Agriculture, Beverages & Food

Some 150 Thai workers on a Del Monte pineapple plantation in Hawaii will get $1.2 million to settle allegations of sub-standard working conditions. The lawsuit was filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against seven companies including Global Horizons, a labor recruiter from Los Angeles. Read More

Flower growers in Kenya have gone on strike to protest unpaid wages from Karuturi Global, the Indian flower export multinational. The strike is the latest in a series of problems that have caused the company share price to plummet from over Rs39 in 2008 to Rs0.63 in mid-September 2013. Read More

Fonterra, a New Zealand company and the world's largest dairy exporter, has apologized for exporting a milk formula ingredient contaminated with potentially toxic bacteria. The incident comes six years after a company subsidiary in China sold contaminated baby milk formula that killed six infants and made thousands more ill. Read More

Ethiopian Sugar Corporation is benefiting from forced resettlement of pastoral people in the Lower Omo Valley - a United Nations cultural heritage site - to make way for new sugar plantations and factories, according to a new report from the Oakland Institute. Read More

Cargill, the world's largest food company, has been secretly amassing land from small farmers in eastern Colombia, despite a law prohibiting the practice. When the two countries signed a free trade agreement last year, Cargill emerged as the owner of 52,574 hectares where it grows corn and soybeans. Read More

Monsanto has refused to testify at a major government hearing about the development and sale of seeds in Puerto Rico. At stake is the research that the company conducts into genetic engineering on the island that critics say threaten the environment and can cause serious human health problems. Read More

Farmers in North Carolina are regretting the day that they put their trust in the Egg King - Oleg Bakhmatyuk - a billionaire agricultural investor from the Ukraine. Over 100 farmers are suing a subsidiary of his global empire for almost $10 million for reneging on chicken sales contracts. Read More

Does Monsanto own all future generations of genetically modified seeds that it sells? The Missouri-based agribusiness giant wants farmers to pay a royalty to plant any seed that descended from a patented original. The legal decision has ramifications for other patented "inventions" that reproduce themselves like strands of DNA. Read More

Addax Bioenergy, a Swiss energy company, is jeopardizing the livelihoods of thousands of subsistence farmers in order to export ethanol made from sugarcane grown in Sierra Leone, according to the Sierra Leone Network on the Right to Food and Brot Für Alle, an NGO based in Switzerland. Read More

Associated British Foods (ABF), a UK company that makes Silver Spoon sugar, pays almost no taxes on its profitable Zambian sugar subsidiary, according to a new ActionAid report. The authors allege ABF has avoided estimated taxes of $27 million since 2007, enough to put 48,000 Zambian children in school. Read More