Search Results for: food

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union’s Scientific Steering Committee – the body offering the European Commission expert advice on food safety issues – has held its final meeting, six years after its creation. Its functions are to be taken over by the new European Food Safety Authority.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WITH negotiators failing this Monday to agree liberalisation targets for the World Trade Organisation’s three years old agricultural talks – missing a March 31 deadline – member governments are facing a stiff challenge.

They have until the WTO’s next ministerial summit at Cancun, Mexico, in September, to strike a deal or face potential chaos at this meeting.…

BY MARK ROWE
SINGAPORE is to set up what it is hailing as the world’s first specialist retailing school. The Retail Academy of Singapore will aim to improve local standards by offering up to 23,000 shop and store staff courses on consumer behaviour, merchandising, management, fashion, food, supermarket economies of scale and information technology.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A MOVE by European Union (EU) health and consumer affairs Commissioner David Byrne to kick-start preparations to lift the five year de-facto moratorium on genetically modified organism imports into the EU has been blocked by Germany, France, Greece, Belgium, Luxembourg and Austria.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SOME eastern European countries applying for EU membership need to work harder to reform their food sectors, said a European Commission report. Slovakia, Slovenia and Latvia are highlighted as having won foreign investment though.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UN Food and Agricultural Organisation has released a series of papers on genetically modified food, with a memorandum on fish highlighting the significant commercial opportunities to fish farmers, but also the potential dire environmental after effects of escapes by GM fish.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union’s Scientific Steering Committee has approved two new rapid BSE post-mortem tests that will widen the choice of checks available to environmental health authorities seeking to control the disease. The European Commission said that they were “comparable to already approved tests…(and)… should help to create more competition in the field.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INTERNATIONAL team of experts has successfully controlled a newly discovered species of parasitic wasp that was threatening to destroy the Lebanon’s iconic cedar woodlands, descended from Levantine forests probably walked by Jesus Christ. From Biblical times to the Nineteenth Century, much of the steep Mount Lebanon range that towers over the eastern Mediterranean was cloaked in ancient cedars.…

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 KEITH NUTHALL
The European Parliament’s environment committee has voted to recommend the continued withholding of some 2.18 million euros (about pounds 1.4 million) from the budget of the new European Food Safety Agency in spite of a complaint by the EFSA executive director that the agency’s work is being severely restricted by lack of funds.…