockpiles intended to ensure that the poor have enough to eat.
Food security programmes are covered by a so-called "peace clause" in which countries agreed to refrain for making such challenges until 2017. The US has now agreed to extend that commitment, in effect indefinitely. This bilateral agreement between the US and India still has to be endorsed by the full WTO membership, and it's likely to be discussed in the Organization's General Council next month. The breakthrough stems from a bilateral summit in September when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the US. It clears the way for the WTO to press ahead with the Trade Facilitation Agreement that was done in Bali.
Analysts have estimated that that trade deal could add $1tn (£630bn) to the world economy, by reducing the costs of conducting trade by for example simplifying customs procedures. US Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a statement: "On the basis of this breakthrough with India, we now look forward to working with all WTO Members and with Director General Roberto Azevedo to reach a consensus that enables full implementation of all elements of the landmark Bali Package, including the Trade Facilitation Agreement." The statement also said Delhi and Washington have agreed that India's food security programmes would not be challenged under WTO rules "until a permanent solution regarding this issue has been agreed and adopted".
13 November 2014
India and the US have resolved their disagreements on food security issues, paving the way for the implementation of a global trade pact.
The deal to simplify trade procedures was done at a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting summit in Bali in Indonesia last year. But India has been blocking implementation of that agreement. It wanted assurances that its food security programme would not be challenged under the WTO's rules. India's concern was that complaints based on rules limiting farm subsidies might undermine its spending on food stockpiles intended to ensure that the poor have enough to eat.
Food security programmes are covered by a so-called "peace clause" in which countries agreed to refrain for making such challenges until 2017. The US has now agreed to extend that commitment, in effect indefinitely. This bilateral agreement between the US and India still has to be endorsed by the full WTO membership, and it's likely to be discussed in the Organization's General Council next month. The breakthrough stems from a bilateral summit in September when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the US. It clears the way for the WTO to press ahead with the Trade Facilitation Agreement that was done in Bali.
Analysts have estimated that that trade deal could add $1tn (£630bn) to the world economy, by reducing the costs of conducting trade by for example simplifying customs procedures. US Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a statement: "On the basis of this breakthrough with India, we now look forward to working with all WTO Members and with Director General Roberto Azevedo to reach a consensus that enables full implementation of all elements of the landmark Bali Package, including the Trade Facilitation Agreement." The statement also said Delhi and Washington have agreed that India's food security programmes would not be challenged under WTO rules "until a permanent solution regarding this issue has been agreed and adopted".
US FDA will send more inspectors to China office
Shan Juan
China Daily
Publication Date : 05-11-2014
The top US food safety authority will dispatch more inspectors to China to help ensure the quality of exports, making its China office the largest one overseas, according to a senior US official. As early as next year, staff at the China office will be boosted to 21 from the current four, and nine of them will be responsible for food safety, said Christopher J. Hickey, FDA China director. Currently there are only two in food safety, while the rest are in charge of drugs and medical devices. China is the fourth-largest exporter of food to the US.
Meanwhile, citing a globalised food and drug supply chain, China is also considering sending safety inspectors to the US, said Wu Yongning, chief scientist from the China National Centre For Food Safety Risk Assessment. Wu said that given China's sheer size, the increase of US FDA inspectors would allow more on-site inspections of particularly high-risk producers. "That helps with China's domestic food safety as well in terms of supervision over the industry," he said. Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration, said the staff increase is "important for us as that permits us to work more closely with our Chinese counterparts to become knowledgeable about practices here." "We can work with both the Chinese government and the industry to explain our requirements and provide trading support for those exporting to the US to comply with our standards," he said. Priorities include agriculture, farm produce, seafood and animal drugs, he noted.
Worldwide, the FDA has small offices in Europe and Latin America. The one in China will be its largest overseas team of food inspectors. "Food safety is a very dynamic challenge, and the food system is becoming more technologically complicated and global," Taylor said. "We need to ensure that all food imports to the US are up to our standards as well, and that's why the partnership with major food trade partners like China is so important," he noted. It took at least two years for the FDA to reach an agreement on the increase.
Early on Tuesday, the food safety chief of the China Food and Drug Administration met with Taylor and said they would continue a staff exchange programme and enhance cooperation to ensure food safety.
Shan Juan
China Daily
Publication Date : 05-11-2014
The top US food safety authority will dispatch more inspectors to China to help ensure the quality of exports, making its China office the largest one overseas, according to a senior US official. As early as next year, staff at the China office will be boosted to 21 from the current four, and nine of them will be responsible for food safety, said Christopher J. Hickey, FDA China director. Currently there are only two in food safety, while the rest are in charge of drugs and medical devices. China is the fourth-largest exporter of food to the US.
Meanwhile, citing a globalised food and drug supply chain, China is also considering sending safety inspectors to the US, said Wu Yongning, chief scientist from the China National Centre For Food Safety Risk Assessment. Wu said that given China's sheer size, the increase of US FDA inspectors would allow more on-site inspections of particularly high-risk producers. "That helps with China's domestic food safety as well in terms of supervision over the industry," he said. Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration, said the staff increase is "important for us as that permits us to work more closely with our Chinese counterparts to become knowledgeable about practices here." "We can work with both the Chinese government and the industry to explain our requirements and provide trading support for those exporting to the US to comply with our standards," he said. Priorities include agriculture, farm produce, seafood and animal drugs, he noted.
Worldwide, the FDA has small offices in Europe and Latin America. The one in China will be its largest overseas team of food inspectors. "Food safety is a very dynamic challenge, and the food system is becoming more technologically complicated and global," Taylor said. "We need to ensure that all food imports to the US are up to our standards as well, and that's why the partnership with major food trade partners like China is so important," he noted. It took at least two years for the FDA to reach an agreement on the increase.
Early on Tuesday, the food safety chief of the China Food and Drug Administration met with Taylor and said they would continue a staff exchange programme and enhance cooperation to ensure food safety.
Food Scores, a New Web Service, Ranks Grocery Items on Ingredients and Nutrition
By STEPHANIE STROM
OCT. 27, 2014
An environmental research organization on Monday introduced one of the most comprehensive online databases of food products, containing information on more than 80,000 items sold in groceries across the nation. It offers details of ingredients and nutritional information as well as an attempt to assess how processed the food items are.
“We know that consumers care a lot about what’s in the foods they buy, and we also know that if foods are highly processed, that can have an impact on nutrition in ways that don’t always show up on the information panels on labels,” said Renée Sharp, the director of research at the Environmental Working Group, the nonprofit group that built the new service. The Food Scores database, compiled largely from information supplied by food companies through voluntary and mandatory labeling, combined with the group’s own research on pesticides and additives, allows consumers to find information like how many products contain brominated vegetable oil as an ingredient or whether a specific product contains added dyes and preservatives.
The Food Scores page grading Doritos Tapatio Salsa Picante Hot Sauce.The Environmental Working Group aims to assign a score from 1 to 10, with 1 being the best, to each product based on how nutritious it is, how many ingredients in it or its packaging raise concerns and an estimate of how processed it is. Factors include whether a product is organically certified; raised according to various animal welfare standards or without antibiotics; and exposed to environmental contaminants and pesticides. “You can see if a product is gluten-free, whether it potentially contains genetically modified ingredients, how it stacks up against its competition,” Ms. Sharp said. “The database is only of branded and packaged products, so bagged spinach but not spinach sold loose.” Because of mobile technology and social media, consumers are becoming much more aware of not only what is in the foods they eat but also of questions and concerns about them. That attention has been forcing food manufacturers to reformulate products as varied as Gatorade and Kraft macaroni and cheese. “Ingredients that are added to food purely for the convenience of industrial food makers are under scrutiny, not by regulatory agencies but by the public,” said Ken Cook, president and a founder of the environmental group. Mr. Cook said he anticipated resistance from the food industry, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the trade group that represents the industry’s interests, was highly critical of the new tool, saying it was based on little more than “guesses.” “The Environmental Working Group’s food ratings are severely flawed and will only provide consumers with misinformation about the food and beverage products they trust and enjoy,” the association said in a statement.
It said the scoring system was “void of scientific rigor and objectivity” and thus would give consumers inaccurate and misleading information. “The addition of E.W.G.'s rating scheme to the already crowded landscape of subjective food rating systems underscores the importance of fact-based sources like the government-regulated Nutrition Facts Panel and ingredient list as consumers’ best source for consistent, reliable information about food and beverage products,” the trade group said. Ms. Sharp said her group’s methodology was presented in depth on the website so that consumers could understand exactly how the organization arrived at its conclusions. “We laid out all of our assumptions and decisions,” she said. “We don’t think anyone is as transparent as we are about what we’re doing.” She and Mr. Cook said the biggest surprise was how many products contained sugar. “It is astounding,” Ms. Sharp said. “Almost 60 percent of the products in the database contain added sugars.”
More than 90 percent of granola bars, for instance, have added sugars, as do 100 percent of stuffing mixes. Perhaps even more surprising, processed meats like bologna and salami contain added sugar. Analysis of food products aimed at educating consumers about what they’re buying is increasingly common. Whole Foods, for instance, recently began rating some of the produce it sells as good, better or best based on a variety of criteria, and the Cornucopia Institute will soon introduce a yogurt scorecard, ranking a wide variety of yogurts based on whether, say, they use high-fructose corn syrup or carrageenans, among other things. The yogurt analysis, which took more than a year, follows work the organization has done to rate organic eggs and organic milk, among other products and ingredients. “Yogurt is perceived and marketed as a healthy product, and its popularity has really taken off because of that perception,” said Mark Kastel, co-founder of Cornucopia. “But there are a lot of synthetic chemicals in many yogurts, and as much added sugar as some candy bars.” Cornucopia’s yogurt scorecard will award “spoons” to more than 100 yogurts, with five spoons being the best rating. Yogurts that are organic score more highly, as organic foods generally do in the environmental group’s Food Scores, in part because organic producers are required to follow regulations that reduce their use of pesticides, additives and other processing agents. Dannon and Yoplait, best-selling yogurts, get only one spoon. Michael Neuwirth, a spokesman for Dannon, noted that it made many different yogurts, including plain, unsweetened yogurt in traditional and Greek varieties as well as “nonnutritive sweetened yogurt.” “To help people achieve a healthy diet in the way they define it for themselves, we make a huge range of nutrient dense varieties of yogurt to fulfill different needs and preferences,” Mr. Neuwirth wrote in an email. General Mills, which distributes Yoplait in the United States, said: “Cornucopia advocates on behalf of organic, and routinely recommends organic products over alternatives. That has been their focus – and it’s clearly the agenda here.”
Food Scores, which will soon be available as an app that consumers can use with their phones to scan product bar codes, was inspired by the Environmental Working Group’s success with a similar database for cosmetics and skin care, Skin Deep. That effort spurred some cosmetics makers to change their products, and Mr. Cook is hopeful that the food database will have a similar influence. “A cosmetics executive said the nicest thing any ‘frenemy’ has ever said to me," Mr. Cook said. “He told me that before Skin Deep, women thought they were putting on makeup and now they think they’re putting on chemicals. I think Food Scores is going to have some of the same impact.”
By STEPHANIE STROM
OCT. 27, 2014
An environmental research organization on Monday introduced one of the most comprehensive online databases of food products, containing information on more than 80,000 items sold in groceries across the nation. It offers details of ingredients and nutritional information as well as an attempt to assess how processed the food items are.
“We know that consumers care a lot about what’s in the foods they buy, and we also know that if foods are highly processed, that can have an impact on nutrition in ways that don’t always show up on the information panels on labels,” said Renée Sharp, the director of research at the Environmental Working Group, the nonprofit group that built the new service. The Food Scores database, compiled largely from information supplied by food companies through voluntary and mandatory labeling, combined with the group’s own research on pesticides and additives, allows consumers to find information like how many products contain brominated vegetable oil as an ingredient or whether a specific product contains added dyes and preservatives.
The Food Scores page grading Doritos Tapatio Salsa Picante Hot Sauce.The Environmental Working Group aims to assign a score from 1 to 10, with 1 being the best, to each product based on how nutritious it is, how many ingredients in it or its packaging raise concerns and an estimate of how processed it is. Factors include whether a product is organically certified; raised according to various animal welfare standards or without antibiotics; and exposed to environmental contaminants and pesticides. “You can see if a product is gluten-free, whether it potentially contains genetically modified ingredients, how it stacks up against its competition,” Ms. Sharp said. “The database is only of branded and packaged products, so bagged spinach but not spinach sold loose.” Because of mobile technology and social media, consumers are becoming much more aware of not only what is in the foods they eat but also of questions and concerns about them. That attention has been forcing food manufacturers to reformulate products as varied as Gatorade and Kraft macaroni and cheese. “Ingredients that are added to food purely for the convenience of industrial food makers are under scrutiny, not by regulatory agencies but by the public,” said Ken Cook, president and a founder of the environmental group. Mr. Cook said he anticipated resistance from the food industry, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the trade group that represents the industry’s interests, was highly critical of the new tool, saying it was based on little more than “guesses.” “The Environmental Working Group’s food ratings are severely flawed and will only provide consumers with misinformation about the food and beverage products they trust and enjoy,” the association said in a statement.
It said the scoring system was “void of scientific rigor and objectivity” and thus would give consumers inaccurate and misleading information. “The addition of E.W.G.'s rating scheme to the already crowded landscape of subjective food rating systems underscores the importance of fact-based sources like the government-regulated Nutrition Facts Panel and ingredient list as consumers’ best source for consistent, reliable information about food and beverage products,” the trade group said. Ms. Sharp said her group’s methodology was presented in depth on the website so that consumers could understand exactly how the organization arrived at its conclusions. “We laid out all of our assumptions and decisions,” she said. “We don’t think anyone is as transparent as we are about what we’re doing.” She and Mr. Cook said the biggest surprise was how many products contained sugar. “It is astounding,” Ms. Sharp said. “Almost 60 percent of the products in the database contain added sugars.”
More than 90 percent of granola bars, for instance, have added sugars, as do 100 percent of stuffing mixes. Perhaps even more surprising, processed meats like bologna and salami contain added sugar. Analysis of food products aimed at educating consumers about what they’re buying is increasingly common. Whole Foods, for instance, recently began rating some of the produce it sells as good, better or best based on a variety of criteria, and the Cornucopia Institute will soon introduce a yogurt scorecard, ranking a wide variety of yogurts based on whether, say, they use high-fructose corn syrup or carrageenans, among other things. The yogurt analysis, which took more than a year, follows work the organization has done to rate organic eggs and organic milk, among other products and ingredients. “Yogurt is perceived and marketed as a healthy product, and its popularity has really taken off because of that perception,” said Mark Kastel, co-founder of Cornucopia. “But there are a lot of synthetic chemicals in many yogurts, and as much added sugar as some candy bars.” Cornucopia’s yogurt scorecard will award “spoons” to more than 100 yogurts, with five spoons being the best rating. Yogurts that are organic score more highly, as organic foods generally do in the environmental group’s Food Scores, in part because organic producers are required to follow regulations that reduce their use of pesticides, additives and other processing agents. Dannon and Yoplait, best-selling yogurts, get only one spoon. Michael Neuwirth, a spokesman for Dannon, noted that it made many different yogurts, including plain, unsweetened yogurt in traditional and Greek varieties as well as “nonnutritive sweetened yogurt.” “To help people achieve a healthy diet in the way they define it for themselves, we make a huge range of nutrient dense varieties of yogurt to fulfill different needs and preferences,” Mr. Neuwirth wrote in an email. General Mills, which distributes Yoplait in the United States, said: “Cornucopia advocates on behalf of organic, and routinely recommends organic products over alternatives. That has been their focus – and it’s clearly the agenda here.”
Food Scores, which will soon be available as an app that consumers can use with their phones to scan product bar codes, was inspired by the Environmental Working Group’s success with a similar database for cosmetics and skin care, Skin Deep. That effort spurred some cosmetics makers to change their products, and Mr. Cook is hopeful that the food database will have a similar influence. “A cosmetics executive said the nicest thing any ‘frenemy’ has ever said to me," Mr. Cook said. “He told me that before Skin Deep, women thought they were putting on makeup and now they think they’re putting on chemicals. I think Food Scores is going to have some of the same impact.”