Search Results for: United Nations

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN food and drink industry has been keeping a weather eye on negotiations in Geneva at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), where stubborn attempts are being made to keep alive the Doha Development Round on liberalising global commerce.…

BY MARK GODFREY

THE BUREAUCRATS and engineers who run China’s booming hydropower sector will be in listening mode in April when the world descends on Beijing for the second International Conference on Hydropower Technology & Equipment. The theme of this year’s government-sponsored gathering – ‘Sustainable China Hydropower Industry’ – reflects worries about the environmental impact of recent massive hydropower projects in China.…

By Keith Nuthall

Members of the US congress have been pressed by higher education lobbyists to include the maximum amount of funding possible for American scientific and research agencies from President Obama’s economic stimulus package.

In a united front, six US higher education organisations wrote to influential members of the US House of Representatives and Senate as they negotiated the final text of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.…

BY JAMES FULLER

THE TWIN island republic of Trinidad & Tobago is many people’s idea of a tropical idyll but Sunita Kissoon, senior nurse/midwife at the Gulf View Medical Centre in San Fernando, says medical care in her country is fundamentally lacking when compared to the UK.…

BY ALAN OSBORN

STANDFIRST

Every country has its own food and drink regulatory body or bodies: in the first place to ensure that its citizens eat safely and in the second to help safeguard its position in the rapidly-growing world food trade.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A GLOBAL reduction in cereal output is predicted in 2009 compared to 2008’s record levels, the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has predicted. Falling prices has led to smaller plantings in Europe and the United States, while drought has hit winter wheat production in China and India.…

By Eric Lyman, in Poznan, Poland, for ISN Security Watch

 As countries battle to come up with a plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions in 2009, attention will almost surely begin to focus on two main players that hold the fate of the international process in their hands: the US and China.

December’s United Nations negotiations on climate change in Poznan, Poland, concluded with relatively little progress. Delegates voted to activate a fund to help poor countries adapt to the changing climate, for example, but they did not approve a mechanism to put cash in the fund.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

NEGOTIATORS are close to forging an international agreement that would ban vessels involved in illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing from ports worldwide. The United Nations Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has been hosting the talks, and has reported the "general outlines… on ‘port state’ measures that would deny vessels engaged in IUU fishing access to fishing ports are largely in place."…

BY MARK ROWE

INDONESIA’S paint industry appears likely to weather the worst of the global economic downturn. Indeed, Indonesia may be one of the few major countries where sales of paint for industrial and domestic use will rise. In January 2009, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono forecast economic growth of 6.2% for the year in a budget that revealed capital spending plans that were 14.3% up on 2008.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) Council of Ministers has approved harmonising EU chemical labelling rules with a United Nations Globally Harmonised System. This will require changes to some warning messages and pictograms on paint, coating and related products to make health hazards better understood.…