Search Results for: World Trade Organisation

BY PHILIP FINE

An American company that normally supplies its breeding services to

livestock producers has been developing a sideline serving the

pharmaceutical industry. Its leap into biotech could offer a

glimpse of how the meat and livestock trade might discover some future

crossover

business.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE GLOBAL demand for paper is set to surge ahead, despite the harbingers of doom who predicted that IT advances would create a paper-less world, according to the latest World Commodity Survey of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, (UNCTAD).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
GOVERNMENTS and international organisations have highlighted tobacco smuggling as one of the largest illegal drains on their tax revenues. An international conference has brought law enforcement professionals together with health officials to fight this problem. Keith Nuthall reports.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
RETALIATORY duties hitting shoe and fashion accessory imports from the United States may be postponed or never imposed because of concessions made by the US regarding controversial steel safeguard duties that provoked the European Union into planning reprisals.…

By ALAN OSBORN
Farmers can’t complain that they lack information about long-term trends in agriculture. The European Commission, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the various United Nations food agencies, specialised agricultural research institutes and of course national governments all seem driven to make regular projections about crops, prices and markets several years into the future.…

Keith Nuthall
BRAZIL and the European Commission have agreed a Memorandum of

Understanding paving the way for a formal textile trading agreement which, says Brussels, “significantly improves access for textile products on each other’s markets.” The deal removes the quotas on Brazil’s textiles and clothing exports to the EU.…

BY MARK ROWE
MONEY launderers looking to process their criminal gains look favourably upon south-east Asia. Authorities in the region are under-funded and overworked, while cash-transactions are a cultural norm, making it easy to ensure that money you would prefer not to be traced can simply disappear, with little likelihood that anyone will have the time to investigate the transaction.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed formal regulations governing the erection of possible future safeguard restrictions within the European Union against Chinese exports of textile and clothing products. Under the agreement approving China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation, Brussels has the right to impose special temporary safeguard duties until December 2008, where a boom in imports threatens “market disruption.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Trade Organisation’s general council has been asked to approve global trading laws stating that dyes or inks can turn unbleached or pre-bleached fabrics into new products under global rules of origin legislation, so long as they are subject to at least two preparatory or finishing operations.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
NEW worries about the health and safety of teleworkers, homeworkers and others on short-term contracts are expressed in two new studies by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. It says they not only lack the protection of national occupational health and safety (OSH) regulations but may also suffer from “an increased sense of

job insecurity, often associated with work-related stress and its potential human and economic costs.”…