Search Results for: World Trade Organisation

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE ADAGE ‘you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink’ applies in many walks of life and it is certainly relevant to the ongoing World Trade Organisation’s negotiations on liberalising market access for services.…

Keith Nuthall
THE INTERNATIONAL Chamber of Commerce has drawn up global guidelines for customs officials worldwide, to promote the efficient and secure handling of containers at a time when controls are being tightened to fight terrorism. The advice has been submitted to the World Customs Organisation and national customs administrations; they include a checklist of good practice, such as greater reliance on sophisticated risk assessment and control techniques.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INSURANCE sector may be so vulnerable to money laundering, its exposure should be probed in depth, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has said. Its report on Money Laundering Typologies concludes that brokers often have “little or no training in anti-money laundering issues” and are used to “place cash funds into various financial institutions.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union has initiated formal talks – the first stage of disputes proceedings at the World Trade Organisation – over import restrictions imposed by the Indian government on a range of products, including live swine, turkeys and the gallus domesticus chicken breed, cattle guts used for casings and bovine semen.…

BY MARK ROWE and ALAN OSBORN, in London, PHILIP FINE and MONICA DOBIE, in Montreal, and RICHARD HURST, in Johannesburg

RATCHETING up security has been a prime concern of the nuclear industry since the September 11 attacks, with all countries possessing commercial reactors addressing the issue to some extent.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE MULTILATERAL Investment Guarantee Agency, of the World Bank, is providing investment guarantees worth US$72 million to South Africa’s Sasol for developing natural gas fields in Mozambique, including building a central processing facility and an 865 km cross-border gas pipeline.…

BY MARK ROWE
RUSSIA has been warned that it faces retaliatory trade measures if it does not remove import barriers on meat from the USA. Robert Zoellick, the United States Trade Representative, told the US Senate Finance Committee that he would not shrink from taking such steps in order to put pressure on Russia to drop the restrictions.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission is threatening legal action at the European Court of Justice against France, Luxembourg, Belgium and Italy, alleging that they have failed to write into their national legislation European Union rules limiting the working hours of seafarers on ships calling at EU ports.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
IF there was ever a good example to show how the economic interests of humankind generally trump those of the environment, look no further than the Aral Sea, or rather, seas, as it is today. Once a beautiful 66,900 square km inland great lake, it has since the 1960’s shrunk to less than half this size and split in two.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UN Food and Agricultural Organisation has urged banana producers to vary the varieties they produce to defend against disease, notably the Panama Disease, which has been hitting Cavendish bananas, mostly sold in Europe and north America.…