Search Results for: Brazil

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AS the May 31 deadline looms for World Trade Organisation (WTO) member countries to make formal offers to liberalise their service industries, the Comité Européen des Assurances (CEA) has called on Brazil, India and China to be as generous as they can.…

BY LIZ HALL
A PROFUSION of family-run businesses, corrupt and under-resourced authorities and low wages has traditionally meant much commercial crime goes undetected in Latin America. But the tide is turning, with more and more companies unwilling to turn a blind eye to fraud, bribery and counterfeit goods production.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
PRESIDENT George W Bush’s re-election last November has pretty well ruled out any change in the US ban on Cuban cigars for the next four years – if anything, things are likely to get tougher. One of the last things the previous Bush administration did last October was to actually tighten the import ban by barring Americans travelling to Cuba from bringing back up to US$100 dollars worth of Cuban cigars.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH
RURAL development will be the CAP’s cornerstone for at least the next decade in its twin ambitions of creating regional growth and supporting farmers who need to modernise, promises the recently arrived European Union (EU) agriculture Commissioner, Mrs Mariann Fischer Boel.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH, in Brussels
PROPOSALS for a new European Union (EU) wine regime, which are currently under review, will be unveiled in 12 months’ time according to the recently installed European Commissioner for agriculture, Mrs Mariann Fischer Boel.

In a wide-ranging interview in her Brussels office she admitted that the present arrangements are not working.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A GROUP of cotton exporting countries are resisting a move by the United States to dilute the mandate of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) cotton sub-committee, formed to find agreement on this sensitive issue during the WTO Doha Development Round.…

BY DAVID HAWORTH, in Brussels
SUGAR quotas covering imports from some of the world’s poorest economies are not a feasible option, according to the European Union’s (EU) Commissioner for agriculture, Mrs Mariann Fischer Boel.

She told Confectionary Production at her Brussels office that such quotas would inevitably mean higher prices with consequent damage for the Union’s sugar producers and for the industry, especially where they were set at a lower level than national consumptions.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

COSMETICS, perfume and personal hygiene companies in the Mercosur region of South America will have to stage annual health inspections of their manufacturing systems under a resolution agreed by member states Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. These will have to demonstrate that companies are following prescribed Mercosur standards of good practice, with written reports being produced by in-house laboratories, detailing results and any reforms that are required.…

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 KEITH NUTHALL

AUTO manufacturing firms will be closely monitoring next week’s World Trade Organisation (WTO) summit in Hong Kong for signs that the WTO’s long-running Doha Development Round talks are about to crack open national automobile markets. Key auto industry countries – the US, the European Union, Canada, Japan, South Korea, India and Brazil – have been making steady progress this year in identifying non-tariff barriers to trade they would like to remove, such as burdensome customs procedures, technical engineering rules and licences.…