Search Results for: food

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Trade Organisation has agreed to launch a new wide-ranging round of talks on liberalising international commerce, negotiations that will include industrial goods, which will be combined with the ongoing discussions on services and agricultural products.

Ministers at the summit in Doha, Qatar, struck a deal after six days of bargaining, with their task being made achievable by the wide-ranging draft communiqué that was drawn up beforehand.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Trade Organisation has agreed at its ministerial meeting in Qatar, to intensify its ongoing agriculture talks. Ministers ruled that by the end of 2003, member governments should propose formal concessions on quotas, tariffs, subsidies and other trade barriers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CYNICS may look at the hastening political process of allowing eastern European countries, and their large agricultural sectors, into the European Union, and ask, ‘what’s in it for us?’

It’s a good question given that the 10 countries that are at the front of the membership queue, (with the tiny exceptions of Malta and Cyprus), are hardly wealthy.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INTERNATIONAL Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture has been approved by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. Once it is ratified, the treaty will ensure access by all countries to plant genetic resources worldwide, to related knowledge and technologies, plus financing to make use of the agreement.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Trade Organisation is moving towards the launch of a general round at its November summit in Qatar, but these negotiations will only be approved if a wrangle affecting the trade in meat and other food products can be resolved.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN ministers have reached “political agreement” on a proposed directive designed to harmonise the EU’s widely different national rules covering the sale of food supplements sold in special doses, in pills, capsules and sachets, such as orange vitamin C tablets.…

KEITH NUTHALL
A STREAMLINED system for removing faulty non-food items from shops across the European Union, where goods have been shown to be a risk to consumers, is to be set up, following the agreement of reforms to the EU general product safety directive.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
MOST governments are keenly concerned about the quality of food their people eat, and quite rightly so. They pass laws to ensure food purity and safety and that’s all very commendable – but it can be overdone.

Regulations can, sometimes deliberately, be drawn up so tightly that they effectively bar the sale of food produced in other countries, thus constituting an impediment to free trade.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE CAIRNS Group of the WTO, representing food exporting countries such as Australia and Argentina, has been pressing during the preparations for its planned launch of a general round at its November summit in Qatar, for an intensification of the discussions in the ongoing agricultural round.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FARMERS might fear that the old industrial saying ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass’ may no longer apply to them, but the European Commission is out to prove that crop productivity can be boosted by the filth that can be dumped on land from manufacturing sectors.…