Livestock

• Traditionally BSF breeding is a major bottleneck in industrial scale insect protein production, requiring unique bio-expertise to tackle inherent colony instabilities and technological gaps.
• By eliminating these industry constraints, PauseM® not only promotes sector growth but also facilitates scaling of the global insect protein industry.
• FreezeM takes the breeding hurdle out of the equation, streamlining insect protein production and making it more efficient and accessible from new entrants to veteran market players.
• Our technology unleashes the insect market from its shackles and will propel the insect protein market to fulfill its true potential," said Dr. Yuval Gilad, Co-founder and CEO of FreezeM.

• The numbers involved are just as despairing.
• The world’s major authority on food insecurity, the IPC Famine Review Committee, estimates that 90% of Gazans – some 2.08 million people – are facing acute food insecurity.
• Indeed, of the people facing imminent starvation in the world today, an estimated 95% are in Gaza.
• As an expert in Palestinian public health, I fear the situation may not have hit its nadir.

Putting Palestinians ‘on a diet’

• But food insecurity in Gaza and the mechanisms that enable it did not start with Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack.
• Multiple factors contributed to this food insecurity, not least the blockade of Gaza imposed by Israel and enabled by Egypt since 2007.
• Basic foodstuff was allowed, but because of delays at the border, it can spoil before it enters Gaza.

• By placing restrictions on food imports, Israel seems to be trying to put pressure on Hamas by making life difficult for the people in Gaza.
• In the words of one Israeli government adviser in 2006, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” To enable this, the Israeli government commissioned a 2008 study to work out exactly how many calories Palestinians would need to avoid malnutrition.
• The blockade also increased food insecurity by preventing meaningful development of an economy in Gaza.

Hampering self-sufficency

• Gaza’s fishermen are regularly shot at by Israeli gunboats if they venture farther in the Mediterranean Sea than Israel permits.
• Because the fish closer to the shore are smaller and less plentiful, the average income of a fisherman in Gaza has more than halved since 2017.
• By early December 2023, an estimated 22% of agricultural land had been destroyed, along with factories, farms, and water and sanitation facilities.

Starvation as weapon of war

• The use of starvation is strictly forbidden under the Geneva Conventions, a set of statutes that govern the laws of warfare.
• Human Rights Watch has already accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war, and as such it accuses the Israeli government of a war crime.
• Yet untangling what Israel’s intentions may be – whether it is using starvation as a weapon of war, to force mass displacement, or if, as it claims, it is simply a byproduct of war – does little for the people on the ground in Gaza.

Yara M. Asi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• SAN DIEGO, Feb. 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Blacksmith Medicines, Inc. (Blacksmith), a leading biopharma dedicated to discovering and developing medicines targeting metalloenzymes, and Zoetis, the world's leading animal health company, announced today a collaboration to discover and develop novel antibiotics for animal health.
• Blacksmith and Zoetis will collaborate to discover and develop novel antibiotics to selectively target bacteria for animal health," said Zachary Zimmerman, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Blacksmith.
• "As part of our commitment to reduce the dependency on antibiotic classes shared with human health, we are pleased to leverage our veterinary expertise along with our extensive collection of pathogens in this collaboration with Blacksmith," said Dr. Jeff Watts, Research Director, External Innovation at Zoetis.
• "Through our research, we aim to ultimately provide new options for our customers to treat life-threatening infections in livestock."

• MUKILTEO, Wash., Feb. 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Award-winning food-recycling system Mill received formal approval last week from the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) to distribute their recycled chicken feed ingredient in Washington State, marking the first time a chicken feed ingredient made from recovered household food scraps has been approved for commercial distribution in the United States.
• Mill's breakthrough approach prevents food waste by closing the loop from fork to farm, making it easy for people at home to incorporate uneaten food scraps back into the food system.
• Mill makes it easy for people at home to recycle food scraps back into the food system.
• Today, Americans throw out over 44 million pounds of food annually while around 30% of the world's arable land is used to grow food for livestock .