In a bizarre move, British pharmaceuticals and beauty products group Alliance Boots has withdrawn from the Ethical Trading Initiative.

The ETI is a retail industry-recognized commitment to ethical trading standards designed to ban suppliers from using child or forced labour.

There is no press release on the Boots website explaining the move. The company's 2007 corporate social responsibility report made it clear that the company was working to expand its supplier reviews in accordance with ETI standards. The report that came out a year later did not mention the ETI at all.

Boots, previously a FTSE 100 company, was bought by private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in April 2007. Union groups and campaigners are suggesting that the withdrawal from the ETI commitment has been driven by its new owners, a suggestion that Boots has apparently denied. Earlier this month KKR posted a $1.19bn (£722m) loss for 2008.

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So, at last, Celebrity gets into the ethical-food movement, in Britain at any rate, with such luminaries as Greta Scacchi and Richard E. Grant posing nude with large fish as part of the British publicity campaign for the documentary "End of the Line."  Which means that concerns about the food supply-chain are becoming rather zeitgeisty.  I just hope that the public's attention can be not just caught, as it was with the famous PETA anti-fur campaign of the 1980's, but that it can be held awhile, until, say, actual solutions are found.  Also that Stephen Fry, a passionate ethical-fish Twitterer, eschews baring his flesh for the cause.

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According to Human Rights Everywhere, there is widespread evidence of "forced displacement, assassinations, property invasion" as Colombia grows its palm-based biofuels industry.  Paramilitary forces are alleged to be taking land forcibly from subsistence-farming communities in order to turn it over to biodiesel producers, who convert it the land to palm plantations.  The UN has suspended its investment in Colombian biofuels, but so far Colombia has escaped the kind of international scrutiny that Brazil's ethanol production has undergone recently.

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Fast-food chain Pret-A-Manger has declared an end to bluefin and yellowfin tuna in its sandwiches and salads.  Beginning in August, they'll switch to line-caught (as opposed to net-caught) skipjack tuna, which is more plentiful and also more expensive, because of its lower-intensity fishing method.  This decision comes in the wake of founder Julian Metcalfe's viewing of the new documentary expose of the fishing industry, End of the Line, which he said opened his eyes to the unsustainability of Pret's tuna policy.

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A great profile from the Womens Feature Service about Kalpona Akter, the head of the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity (BCWS).

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A new survey by IBM Global Business Services found that companies concerned about supply chain issues are seldom collecting the data they need.

Some 29% of businesses weren't collecting any data at all. 80% of companies are not collecting data on carbon or water use.

The survey also found that 37% of companies had never asked their customers what kind of supply chain sustainability information they wanted.

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Leaders from the food-packaging and chemical industries met this week in secret, hammering out a media strategy for the promotion and defense of BPA.   You know, bisphenol-A, the endocrine-disrupting chemical that is now known to be a contributor toward various cancers, heart disease,  and diabetes, particularly in infants and young children, and yet is widely found in baby bottles and most canned goods.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel obtained documents from the meeting that outlined the thinking of its participants.  Basically, the group discussed the fact that science won't come to the industry's defense, because the only studies that are favorable to BPA are industry-sponsored studies, which, for some reason, the media won't buy; so they turned their attention to ways they could hoodwink or frighten the publc. 

Strategies discussed: 

• suggesting that BPA is the only way to keep canned food from contamination;
• suggesting that the end of BPA means the end of canned foods, and therefore, an undue burden on poor minorities;
• suggesting that the end of BPA means the end of baby food;
• suggesting that the replacement for BPA will be even worse; and, my personal favorite:
• hiring a pregnant woman to be the spokesperson for BPA.

The group agreed to spend $500,000 to survey Americans to gauge public attitudes about BPA and canned foods, so they may come up with more "creative" solutions to their problem yet.

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This morning I'm listening to an excellent radio interview: Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau talks with Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food.  They talk about the American food system including the treatment of animals and the omnipresence of corn, and about eating "food, not too much, mostly plants,"  as opposed to "edible food-like substances."  Pollan's rule: if your grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, it probably isn't.  Good stuff.

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A new documentary by director Rupert Murray follows journalist Charles Clover as he travels the world investigating the state of the world's ocean fisheries.  His findings are dire: an end to seafood by 2048 if current practices continue.

So, grim facts, stern warnings, and adventure on the high seas.  Should make for good viewing.

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The 2005 Energy Policy Act contained a nice loophole for natural gas companies, exempting a practice known as hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" from the Safe Drinking Water Act, thus allowing the companies to pump unspecified chemicals mixed with water into the ground in search of natural gas depsosits.  There's widespread concern--and not a little anecdotal evidence--that the practice is polluting drinking water supplies and wreaking environmental havoc all over the US. 

Environmental groups are pressuring Congress to take action and regulate fracking, which, obviously, industry is strongly against.  They argue that regulation should be--and is being--performed by the states, and any Federal regulation would be unduly burdensome. 

Considering that none of the states are paying particular attention to this issue, and that state budgets typically don't have the resources to enforce what regulations they have on their books, it would appear that the natural gas industry has been benefiting from artificially low operational costs for several years, not having to pay attention to any regulations whatsoever. 

For a quick audio story of the fracking issue, here's yesterday's NPR story.

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