Greenpeace

Responding to pressure from the environmental group Greenpeace, the world’s largest tuna supplier, Thai Union, has announced a series of initiatives designed to improve its fishing practices and protect workers from abuses. Thai Union owns the popular brands Chicken of the Sea and Sealect.

Pesticide manufacturers Syngenta and Bayer appear to have secreted away studies that showed their pesticides did serious harm to honeybees, rather than revealing the results to the public. After Greenpeace obtained the studies from the EPA through the Freedom of Information Act, scientists are calling on the two companies to operate with more transparency, says The Guardian.

Foodservice giants Sodexo USA, Compass Group USA, and Aramark earned top scores in the Greenpeace report, “Sea of Distress,” which graded 15 major contract-management companies and distributors on their policies around sustainable seafood.

With avocado prices on the rise and American demand booming, Mexican farmers are cutting down trees to plant the fruit. “Avocado trees flourish at about the same altitude and climate as the pine and fir forests in the mountains of Michoacan, the state that produces most of Mexico’s avocados,” says The Seattle Times.

A prominent fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, Ray Hillborn, is accused by Greenpeace of failing to disclose funding from the fishing industry in several scientific papers dating back to 2006, says the NPR blog The Salt. The environmental group calls Hillborn a "denier of over-fishing."

A widely used insecticide, the neonicotinoid imidacloprid, "does not significantly harm honey bee colonies at real-world doses," contrary to concerns that neonics, as they are called, are to blame for population declines, says a University of Maryland study.