Labels: beef, food, fun

Britain's deputy chief veterinarian Fred Landeg told British television stations on Saturday that a cow on a cattle and sheep farm near Ipswich, Suffolk, northeast of London, tested positive for bluetongue.

The cow was to be slaughtered, other animals on the farm tested to see if they were also infected, and restrictions put in place at the site, Landeg and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said.

National Farmers Union (NFU) President Peter Kendall told BBC television that bluetongue "is definitely not as serious as foot-and-mouth but it is of major concern to us," as it is one more disease to deal with.

He said the disease is carried by insects like midges and is not transferred from animal to animal. [More]

Labels: beef, production

Your reporter remains skeptical about USDA’s refusal to allow voluntary BSE testing. As has been argued before, it’s not that voluntary testing is needed or the expense justified.

That’s not the question.

It’s a matter of the proper role of government and the fact that, from a public relations angle, this looks awful. [More]

Labels: beef, food, milk, policy, regulation

Meatlifting is a grave problem for food retailers: According to the Food Marketing Institute, meat was the most shoplifted item in America's grocery stores in 2005. (It barely edged out analgesics and was a few percentage points ahead of razor blades and baby formula.)

Meat's dubious triumph is due in part to a law enforcement crackdown on methamphetamine use. Meat used to be the shoplifting runner-up to health-and-beauty-care items, a category that includes cough medicines containing pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient in home-cooked meth. In 2003, for example, a quarter of shoplifted products were HBCs, while meat took second place at 16 percent. But states began passing laws that require stores to move medicines containing pseudoephedrine behind secure counters. That was enough to cut the pinching of HBCs, which fell by 11 percent between 2003 and 2005.

Labels: beef, retail

Miliband muses on farm farts ban

While it is unlikely that this will result in a "fart-tax" with civil servants chasing cows round with breathalyzer style methane measurers, Miliband did argue that farmers should act to reduce methane emissions by feeding cattle different food, breeding them to live longer, altering the handling of manure and getting farms to generate "biogas" or "biofertiliser" from animal waste.

Extending the polluter pays principle to farming would likely lead to higher food prices, but Miliband insisted that climate change could provide an opportunity for farmers, as it has done in other sectors. [More]

[My emphasis]

A correct interpretation of the polluter pays principle would detine pollution as any byproduct of a
production or consumption process that harms or otherwise violates the property rights of others. The
polluter would be the person, company, or other organization whose activities are generating that byproduct. And finally, payment should equal the damage and be made to the person or persons being
harmed.
Inanimate objects and the environment do not incur costs, people: do. It is not merely the physical
property that is being damaged, but the interests of the owner. However, most advocates of PPP rarely
talk about harm to people. Instead, they misappropriate the economic theory by redetining the concepts
of cost and damage to apply to things rather than to people. The statement above is typical. Polluters
are said to be those who “damage” or impose “costs” on the environment. [More]

Labels: beef, environment