Search Results for: food

BY TAMARA VANTROYEN, in Hong Kong

CHINA looks to be a likely candidate for the first country in the world to approve genetically modified rice, despite the fact that the State Agricultural GM Crop Biosafety Committee, a technical body which evaluates GM rice for research, did not approve the idea at its three-day meeting in Beijing, December 10-12, 2005.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

TRADE ministers at the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Hong Kong summit are struggling today to reach a compromise deal on the vexed question of cotton subsidies that will prevent west African exporters scuppering an overall agreement. The United States has been under pressure to abandon its production payments to American growers, which are highly politically sensitive in the US.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
WAL-MART Canada Corp is consulting its lawyers after the retail chain was told to accept union recognition at a Quebec store, only the second time this has happened in the whole of north America. The Quebec Labour Relations Commission has certified workers at the Saint-Hyacinthe store, 60 km east of Montreal, as belonging to and represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Canada (UFCW).…

BY MONICA DOBIE
MONTREAL, Canada-based Alcan Inc will invest US$30 million in building a tobacco packaging plant in St Petersburg, Russia. Production will begin before the end of April 2006 with more than 120 people employed at the facility. “The Russian packaging market represents an attractive growth opportunity and is strategically important to Alcan,” said Christel Bories (CORRECT SPELLING), President and Chief Executive Officer of Alcan Packaging, which employs about 73,000 people in 56 countries.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON
THE WORLD is waking up to biofuels, increasingly produced from food crops and their waste by-products, and now one of the growing energy alternatives to conventional fossil fuels. As prices for traditional energy rise year on year, and energy watchers warn of oil production peaking around 2010, governments are looking towards food producers to grow the raw feedstock for the fuel of the twenty-first century.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

AUTO manufacturing firms will be closely monitoring next week’s World Trade Organisation (WTO) summit in Hong Kong for signs that the WTO’s long-running Doha Development Round talks are about to crack open national automobile markets. Key auto industry countries – the US, the European Union, Canada, Japan, South Korea, India and Brazil – have been making steady progress this year in identifying non-tariff barriers to trade they would like to remove, such as burdensome customs procedures, technical engineering rules and licences.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has called for efforts to ensure the further minimisation of certain ‘non-dioxin-like’ polychlorinated biphenyls (NDL-PCBs) in food, because of health concerns about excess contamination. The problem, said EFSA, is that it was hard to separate these lightly-studied elements from their cousins, the oft-examined ‘dioxin-like’ PCBs, especially when checking their presence in the body.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has released guidelines for food product packaging companies wanting to secure authorisation for new materials touching foodstuffs. This follows the approval in October of European Union (EU) regulation 1935/2004 on materials and articles intended to come into contact with food, legalising ‘intelligent materials’ alerting consumers to the freshness of a foodstuff.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed three-year zero-duty import quotas for confectionary ingredients. Products include dates, frozen boysenberries, frozen pineapple pieces and palm oil. Also one-year duty free quotas will be opened for 2,000 tonnes of sour cherries and 2,000 tonnes of sweet cherries, for chocolate production.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
ALL proceeds, frozen assets and transfers from the defunct UN Oil for Food programme have been “properly and transparently accounted for” by its successor, the US-dominated Development Fund for Iraq, according to a KPMG audit, ordered by the International Advisory and Monitoring Board for Iraq.…