Search Results for: South Africa

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN ATTACK has been made on the United States, European Union (EU), and other textile importing jurisdictions for waiting until the last minute to abolish most restrictive quotas under the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Agreement on Textile and Clothing.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union (EU) ministers have approved an agreement with west Africa’s Guinea Bissau, which will guarantee access to its fishing grounds for Italian, French, Greek, Portuguese and Spanish fishermen until June 2006. The deal involves the Guinea Bissau government being granted Euro 7.26 million a year in financial compensation.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction Development (EBRD) is lending Euro 22 million to Serbia & Montenegro’s largest pharmaceutical producer Hemofarm a.d. to launch operations in Russia, its largest export market. The money will help Hemofarm buy new equipment and build a packaging and production pharmaceutical plant in Obninsk, 100 km south-west of Moscow.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is bankrolling the development of Kazakhstan’s oil and gas reserves, a key alternative supply for the European Union (EU). It wants to lend Tasbulat Ltd Euro 60 million to help develop three medium-sized oil and gas fields in Mangistau region, western Kazakhstan, producing up to 8,000 barrels/day in 2006; Tasbulat is owned by SNP Petrom, Romania’s national oil company.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE NEW socialist government in Spain has rewritten plans developed by its conservative predecessor to boost water supplies in the south, proposing a Euro 3.7 billion scheme that relies heavily on desalination plants. Dumping controversial plans to transfer water from the northern Ebro river basin to southern Spain, the José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero government has also proposed making improvements to existing water facilities and better exploiting groundwater reserves.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CHINA will this year begin a trial of automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) technology at three airports in the west of the country, it has told an Asia-Pacific region ADS-B meeting staged by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED States Trade Representative has claimed more than 95 per cent of US imports from sub-Saharan African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) eligible countries now enter America duty free. Exports rose by 55 per cent to US$14 billion from 2002 to 2003, mainly through higher oil sales.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE ZERO Emissions Research Initiative – helping Africa sustainably exploit local biological resources – is examining using ganoderma mushrooms as medicines, possibly for HIV/AIDS. It is also considering exports of Termitomyces titanicus, the world’s largest edible umbrella mushroom and the Congo basin’s edible goliath frog.…

Keith Nuthall
AVITRACK, a three-dimensional monitoring system allowing airport managers to check all groundhandling movements on aircraft runways, taxiways, aprons and parking zones, is being developed by a European Union (EU) research consortium. Coordinated by French IT firm SILOGIC, it involves cameras creating digital images that identify individuals, objects and vehicles, whose movement can be interpreted by computers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) organisation tasked with reviving the war-damaged south-eastern Balkans has released a plan to move Macedonia’s wine industry from a bulk producer of cheap wine towards a higher-end standards, tapping western export markets. The country has a wine-making tradition, but since the rise (and fall) of communism, it has been characterised by a command economy inspired indifference to quality.…