Search Results for: Mali

BY PAUL COCHRANE

TURKEY’S bid to become part of the European Union (EU) has resulted in tougher banking and financial regulations, in addition to a strengthened financial intelligence unit at the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey. But while the country has ramped up its counterterrorist financing initiatives to thwart funding to Kurdish separatist groups such as the PKK, Turkey’s position as a crossroads between the East and West has resulted in significant challenges to rein in the surge in narcotics trafficking and organised crime.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

IT has long been outmoded and inaccurate to split the world into two camps: industrialised developed economies, and largely agricultural developing countries. The growth of the 1990s and the current decade means there is a wide range of social and economic sophistication and wealth amongst the poorer of these two old-fashioned categories.…

BY ALAN OSBORN, LUCY JONES and KEITH NUTHALL

INTRODUCTION

CLOTHING and textile production and trade subsidies are under pressure today, as they have not been for many years. There has been a steady trend towards liberalisation in the sector worldwide, stemming from the abolition of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC) in January 2005 and with it, then end of restrictive quotas for imports for the WTO’s 152 member countries.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

AN INTERNATIONAL website has been launched by two European campaign groups pushing for the return of water services to local governments worldwide. The Corporate Europe Observatory and Transnational Institute organisations have set up www.remunicipalisation.org to monitor campaigns for transferring water services from private utilities.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

WHILE grandmothers in the west are sometimes accused of possessing outdated knowledge and habits, such bias deters international aid agencies from exploiting the wisdom of older people in grassroots projects. This was the conclusion of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), which recently staged a seminar on the issue.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
IT’S had a somewhat laborious beginning but at long last it seems that the West African regional body for fighting money laundering – formally known as the Groupe Inter-gouvernemental d’Action contre le Blanchiment en Afrique (GIABA) – is ready to begin operations in earnest.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON

IN an era when military intervention has been given a bad name through the Iraq morass, serving with the army, navy or air force might not be the immediate choice of many nurses as a career path which helps the needy.…

BY STEVEN SWINDELLS, in Johannesburg

SUB-SAHARAN Africa’s biggest cotton producer Mali is mulling GM cotton trials, a development which could open up cheap cotton supplies for the textile and clothing trade.

But resistance from local farmers to high seed costs and tough times for existing GM cotton growers in South Africa – the only African country where GM is commercially grown – may mean that Africa’s potential as a key supplier is still some way off.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE WEST African countries that have spearheaded the call for reductions in cotton subsidies at the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Doha Development Round have released a proposed formula guaranteeing these cuts are significant. If proposals tabled by the so-called Cotton-Four states Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali are accepted, cotton reductions would be deeper than cuts to agricultural subsidies in general.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A WELL-FINANCED international programme to remove stocks of obsolete pesticides from Africa has been launched, protecting communities from persistent organic pollutants. The first phase of the Africa Stockpiles Programme (ASP-P1) has now been approved by the World Bank, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).…