These 3 stories caught my eye recently as I revived my Flipboard Ethical Food magazine.

 Celebrating Isabel Uriarte, A Fair Trade Hero

She is a founder and one of the 1,458 members of the CECANOR cooperative. After earning the Fair Trade certification, the cooperative gained access to international markets, better prices and wages and the protections of Fair Trade standards. Check out the full piece on her here.

Fairtrade is not complex – reworking the share of the price of the end product to ensure that the growers are treated fairly – like equal human beings in the supply chain. This is an ongoing battle in almost every product category and involves little or no sacrifice in the developed consumers markets and massive improvements in the growing countries.

Matthew Corrin hopes to fuel the growth of likeminded food entrepreneurs

Love to see this in Europe (unless it already is?) – a healthy food startup incubator kicked off by a partnership between the founder of Freshii and a Toronto consulting firm. See the article I picked it up in here or click on the image above to go the incubator website.

Stunning Difference – GM V non GM corn grown side by side

From the study:

“It is not surprising that this analysis has been carried out independently; i.e., not by biotech companies. It was done by farmers themselves. The high level of glyphosate is bad enough. Scientific evidence on glyphosate accumulated over three decades documents miscarriages, birth defects, carcinogenesis, endocrine disruption, DNA damage, neurotoxicity, and toxicity to liver and kidney at levels well below recommended agricultural use (see our recent review [2]Why Glyphosate Should Be Banned, SiS 56). The presence of formaldehyde – a genotoxic and neurotoxic poison at such enormous concentration – is totally unexpected.”

These results are scientifically valid and non-trivial. Worth reading for anyone still on the fence about GMO and its role in the future of food. Taken from this article on the ISIS website.

Keith