The USDA reports that investment in agricultural research is declining (since 2009) in high-income countries, particularly in the U.S.

The U.S. share of total agricultural investment in research was 35% in 1960; it fell to 25% in 2013.

What with global problems of hunger, chronic disease, and climate change, shouldn’t we be doing more agricultural research, not less?

The documents

• Agricultural Research Investment and Policy Reform in High-Income Countries
• Summary report
• Amber Waves article, Agricultural Research in High-Income Countries Faces New Challenges as Public Funding Stalls.
• Webinar, Tuesday, June 5, at 1 p.m. EDT.  Registration webinar page.

The industry newsletter,  BeverageDaily.com, offers a collection of recent articles about the beer business.

• Brewers Association: Microbreweries and taprooms are ‘clearly the growth engine of craft’:  The US craft beer industry is seeing most of its current and predicted future growth coming from small-scale operations like local microbreweries and taprooms, a shift away from regional breweries with multi-state distribution footprints, according to the Brewers Association… Read
• Low calorie, vegan and gluten-free beers win favor with millennial consumers: Low-calorie, vegan and gluten-free are likely to be winning attributes for beer brands who want to appeal to millennials, according to GlobalData… Read
• New era of brewing? YCH Hops sees interest around proprietary Cryo Hops:  Cryo Hops, developed by YCH Hops using a patent-pending process, has generated a buzz with brewers as the highly-concentrated ingredient means breweries, in theory, can use half the amount of hops to achieve the same desired beer flavor profiles… Read
• Oskar Blues sees adoption of larger format craft beer packaging on the rise:  After being among the first craft breweries to can its beer nearly 20 years ago, Oskar Blues of Colorado has introduced its latest packaging innovation of 24-can variety packs using collated shrink packaging engineered by The Dow Chemical Company. And the brewer says larger formats like this are now catching on in the craft category… Read
• O-I to close US plant following ‘continued decline of beer’: Owens-Illinois (OI) says it has finalized plans to stop production at its Atlanta, GA, plant on or after July 18… Read
• Japan’s major beer breweries scramble for a place in canned cocktail market:  Traditional beer manufacturers Asahi, Suntory and Kirin are extending their presence into the canned cocktail market… Read
• Irish Distillers acquires craft brewer Eight Degrees Brewing
• Pernod Ricard owned Irish Distillers – a supplier of spirits and wines and producer of Jameson Irish whiskey – has acquired craft brewer Eight Degrees Brewing… Read
• Scotland introduces minimum unit pricing for alcohol: Scotland has become the first country in the world to introduce minimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol, with legislation coming into effect this week… Read
• ‘Optimism and dynamism’ among independent UK brewers: In the UK, 63% of independent brewers say they expect their turnover to increase this year: showing ‘the optimism and dynamism’ of the sector against a backdrop of unprecedented competition and continued dominance of big beer, according to SIBA, the UK’s society of independent brewers… Read
• Corona charm: What can food makers learn from Latin America’s most valuable brand?  Corona leads the throng of beer brands that dominate the 2018 BrandZ Top 50 most valuable Latin American Brands list, and with only three food companies ranked it begs the question: what can industry learn from the likes of Corona and Skol?.. Read
• What – exactly – is ‘alcohol free’?  In Europe, an ‘alcohol-free’ drink is defined as one under 0.5% ABV. In the UK, however, an ‘alcohol-free’ drink must be 0.05% ABV or below. But the UK’s definition could change, with the government currently consulting on new regulations for low alcohol drinks labelling… Read
• Australian alcohol advertising code in need of ‘thorough review’ for failing to protect teens:  Current alcohol advertising regulations in Australia are failing to protect the health and well-being of adolescents, with academics claiming that it is leading to an environment that is ‘not consistent with the responsible marketing spirit’… Read

The World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research have published their third compendium of information about diet and cancer risk.

By this time, their research base is so enormous that it takes them 12,000 pages to cover it.   The summary alone is more than 100 pages.

Consequently, they have created an online toolkit with a matrix for dealing with the information.

The matrix provides an interactive summary of dietary correlates .  Here is a clip from the section on factors that decrease cancer risk, convincingly or probably.

And here is a clip from the section on dietary correlates of increased cancer risk.

On the website, you can click on the bubbles to be directed to pages discussing the evidence for each of these factors.

The bottom line?  Eat your veggies.  Don’t gain excess weight.  Avoid excess alcohol and processed meats.  Be active.

Very handy, this.

The site also provides further information about these particular factors:

• Wholegrains, vegetables and fruit – PDF (2.7MB, 140 pages) | Toolkit.zip (7.4mb)
• Meat, fish and dairy products – PDF (2.5MB, 80 pages) | Toolkit.zip (4.4mb)
• Preservation and processing of foods – PDF (1.3mb, 53 pages) | Toolkit.zip (2.6mb)
• Non-alcoholic drinks – PDF (1.7mb, 64 pages) | Toolkit.zip (2.8mb)
• Alcoholic drinks – PDF (2.6mb, 85 pages) | Toolkit.zip (5.5mb)
• Other dietary exposures – PDF (1.9mb, 74 pages) | Toolkit.zip (3.4mb)
• Physical activity – PDF (1.6mb, 64 pages) | Toolkit.zip (3.8mb)
• Body fatness and weight gain – PDF (2.8mb, 142 pages) | Toolkit.zip (7.7mb)
• Height and birthweight – PDF (1.5mb, 70 pages) | Toolkit.zip (4mb)
• Lactation – PDF (1mb, 33 pages) | Toolkit.zip (1.6mb)

The New York Times describes the enormous gap between the pay of company chief executives and their employees.

Its two printed pages of lists compare CEO total annual compensation (in millions of dollars) to the median pay of employees (in $ thousands).  

Median means half the employees get that amount or more, but the other half gets that amount or less.

I looked for the data on companies that produce, food, beverage, or agricultural products.  I could not find many (where is Coca-Cola?).  Several of the companies of interest—Monsanto, Sysco, and Procter & Gamble, for example—list the pay of the CEOs, but not employees.

Even so, the comparison is striking.  Repeat: CEO pay is in $ millions; worker pay is in $ thousands.

The Times interactive lists provide calculations of the ratios (and its account explains the limitations of these data—part-time work, etc).

If you need quantifiable evidence for income inequality, here it is.

American Farmland Trust has a new report out documenting the rapid loss of farmland to urban and suburban development.

Action Aid USA has videos demonstrating how “Agribusiness Is Devastating to Family Farmers, Rural Communities, and the Environment.”

One of the industry newsletters I read regularly is GlobalMeatNews.com, which occasionally collects articles on specific topics into “special editions.”  This one is about pork.

Still the most-consumed meat in the world, the pork sector is shifting quickly with global markets opening for processors on a weekly basis. In this special newsletter, we look at the lucrative Chinese market that everyone is looking to break into, as well as work being done to tackle diseases in the pork sector.

• Canada heads to China to expand pork and beef exports: Canada is aiming to boost its position in the global meat market by initiating discussions with China in order to strengthen trading relationships and to pursue other opportunities across the agricultural sector… Read
• Chinese pig meat imports slow during first quarter: Chinese pig meat imports declined 10% compared with 2017 levels during the first quarter of this year… Read
• HKScan launches pork exports to China: Finnish processor HKScan has launched pork exports to China from its Forssa production unit… Read
• Access for US pork in Argentina takes a step closer: The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Argentina’s Ministry of Agro-Industry have finalised technical details for US pork to be imported into the South American country… Read
• University study finds growth link between pork and formula-fed infants: The University of Colorado has published a report that supports pork as an important source of protein in an infant’s diet when transitioning to solid foods… Read and see note below.
• Poland’s wall to tackle ASF should have been built four years ago, say meat experts: The Polish Government’s decision to build a 1,200-kilometre-long fence along the country’s eastern border, as a tool to fight African Swine Fever (ASF) by blocking the migration of infected wild boars, has been condemned as too little, too late by Poland’s meat sector… Read
• Supermarkets urged to end poor pig welfare in WAP campaign: World Animal Protection (WAP) has launched a global campaign calling on supermarket chains to source their pork from high-welfare farms… Read

A note on the pork study: it elicited a tirade in the New Food Economy about how so much of nutrition research is correlational and says little about causation.  The writer singles out the pork study as one of three examples of possible misuse of statistics.

Feeding infants puréed pork and increased body length? Trick question. P = 0.001—so something really seems to be happening. But does greater body length in infants actually matter? We’ll let the scientists pursue this one on their own until they come up with something that’s not just statistically significant but meaningful…The point isn’t to prevent you from snacking on prunes and chocolate while you shovel puréed pork into the baby. Do it if you want to, and given the marvelous powers of the placebo effect, you’ll probably be happy you did. But stop treating studies like these as if they contain the truth.

The study, no surprise, was sponsored by NIH but also by the National Pork Board, among other industry groups.  The Pork Board issued a press release: “New Study Finds Pureed Pork Supports Infant Growth.”

The Government Accountability Office reports that

Under the Agricultural Act of 2014 (2014 Farm Bill), each member of a farming operation that is a general partnership can generally receive directly or indirectly up to $125,000 per year through the applicable programs if the member meets eligibility requirements, including being determined to be actively engaged in farming.

The GAO’a full report provides the data for 2015:

For those USDA program payments requiring active engagement in farming, we determined that

• USDA distributed about $2.7 billion in payments to 95,417 entities, such as corporations, general partnerships, joint ventures, and limited liability companies;
• USDA distributed an average of $884,495 in payments to the 50 farming operations receiving the highest payments for 2015; and
• General partnership members’ payments were predominantly based on members’ claimed contributions of combined management and labor (74.6 percent) and management (23.1 percent), while labor was 2.3 percent.

To game this system, it’s best to have many individuals qualifying for maximum payments.  Here’s how that works:

Will the new farm bill, if it ever passes, do a better job of supporting small farmers and fruit-and-vegetable (“specialty crop”) producers?  It doesn’t look like it at this point, alas.