Archive

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED States and Mexico have headed off a poultry trade row. Under NAFTA, standard Mexican tariffs on US poultry exports were scrapped on January 1. However, Mexico feared an export boom and threatened to invoke its right to impose safeguard tariffs on all US chicken.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
INDIAN chicken producers, already been hit by a poultry price fall, are now facing another problem: a rise in the price in their principal feed, maize. There is a particular problem in the south, where the Tamil Nadu’s maize crop could be 50 per cent of earlier projections because of the failure of the country’s northeast monsoon.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE CHAIRMAN of the World Trade Organisation’s agriculture talks has proposed binding liberalisation targets for member governments. In his first draft of a ‘modalities’ agreement that would set these goals, Stuart Harbinson, of Hong Kong, has suggested, for instance, that all agricultural tariffs greater than 90 per cent should be cut by an average of 60 per cent, with a minimum cut of 45 per cent per tariff line.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Parliament’s environment committee has attacked the lifting of tight import restrictions imposed on Vietnamese poultry exports into the European Union because of concerns about the use of controlled anti-biotics. MEP’s accused the European Commission of acting without adequately checking whether nitrofurans were still being widely used by Vietnamese poultry producers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) Council of Ministers has banned all imports of bovine fresh meat into the EU from Paraguay, because of alleged serious problems regarding the south Americans’ control and supervision of Foot and Mouth Disease outbreaks in their country.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FARMERS may know them as the high priests of capitalism and expect them to preach against agricultural subsidies, but a recent report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has laid bare doubts that a truly effective farm support system has yet been invented, let alone implemented.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FARMING may be becoming increasingly high-tech, but somehow, it still seems rather odd to couple digging potatoes with launching shiny satellites into orbit around the Earth. But, in fact – as many British farmers well know – space technology has offered useful services to agriculture and will increasingly do so in the future.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
ASIAN Paints (Lanka) Ltd., the Sri Lanka operation of the India-based multinational coating giant, is offering free insurance to professional painters who choose to use its products. They will be offered a comprehensive accident insurance scheme that could pay up to SL Rupees 250,000 (US$2,580) in compensation per painter.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN Union (EU) funded project has been launched, which will support the restructuring of Macedonia’s steel sector. This Euro 500,000 technical assistance project is being managed by the EU’s European Agency for Reconstruction, which is helping to rebuild the war-damaged economy of the southern Balkans.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Bank is developing a Regional Integration Assistance Strategy to remove obstacles to trade within six central African countries that would particularly promote commerce in the area’s rich metal reserves. Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon would benefit from five years of support, leading to road construction and improvement, the modernisation and integration of the financial sector, and by speeding ports and customs transactions.…