18/March/22

 

Three people suffering from cancer are set to face off against Monsanto in the latest courtroom battle over allegations that exposure to the company’s Roundup weedkiller causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The trial will be the first to take place in the company’s former hometown, with jury selection set to start on March 24. The trial will focus on the complaints of three individuals: Robert Bird, an Iowa man who sprayed Roundup products routinely on a tree farm; Blake Buchan, a 39-year-old Georgia man who used Monsanto’s products to spray fence lines and other areas of two properties he maintained; and Ozie Parker, also of Georgia, who grew up helping out on his family farm, mixing and spraying Roundup weedkillers on hundreds of acres for many years. UnSpun

 

 

Bayer has won preliminary court approval for a $648 million settlement of suits over environmental contamination tied to now-banned chemicals made by its Monsanto unit. The proposed deal will cover more than 2,500 cities and counties that claimed harm from polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, according to federal court filings. PCBs were banned in the US in 1979 after researchers found they posed a cancer threat. Bloomberg Quint

 

 

Lab meat — flesh grown in massive tanks instead of in the bodies of sentient animals — offers the promise of having our steak and eating it guilt-free, too. Yet several obstacles hold back a new era of widely available animal-free burgers. The biggest involves something much less appetizing than chicken dumplings: the blood of unborn cow fetuses, extracted from their mothers after slaughter. Fetal bovine serum (FBS), a substance that works great for medical purposes, creates two huge problems for an industry seeking to mass-produce slaughter-free meat. The first is expense. FBS sells for upward of $1,000 per litre — a major reason why, to break even on expenses, companies would have to sell their cultured meat for about $200,000 per pound, a 2020 analysis from University of California, Davis, researchers found. Mother Jones

 

 

The first major evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s controversial efforts to expand capital-intensive, high-input agriculture in Africa found that the 15-year-effort has failed to achieve its goals of improving food security. The Gates-led Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) aimed to transform agriculture in Africa by increasing incomes and food security for millions of smallholder farmers. But an independent evaluation by the consulting firm Mathematica provides no evidence of progress toward these goals. US Right to Know