FDA Guidance on Animal Antibiotics Concerns Pork Producers

The National Pork Producers Council has concerns about the impact of the implementation of U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidance on the use of antibiotics in livestock and poultry production. The group says the expected loss of and restricted access to products will likely disproportionately affect small producers, have a negative effect on animal health and increase the cost of producing food without improving public health. The FDA guidance issued Wednesday which was first proposed in June 2010, calls for antibiotics that are medically important to humans only be used in animals when necessary to assure their health.
 

Bob Ford, Executive Director of the North Carolina Poultry Federation says that as far as poultry production is concerned, it’s largely a non-issue:

“Today we are using less antibiotics in the poultry industry. We have found ways to substitute keep them healthy and productive and get the birds to market. It shouldn’t affect us as much today as it would have twenty years ago.” 

Meteorologist Says La Nina is Dead
 

La Nina has passed away – according to USDA Meteorologist Mark Brusberg:

“Sea surface temperatures that they monitor in the Pacific are now within half a degree of normal.”

La Nina is cooler than normal temperatures and El Nino is warmer than normal temperatures – but Brusberg says current temperatures are completely neutral:

“The trend in the models have it staying neutral to going into an El Nino by the end of this calendar year. It still is anybody’s guess.”

El Nino typically brings mild, dry weather to the northern U.S. and wetter weather in the southern part of the country – but Brusberg says the pattern isn’t necessarily followed every year. 
 

MF Global Trustee Has Plans to Return Millions to Customers

An MF Global trustee’s plan to return millions of dollars to MF Global customers will not force them to give up claims against unknown parties or hold them to other undefined conditions according to court papers filed by trustee James Giddens in Manhattan bankruptcy court earlier this week. This planned distribution to customers will provide a return of about 80-percent for some.
 

Food Aid Reform in the 2012 Farm Bill Needs Serious Attention
 

As the Senate Ag Committee prepares to write its version of the 2012 Farm Bill later this month – international relief and development organization Oxfam America released a satirical online video and TV ad Thursday to mobilize support for reform to food aid programs. The video’s message – when kids play with their food – it’s cute. When Washington does – it costs lives. Oxfam’s Director of Policy and Research Gawain Kripke says regulations ripe for reform include rules that prevent food aid from being purchased from the most cost effective and efficient sources, mandates that require food to be shipped on U.S. flagged vessels and programs which dump U.S.-grown food in development country markets to pay for aid projects…

Kripke says the reforms sought by Oxfam would save taxpayers 500-million dollars a year and get life-saving food aid to an additional 17-million people.