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The eradication of hunger and malnutrition is an achievable goal. Reaching it requires, however, that we move away from business as usual and improve coordination across sectors, across time and across levels of governance. Empowering communities at the local level, in order for them to identify the obstacles that they face and the solutions that suit them best, is a first step. This must be complemented by supportive policies at the national level that ensure the right sequencing between the various policy reforms that are needed, across all relevant sectors, including agriculture, rural development, health, education and social protection. In turn, local-level and national-level policies should benefit from an enabling international environment, in which policies that affect the ability of countries to guarantee the right to food – in the areas of trade, food aid, foreign debt alleviation and development cooperation – are realigned with the imperative of achieving food security and ensuring adequate nutrition.

A recent CNN report Saturday revealed an unusually high number of babies born with the birth defect anencephaly in a three-county area in the state of Washington. According to the article, between January 2010 and January 2013, Department of Health epidemiologists found 23 reported cases of anencephaly in those areas, which means for every 10,000 live births there were roughly eight cases. Anencephaly is a life-ending birth defect where parts of the infant's brain and skull are missing. The stunning amount of those cases reported is four times higher than the national average, which is about 2 cases per 10,000 lives.

The number of officially endangered species in Turkey now stands at 179, according to a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Major threats to wildlife include illegal hunting, pollution and overbuilding. Tolga Baştak, president of WWF-Turkey, sent a press release to Turkish media on Monday in honor of World Wildlife Day, established by the UN General Assembly last December to “celebrate the many beautiful and varied forms of wild fauna and flora and to raise awareness of the multitude of benefits that conservation provides to people.” Baştak stated that wildlife in Turkey is in need of human protection because it “is increasingly trapped in confined spaces as human domains expand.” Cranes, dolphins, grouper fish, reed cats and sea turtles are among the most endangered species in Turkey, the report says.

WHEREAS managed hives, wild bees and native pollinators are integral and irreplaceable as pollinators in agriculture and in the natural environment;

WHEREAS the economic health of crop and livestock agriculture – which contributes 8% of Canada’s total GDP – ultimately relies upon a healthy population of pollinators;

WHEREAS neonicotinoid-based insecticides have been subject to moratoriums in other jurisdictions due to the conclusive links to bee deaths;

WHEREAS the systemic mode of action of neonicotinoids means that conventional risk mitigation measures – including causing farmers to modify seeding machinery and planting practices – may impose additional costs on farmers while not protecting pollinators from harm;

BE IT RESOLVED that the Liberal Party of Canada call for the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) to suspend immediately its registration of all neonicotinoid-based compounds, resulting in an immediate moratorium on the sale and use of this class of technology in Canada;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that pollinator health – including test methodologies to more accurately assess the impact of systemic insecticides – become a more prominent criterion of subsequent registration reviews for new agricultural pesticides;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that a Liberal Government contribute scientific leadership in securing the future global vitality of pollinators in collaboration with other countries and the UN-Agricultural Development and Food Security Organization to support the research and monitoring that are needed to improve information on the status of pollinators and establish a framework for conservation and restoration of pollinator species within two years.

Liberal Party of Canada (Ontario)

A former member of the editorial board of Food and Chemical Toxicology, the journal that published and then retracted the Séralini study on GM maize and Roundup, has written a letter to the editor of the journal condemning the retraction. He writes, "Your decision which can be interpreted as a will to eliminate scientific information that does not help supporting industrial interests is, in my view, unacceptable." Meanwhile 129 scientists have signed a statement opposing the retraction of the Séralini study. If you're a scientist and agree with the statement, please add your signature:
http://www.endsciencecensorship.org/en/page/Statement#signed-by
In a separate initiative, a statement against the retraction and pledging to boycott Elsevier, which publishes FCT, has been signed by over 1200 scientists:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Open_letter_to_FCT_and_Elsevier.php#form
We've been contacted by several scientists who told us that they have withdrawn their manuscripts from the review and/or publication process at Elsevier journals in solidarity with Prof Séralini's team. Some of these manuscripts had already been accepted for publication.

The effect of the insecticide Tanrec® at concentrations of 3.0 × 10–7, 3.0 ×10–2, and 3.0 × 10–1 mg/L (as of imidacloprid) on Daphnia magna Straus has been studied. An acute toxic effect of this insecticide at a concentration of 3.0 × 10–1 mg/L and a depressive effect at concentrations of 3.0 × 10–2 mg/L and 3.0 × 10–7 have been revealed. A damaging effect of Tanrec was revealed during the stage of early development of studied crustaceans. This effect was manifested in the inhibition of the growth of oocytes, abnormal functioning of the intestine, retardation of body growth, and pathological changes in tissues.

A new study from the U.S. Geological Survey, accepted for publication online ahead of print in the journal Enviromental Toxicology and Chemistry, titled, "Pesticides in Mississippi air and rain: A comparison between 1995 and 2007,"[i] reveals that Roundup herbicide (aka glyphosate) and its still-toxic degradation byproduct AMPA were found in over 75% of the air and rain samples tested from Mississippi in 2007. The researchers evaluated a wide range of pesticides currently being used through weekly composite air and rain sampling collected during the 1995 and 2007 growing seasons in the Mississippi Delta agricultural region.

Neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism, attention-defi cit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and other cognitive impairments, affect millions of children worldwide, and some diagnoses seem to be increasing in frequency. Industrial chemicals that injure the developing brain are among the known causes for this rise in prevalence. In 2006, we did a systematic review and identified five industrial chemicals as developmental neurotoxicants: lead, methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, and toluene. Since 2006, epidemiological studies have documented six additional developmental neurotoxicants—manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers. We postulate that even more neurotoxicants remain undiscovered. To control the pandemic of developmental neurotoxicity, we propose a global prevention strategy. Untested chemicals should not be presumed to be safe to brain development, and chemicals in existing use and all new chemicals must therefore be tested for developmental neurotoxicity.

To minimize risks of cancer and other chronic diseases, a healthy diet includes lots of fruits and vegetables. Growing many of these foods requires pollination by bees, but bees are dying en masse – this is called “colony collapse.” Top of the list of suspect causes is a group of chemicals known as neonicotinoid (literally “new, nicotine-like”) insecticides. Canadian beekeepers, such as those in Ontario, see ample evidence that these insecticides kill bees. Neonicotinoids don’t stay in one place – they are mobile in the environment, and pollinators ingest the pesticide from pollen and water. Henk Tennekes and Pierre Mineau, have demonstrated falling insect and associated bird populations with current use of neonicotinoids in Europe and North America respectively. Neonicotinoids degrade very slowly (breakdown products persist for years), and thus are continually building up in the environment, with some breakdown products even more toxic than the original chemical. Breakdown is very complex, as illustrated by Bayer’s information on imidacloprid. According to the US National Toxicology Program summary, the breakdown product, 2-chloropyridine, has no known environmental breakdown pathway, is very stable, is mutagenic, and has the characteristics of a carcinogen. Every molecule of the pesticide creates a molecule of 2-chloropyridine.