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BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has unveiled a series of new proposals that it intends to make in the latter half of this year, during the Belgian presidency of the European Union. In a statement issued by the Directorate General for Health and Consumer Protection, officials have that they intend to follow up the White Paper on Food Safety, issued in January 2000, with formal proposals including:

*A revision of the directive on the control of foot-and-mouth disease, drawing on the experience of the recent outbreak;

*Amendments for a revised directive on livestock and poultry diseases, including measures to control salmonella;

*A new regulation harmonising and reinforcing official controls on food and animal feed;

*Plans to phase out the use of four remaining antibiotics authorised for use in feed and fodder;

*A strategy to reduce the presence of dioxin in feed and food.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has complied with a ruling from the European Ombudsman, who backed the right of Friends of the Earth to read environmental studies regarding the compliance of the UK and Gibraltar with directives on waste, hazardous waste and habitats.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Road Federation has called for a rethink regarding a proposed new four-year research programme, which will probably command a budget of around Euro 17.5 billion. It claims that the European Commission wants to focus too many resources on new areas of research, such as nanotechnology and genomics, at the expense of achieving the EU transport goals.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union Council of Ministers has agreed to allow yet another Member State to stretch the agreement underlying the new common market organisation in wine, by approving a large national handout for compulsory distillation. In a move that it likely to dismay the European Commission, ministers agreed to allow France to grant exceptional national aid to producers for distillation of 1.5 million hectolitres of wine.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
PLANS to develop a new kind of European Union patent, which would allow R&D units to gain protection for their inventions across the EU by making one comparatively simple application, are being discussed. A so-called Community Patent would be easier to operate than the existing European Patents, which have to be translated into the official language of each Member State in which it is to apply.…

KEITH NUTHALL
FISH farming companies and organisations have until September 30 to submit papers to the European Commission, if they want them to be considered as part of an ongoing review of the Common Fisheries Policy, that could create root-and-branch reforms to the way that Brussels impacts on the industry.…

Keith Nuthall
A REARGUARD action is being fought by the European Commission to save its ambitious proposals to impose a deadline of 2005 on the complete liberalisation of the EU electricity market. Following pressure from the French government, EU governments have agreed to rule the idea out, preferring a looser deadline, although this has yet to be formally agreed at the Council of Ministers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
MEMBERS of the European Parliament have proposed changing the name of the nascent European Food Authority, to make it a European Food Safety Authority. The proposal is one of 200 amendments agreed by the parliament’s environment committee for approval by a later plenary session.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
ALTHOUGH petrol and diesel consumption rose by 45 per cent in the European Union between 1985 and 1998, technological improvements meant pollution actually fell during this time, a study from Eurostat has claimed.

Between 1980 and 1998, the EU witnessed a 25 per cent drop in nitrogen oxides and non-methane volatile organic compound emissions, for which road transport is largely responsible.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE TARGET of ensuring that 22 per cent of electricity generated within the European Union comes from renewable sources by the year 2010, has been written into the proposed European Environment Action Programme, by both the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers.…