Search Results for: South Africa

BY STEVEN SWINDELLS, in Johannesburg

DROUGHT-HIT and AIDS-ravaged southern Africa is faced with a looming humanitarian crisis with almost 12 million people in need of food aid. But genetically modified (GM) crops remain off the menu for most African governments who remain reluctant to allow their farmers to do business with GM giants Monsanto and Syngenta.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

ONLY comparatively recently have the world’s anti money laundering agencies come to grips with alternative remittance systems (ARS) and even today the scale of the systems and the degree of infiltration by criminals is still not fully known.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A COMPREHENSIVE reform process has been launched by the African Union (AU) to make Africa’s governments raise their performance in fighting HIV/AIDS. Noting that "Africa bears the heaviest burden and yet, is least prepared to contain (the disease)", a detailed action plan has been adopted by an AU

Continental Forum ‘on human rights and people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS’, staged in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.…

BY RICHARD HURST, in Johannesburg
SOUTH Africa is an emerging economy, neither fully developed, nor fully developing. As a result, there are some rich pickings for commercial criminals, who can operate more freely than in Europe and North America. Richard Hurst reports from Johannesburg.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
FOR many people, Europeans in particular, Canada represents wide-open spaces, pristine wilderness teaming with wildlife, a high standard of living and a country tolerant of other cultures.

And Canadians are generally a happy bunch, who smugly cherish their social differences with their neighbours south of the border, notably that their high taxes are fair because the money creates social programmes and a national health care system that their American counterparts do not enjoy.…

BY MONICA DOBIE

A NEW genetic test that can detect devastating clam disease QPX has been developed by American scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), in Cape Cod Massachusetts. They claim the test is sensitive enough to detect the QPX organism not only in clams, but also in seawater and sediment.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) Council of Ministers has toughened anti-dumping duties levied on imports from South Korea and Taiwan of synthetic textile ingredient polyethylene terephthalate (PET). European Commission inquiries had showed existing duties insufficient to protect EU producers from cut-priced Korean and Taiwanese PET competition.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WHILE discussions continue over how to ensure the security of energy supplies to the European Union (EU), Brussels institutions are sinking money into one sure bet, eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), for instance, is lending US$170 million to SOCAR, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, to fund two Caspian gas projects.…

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.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE WORLD Trade Organisation’s (WTO) general council has permanently amended the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement to make permanent a 2003 waiver helping poor countries obtain generic medicines during health emergencies. The TRIPS amendment enables any WTO member country to export generic pharmaceuticals made under a compulsory licence to assist countries lacking their own manufacturing capacity and whose nurses and doctors would otherwise be unable to deal with a serious disease problem.…