Farm safety

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Danger lurks around the corner

Fairly often a farm is not only the place where a family works, but it is also the place where a family lives.

This means that every member of the family is continuously exposed to the dangers of an environment where machines, chemicals, livestock and animal faeces are constantly present.

Two categories are at particular risk: children and elderly people.
Children often help out with the chores and, furthermore, they find the farm a wonderful playground. They are thus exposed to many dangers.

Kuopio Declaration: committed to safety

The Kuopio Declaration is two years old: on 23 August 2006 the 45 participants in the Nordic Meeting on Agricultural Occupational Health agreed to sign a joint declaration in which they reported the dangers of the agricultural industry and the increase of fatal injuries in Nordic countries, while proposing a series of actions to improve the situation.

On the occasion of the second anniversary of the Declaration we interviewed Peter Lundqvist, professor at the Department of Work Science, Business Economics and Environmental Psychology of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences at Alnarp.

Press clippings can help reduce agricultural accidents

According to information from the University of Iowa Great Plains Center for Agricultural Health (USA), press clippings help researchers categorize agricultural injuries and illnesses, which helps plan out new health and safety measures.

The Center began collecting clippings from across the US in 2002, scaled back to just four states (Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska) for a couple years, then decided to expand in 2007 to collect clippings for all 9-states of the upper Midwest: Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

FAO World Food Security Summit: any positive results?

The FAO World Food Security Summit was held in Rome from 3 to 5 June 2008.
After three days of meetings, the delegates of the 181 countries taking part in the event have drawn up a final declaration calling on the right to food. But not everyone is completely satisfied about the results.

Although the financial resources to fight hunger and boost agriculture in the countries hardly hit by the food crisis have been renewed, NGOs organizations do not approve the declaration stating that it only re-confirms the commitment that governments had already agreed on, but does not provide any specific guidelines. As a matter of fact, it is not clear how the financial aid will be spent in order to contain the food and energy crisis.

GAS Forum I at the Casa del Cinema (Rome, Italy)

Gas Forum I, the first Global Agricultural Safety Forum, will be held on 25 September 2008 in Rome, in the beautiful context of the Casa del Cinema, the first House of Cinema to be inaugurated in a Western capital city.

The Casa del Cinema is a 2,500 sq. m. venue hosted in the historical Casina delle Rose in Villa Borghese, one of Rome’s main parks, only 50 metres from via Veneto. The building has been entirely restored by the Municipality of Rome and boasts a superb 124-seat cinema theatre created by Deluxe and a smaller conference room (Sala Kodak, with 64 seats).

The Forum will take place in the Deluxe theatre and will be divided in two (morning and afternoon) sessions.

More information is available on the GAS Forum website.

Casa del cinema website (in Italian)