Search Results for: Australia

BY MARK ROWE
THE FIRST meeting of the world’s five largest sugar exporters has agreed to co-ordinate efforts to boost prices in the commodity’s international market from current record lows. Meeting in Bangkok, representatives of Thailand, Australia, Brazil, South Africa and Guatemala agreed to speed up co-operation and seek to lift world prices without raising domestic retail prices.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
SOME four years after they began, negotiations for a deal over a geographical indication register for traditionally made wines and spirits are entering a decisive phase at the World Trade Organisation. The talks have taken so long because there is a fundamental difference in approach between new world producers led by the US who want such a register to amount to no more than a kind of voluntary data-base and the Europeans who see it as a means of ensuring world-wide legal protection for traditional appellations.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Union is facing growing opposition at the World Trade Organisation to its stance on geographical indications, where it refuses to grant protection to traditional regional names of drinks and food products from non-EU countries, unless their governments roughly copy Europe’s own rules.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has released detailed information about pharmaceutical industry mutual recognition agreements struck between the European Union and the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These trade-enabling regulations are available at http://pharmacos.eudra.org/F2/mra/doc/mraeccan.pdf;

http://pharmacos.eudra.org/F2/mra/doc/mraecus.pdf;

http://pharmacos.eudra.org/F2/mra/doc/mraeccau.pdf; and

http://pharmacos.eudra.org/F2/mra/doc/mraecnz.pdf…

BY ALAN OSBORN
FRANCE, Italy, Spain and Portugal are blocking a move by the European Commission to allow the import into the EU of Australian wine flavoured by the addition of oak chips. This is a faster and cheaper process than the traditional method of ageing wine in oak barrels.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
CANADIAN wine producers have welcomed a draft agreement on a wide-ranging wine and spirits industry deal with the EU, believing that once formally signed, it will put Canadian wines “on the world stage.” EU agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler said earlier this month (April) that for the EU the deal “presented certain advantages, (particularly) the ending by Canada of the use of certain names, the protection of geographical names, a positive list of oenological practices and a list of prohibited practices.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AUSTRALIAN wine imports treated with sawdust and oak chips to maximise their oaky flavours are likely to be admitted to the European Union (EU) permanently, even though the practice is currently banned for EU wine makers.

Negotiations between the European Commission and the Australian government on allowable wine making practices are – said a Brussels memorandum – subject to “smooth progress.”…

BY JONATHAN THOMSON, in Newcastle, England, MATTHEW BRACE, in Brisbane and RICHARD HURST, in Johannesburg
ASK a human to find a needle in a haystack and they would probably spend five minutes at the most sifting through the stalks, then get bored and walk away.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union has launched disputes proceedings at the World Trade Organisation, claiming that Australian quarantine proceedings for food import, especially meat, break WTO free trade rules. Brussels is particularly concerned about the “extremely long and complex risk assessment procedures” imposed on exports to Australia.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
INDIA, Thailand, Pakistan, New Zealand, Australia and nine other countries in south and south-east Asia are to better control foot-and-mouth disease, by strengthening links between national laboratories. Notably, a new regional reference laboratory in Thailand will be established, sending out affordable test kits to countries that cannot usually afford them.…