Europe is edging slowly towards GM acceptance, according to Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant, who underscored the continent's strategic importance and said his company is laying the groundwork should a policy-change come to pass.

Grant's comments, reported in the St Louis Post-Dispatch, were made at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York yesterday.

The newspaper cited Grant as saying Monsanto does not count on broad regulatory approvals in its financial projections, but the at the company is "laying the groundwork to take advantage of policy change if one should come".

The burgeoning use of cereals and other commodities to satisfy appetite for biofuels could keep food prices high for the next decade, says the FAO, impacting developing countries, the urban poor, and farmers' livelihoods.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) last week published its latest Agricultural Outlook 2007-2016, in partnership with the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD).

It said that while the recent price hikes in farm commodity prices are due to temporary factors like drought...

The European Commission has pledged €38.9m in support of projects to promote European agricultural products to consumers in the face of a global open market, including organics, dairy, fruit and veg and honey.

The funding represents half of the total budget of €77.7m from programmes in 11 member states - Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Greece, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Austria, Poland and the Portugal.

Mariann Fischer Boel, commissioner for agriculture and rural development, drew attention to the diversity of EU products.

If the British government imposes a "carefully targeted fat tax" on food, over 3,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease could be prevented every year, UK academics have said.

"The potential changes in nutrition that would result from an extension of VAT to further categories of food are modest," wrote lead author Oliver Mytton in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

However, given the high incidence of cardiovascular disease and the acknowledged contributory role of dietary salt and fat, inducing even small changes in diet has ...

Mitsubishi Corporation is to form a new diversified food science company by amalgamating three of its subsidiaries, in order to strengthen its R&D capabilities and expand globally by combining customer bases and sales networks.

Mitsubishi Corporation (MC) is Japan's largest general trading company, with operations in 80 countries and comprising 500 group companies.

he new company, expected to be established on August 1 under the name Mitsubishi Shoji Food Tech company, is a move that should allow it to pack a weightier punch...

French president Nicolas Sarkozy has reinforced his position that the outcome of trade talks must be in the interests of French farmers, and if they are not he plans to veto them.

Sarkozy''s latest remarks came during an address to farmers in the north of France yesterday.

They follow remarks made during a press conference in Brussels last week, at which the newly-elected leader said he would not "sell" his country's farmers and exhorted all sides in the trade negotiations to make equal and opposite compromises.