Search Results for: European Parliament

Paint and coating companies worldwide are intensifying innovation as they seek to product anti-fouling products that are targeted, effective and avoid delivering environmental damage to seas, oceans, rivers and canals.

With sustainability reporting becoming mandatory in the European Union (EU) by 2026 and other countries mulling mandating International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) declarations, the pressure to make anti-fouling cleaner is growing.…

The European Union (EU) has banned imports of diamonds from Russia, which amounted to EUR1.3 billion in 2022, because of the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Most of these precious stones are sold to Belgium, a key diamond trader – under EUR500,000 go to other EU member states, according to the European Commission (1).…

Paint and coatings manufacturers and traders within the European Union (EU) are facing changes to the key EU regulation on the classification, labelling and packaging of chemicals (the CLP regulation). The European Parliament, and the EU Council of Ministers have struck a deal on updating the existing 2008 law, aimed at increasing protection of human health and the environment, while easing access to up-to-date information on chemicals hazards and simplified labelling rules.…

Prospects of a bumper cotton crop on Pakistan this year (2023) and a planned extension to December 2027 of the country’s European Union (EU) GSP+ trade benefit status has raised hopes for increased sales by the Pakistan clothing and textile sector within the country’s government (1).…

Vietnam’s businesses in export-focused garments and footwear manufacturing are facing up to the challenge of becoming greener. This realisation comes even as the country benefits from free trade agreements (FTA), such as the 2019 European Union (EU)-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) and the 2020 UK–Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (UKVFTA).…

Türkiye’s garment and cotton sectors have suffered from a slowdown in demand in American and European markets, with more than 1,000 of the country’s garment manufacturing companies closing in 2023. Also, more than 85,000 employees within the sector in Türkiye were laid off this year, say industry sources.…

Türkiye is a critical food and drink provider to the European Union (EU) and the UK, with trade set to grow as Türkiye ramps up production and adopts agri-tech and smart farming solutions. Renewed trade agreements under discussion with the EU (with whom Turkey is already in a customs union) (1) and a new projected trade agreement with the UK are also set to spur growth.…

Cross-border drug and migrant trafficking is booming with billions of dollars being earned by crime networks, according to a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report. The report ‘Crime-related illicit financial flows: latest progress’ (1) is based on estimates of dirty money flows from nine countries – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Colombia, Ecuador, Maldives, Mexico, Myanmar, Nepal and Peru.…

The European Union (EU) has been busy chiselling the regulatory edifice of its much-vaunted European Capital Markets Union (CMU), but this growing legal framework has yet to deliver the deep capital pools that its framers envisaged.

Indeed, speaking at the European Banking Congress, in Frankfurt, on November 17, European Central Bank (ECB) president Christine Lagarde, bemoaned the lack of available EU capital (1):

“Today, European start-ups attract less than half the funding of their US counterparts, while the volume of investments in scale-ups in the United States is more than four times greater than in Europe,” she stressed.…

The International Cocoa Organisation (ICCO) has predicted that the chocolate industry will continue to face cocoa supply deficits, with its latest quarterly assessment predicting that for 2022/3, there will be 99,000 tonnes more grindings than cocoa production. As a result, global stocks will fall to 1.744 million tonnes, amidst declines in output from key production hubs Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.…