Search Results for: World Trade Organisation

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INTERNATIONAL Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank is leading an aid deal to encourage local companies to maintain and manage pipelines sending natural gas and oil from central Asia to the European Union. The IFC, (which is initially injecting US$250,000), BP, Norway’s Statoil, GTZ, (the German aid agency), and the Baku Enterprise Centre, Azerbaijan, will launch a programme to help local businesses benefit from petro- projects, notably the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to Turkey.…

BY PHILIP FINE

THE UNITED States has offered several trading partners a complete elimination within five years of the tariffs it currently places on textile and apparel imports. US Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick announced the decision as part of its first offer for the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, a trading bloc of the western hemispheric countries (Cuba excluded).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Parliament’s transport committee has recommended that a financial carrot is dangled before the Russian government to try and end the practice of paying its national carrier Aeroflot for over-flying rights on trans-Siberian, trans-polar and trans-Asian routes.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A GLOBAL code of practice for the harvesting and manufacturing of fish and fishery products is being drawn up by the world food trade standards body, Codex Alimentarius. Its committee on food hygiene recently endorsed a draft set of worldwide list of rules on handling fish, which are being developed to promote trade by creating uniform, albeit voluntary, standards.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED States has delayed the establishment of a disputes panel at the World Trade Organisation over Brazil’s complaint about American government subsidies to producers, users and exporters of upland cotton. Washington formally opposed Brazil’s bid to create a panel at a meeting of the WTO disputes settlement body, forcing the Brazilians to make a second application, if they want the case to go ahead.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
INDIA’S four-day 18th International Leather Fair, in Chennai (Madras), this month (Feb) concluded INDRupees 5,090 million (US$106.8 million) worth of business, said its organisers. Staged at the Chennai Trade Centre, it attracted more than 8,000 visitors, said the Indian Trade Promotion Organisation, of whom five per cent were from abroad, including representatives from 20 countries, notably from Italy, Germany, Spain, Brazil and China.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRAZILIAN steel producer V&M do Brazil has struck the largest deal to date under the Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism. It will see the steel maker selling five million tonnes of greenhouse gas reductions for Euro 15 million to an International Finance Corporation/Dutch government fund, the IFC-Netherlands Carbon Facility.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INTERNATIONAL Finance Corporation of the World Bank is heading up a groundbreaking aid deal that will try to foster key local companies who will be responsible for maintaining and managing piplelines sending natural gas and oil from central Asia to the European Union.…

BY EDWARD PETERS
FOR a snapshot of the current state of the Chinese tobacco industry, casual observers need go no further than the massive adverts blanketing some of the main highways in Shanghai, which is generally considered to be the most go-ahead city in the People’s Republic (PRC).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission and Vietnam have struck a new textile and clothing trade deal which would give the south east Asian country increases in European Union (EU) textile and clothing quotas worth Euro 200 million a year. In return, the Vietnam government has pledged significant tariff reductions in the sectors, along with other liberalisation commitments.…