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BY ALAN OSBORN
FORGET all those stories you used to hear about weak regulation and cosy financial set-ups in Britain’s offshore dependencies such as the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and the crown colony of Gibraltar. They may once have been good places to launder money but not any more they aren’t.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WITH the World Health Organisation securing approval for its long debated Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, attention is now turning to ratifications by member countries: 40 are needed for it to come into force, Last minute concessions were made at the WHO to bring dissenters such as Germany and the United States on board, who had objected to the convention’s insistence on signatory governments banning tobacco advertising; both countries said this broke constitutional guarantees of free speech.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED States has launched a disputes case at the World Trade Organisation against Mexico, complaining about its southern neighbour’s antidumping duties on American beef exports. Washington is claiming that Mexico broke WTO rules in framing these duties, notably its choice of data used in dumping investigations and its methods of measuring alleged injuries suffered by Mexican beef producers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AMERICAN pork exports are thriving according to a new report from the United States Trade Representative (USTR) office. Overseas sales of swine, pork and pork products have increased three times in volume and 2.5 times in value since 1993, with the US now exporting more than 700 tonnes of pork worldwide worth over US$1.5 billion.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union has struck a research cooperation deal with the United States over the development of hydrogen fuel cells. Both sides have agreed to pool efforts, including staging demonstrations of fuel cell vehicles and fuelling networks, writing codes and standards for the technology and assessing the economics of exploiting rare earth materials to build special high-temperature cells.…

BY PHILIP FINE

AN AMERICAN beef company has turned to Canada to provide a steady supply of organic beef to the EU. The Dakota Beef Company signed an exclusive agreement with the Canadian Organic Livestock Association to try to meet European demands for hormone-free meat.…

BY PHILIP FINE

DEMOGRAPHICS are changing the contents of supermarket freezers in the US. ‘Ethnic’ frozen food sales reached US$2.2 billion in 2001, according to the American Frozen Food Institute. The biggest growth has been Mexican, which grew 20.6 percent to US$488 million, followed by Asian, which include Chinese, Thai and Indian, up 12.3 percent, totalling US$463 million.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED States and the European Union have traded barbs over their respective policies regarding genetically modified food. During a US-EU summit in Washington, President George W Bush claimed European reticence over GM was preventing starving African countries from importing a valuable food resource.…

BY PHILIP FINE

AN AMERICAN labour tribunal has ruled that retail giant Wal-Mart broke the law by refusing to bargain with meat department workers whose local union branch had been essentially dismantled by the retailer moving to pre-packaging meat products.

The National Labor Relations Board has ordered Wal-Mart to bargain with a group of Jacksonville, Texas, in-house meat cutters and their union about the effects of the company’s decision to turn what had been a fully-equipped on-site butcher shop into a pre-packaged meat department, eleven days after a majority of the dozen workers voted to unionise.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
GERMANY has been preventing a collective acceptance by the 15 EU countries on the United Nations Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. As in the negotiations at the World Health Organisation over the convention, at EU Council of Ministers meetings Germany has stood out, (mirroring the US position), against key aspects of the text, notably the ban on tobacco advertising.…