Search Results for: European Union

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union has agreed to exempt Poland until 2009 from new rules setting higher levels of minimum excise rates on cigarettes when it becomes a Member State, maybe in 2004. A current proposal would raise the minimum threshold to Euro 60 per 1,000 cigarettes from July, maybe doubling cigarette prices in Poland, damaging legitimate sales and reducing tax revenues.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has approved the management of European Union ‘SAPARD’ agricultural development funds by the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This means that meat producers in the two countries will benefit from annual grants worth Euro 22.4 and 18.6 million respectively, payable until the countries join the EU, maybe by 2005.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CHINA has been rapped for delaying the establishment of import quotas allowing European Union clothing exporters to sell into this huge emerging market. Under the terms of China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation, quotas should have been created by January.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
AT FIRST sight, the European Commission’s new proposals for guarding against future outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, and tackling them if they do, occur seem eminently reasonable from the farmer’s point of view. Not a lot of detail is yet known, and in any event ministers will have their say, but it seems the Brussels authorities have learned the right lessons from last year.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IF there’s one thing guaranteed to get up the nose of most livestock farmers, it is bleeding heart animal rights campaigners claiming that they do not give a fig about welfare. And this is especially so when that most contentious of topics, live exports, is brought up.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
PRINTING equipment and supplies imported from the United States are to be a focus of retaliatory tariffs imposed by the European Union following the erection of controversial ‘safeguard’ duties by Washington to protect its steel industry.

The European Commission has announced that it is asking EU ministers to approve a selected range of products, where the levying of duty will cause the most pain to US exporters, in a bid to try and force the Bush administration to lift its tariffs.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union is to grant Argentina some leeway over its dismantling of controls on the export of its bovine hides and the import of finished leather, as required by a World Trade Organisation disputes panel ruling, which went against Buenos Aires.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A LAPSED double-checking system for imports of Romanian steel products into the European Union is to be reinstated from July, assuming EU ministers approve a proposal from the European Commission. The system was established when Romania and the EU signed an association agreement, (a broad trade and political relations deal), in 1996, but its legal authority lapsed last December.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union’s fish processing industry should become an integral concern of the EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), a European Parliament report has claimed, with Member States being directed to encourage its companies to become financially independent. MEP’s have voted to accept the report by German Christian Democrat Brigitte Langenhagen who said that state aid should only be paid out to processors in underdeveloped regions “which heavily depend on fisheries.”…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission today (Friday) made a formal proposal to strengthen its proposals on the mutual recognition of judgments on divorce and parental responsibility throughout the European Union, so as to establish a mechanism for the return of abducted children.…