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BY KEITH NUTHALL
A GLOBAL Forum on Food Safety Regulators is to be staged by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation and the World Health Organisation in October, reflecting concern about recent food safety incidents, such as BSE, that the FAO claims have “caused serious turmoil in the world food markets and raised concern among consumers.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union has called on the World Trade Organisation to arbitrate in a dispute with Argentina over the time that it has to implement an earlier ruling opposing Argentine tanning industry controls on the export of raw and semi-tanned bovine hides.…

Keith Nuthall
A DISPUTES panel of the World Trade Organisation has recommended that the USA repeal safeguard duties that it has imposed on imports of Pakistani combed cotton yarn. The decision follows hearings sparked by the failure of the US to abide by a WTO Textile Monitoring Body recommendation that they should be scrapped.…

Keith Nuthall
THE TEXTILES Monitoring Body of the World Trade Organisation has asked the United States to confirm that textile and clothing imports that are to be subject of liberalised quotas, under the third stage of its implementation of the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, will be free of visa restrictions that have been applied in the past.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE USA has accepted its loss of an appeal at the World Trade Organisation against a disputes panel ruling that Washington had broken WTO rules when erecting safeguard duties against lamb imports from New Zealand and Australia. American diplomats said their government needed “a reasonable period of time” for implementation.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INDIAN government has sought formal talks at the World Trade Organisation with Argentina over what it claims is discriminatory treatment of its pharmaceutical exports. The south Americans insist that for medicines to enter Argentina, they must have been made in a country included on one of two official Buenos Aires lists, linked to specific inspection regimes.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE PHARMACEUTICAL industry has been urged to embrace differential pricing policies in the developed and developing worlds, as a means of earning enough money to cover research costs, (in richer countries), whilst keeping drugs affordable in poorer countries.…

KEITH NUTHALL
MEMBER States of the European Union have been placed under increasing political and legal pressure from both the European Commission and the European Court of Justice to improve the environmental quality of their water supplies.

France, for instance, has lost a long-running case at the ECJ, over its failure to ensure the availability of sufficiently clean drinking water in Brittany.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
SWEDEN has been told by the European Commission to end its favourable tax treatment of beer compared to wine or face legal action at the European Court of Justice.

Under the Swedish alcohol tax regime, wine in the 8.5 per cent to 15 per cent abv band bears tax at about four times the rate for beer in the three per cent to five per cent range, even though it has only three times as much alcohol.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
In a test of national and international procedures to be followed after a nuclear accident, a simulated emergency has been carried out at the French reactor at Gravelines, near the border with Belgium across the English Channel. The test, which took place on May 22-23, involved “small plume of radioactivity being vented from the reactor, covering an evacuation area of 10 kilometres radius,” said David Kyd, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency.…