Search Results for: China

BY DEIRDRE MASON
THE WORLD is waking up to biofuels, increasingly produced from food crops and their waste by-products, and now one of the growing energy alternatives to conventional fossil fuels. As prices for traditional energy rise year on year, and energy watchers warn of oil production peaking around 2010, governments are looking towards food producers to grow the raw feedstock for the fuel of the twenty-first century.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INSURANCE industry will wait attentively for the responses due in May to formal requests made this week by the European Commission for its World Trade Organisation (WTO) partners to liberalise their financial sectors.

These notes were made within the WTO’s Doha Development Round’s talks on services, which are in technical terms more advanced than the other portions of the negotiations.…

BY TAMARA VANTROYEN, in Hong Kong

CHINA looks to be a likely candidate for the first country in the world to approve genetically modified rice, despite the fact that the State Agricultural GM Crop Biosafety Committee, a technical body which evaluates GM rice for research, did not approve the idea at its three-day meeting in Beijing, December 10-12, 2005.…

BY MARK ROWE

CHINA has spent the past 15 years playing catch-up with the developed world by building skyscrapers and demolishing its old hutongs and alleyways. It has been accused by cultural organisations of taking the view that, in order to justify its existence everything must have an economic means and end.…

BY TAMARA VANTROYEN, in Hong Kong

HONG Kong’s higher education system’s gradual move away from the British system of education to one that is more aligned with the US and mainland China models, is leading to a proliferation of associate degrees (ADs) springing up in Hong Kong.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A BAN on imports into the European Union (EU) on poultry meat or poultry from Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, China, Vietnam, Pakistan and Malaysia has been extended until this September, because of concerns that bird flu is still present in these countries.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH, in Taipei

TAIWAN’S leading expert on transmissible diseases, Dr. Mei-Shang Ho, says that she is reasonably confident that the national surveillance system she helped design "will be able to catch anything which comes along" regarding threats to the island’s current bird flu status, despite being in the region where the disease is most common.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed that a Euro 3,479 per tonne anti-dumping duty on coumarin imports from China is extended to shipments from India or Thailand to prevent Chinese exporters illegally diverting this additive to avoid the tariff.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE CANADIAN tobacco industry is poised on the brink of major change, with the country’s manufacturers considering comprehensive leaf import programmes that could undermine the sustainability of the country’s domestic growing sector.

This change is being lead by the country’s largest cigarette manufacturer, Imperial Tobacco Canada, which outlined a proposal in the spring of 2004 that would alter the current two-tiered pricing system for domestic and exported tobacco leaf in the 2005/2006 season.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
GLOBAL tea production in 2003 reached a record high of 3.15 million tonnes, 75,000 tonnes more than in 2002, and although traded tea fell by 2.6% to 1.4 million tonnes, prices remained stable, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).…