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BY ALAN OSBORN
A NEW international treaty significantly extending the public information required of companies over their output of pollutants has been agreed by 30 member countries of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and is expected to be formally adopted in Kiev in May.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED States has delayed the establishment of a disputes panel at the World Trade Organisation over Brazil’s complaint about American government subsidies to producers, users and exporters of upland cotton. Washington formally opposed Brazil’s bid to create a panel at a meeting of the WTO disputes settlement body, forcing the Brazilians to make a second application, if they want the case to go ahead.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A GLOBAL code of practice for the harvesting and manufacturing of fish and fishery products is being drawn up by the world food trade standards body, Codex Alimentarius. Its committee on food hygiene recently endorsed a draft set of worldwide list of rules on handling fish, which are being developed to promote trade by creating uniform, albeit voluntary, standards.…

BY PHILIP FINE

THE UNITED States says it is offering duty reductions for all agricultural imports from Americas trading partners to create a proposed 34-nation New Word trading bloc. While meat products were not mentioned specifically in its initial Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) offer, the US says it would be prepared to admit at least 56 per cent of agricultural imports from all these countries duty-free by 2005.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FRANCE’S Suez water company and the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) have launched a joint drinking water improvements programme that will provide around Euro 300,000 in its first three years and will initially concentrate on the Volga-Caspian region.…

BY PHILIP FINE

The United States has offered several trading partners an immediate

elimination of the tariffs it currently places on steel, provided the other

country does the same. U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick

announced the reciprocal agreement in several key sectors as part of its

first offer for the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, a trading

bloc of 34 countries.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union is putting itself in a position to reap the economic rewards of developing renewable energy technologies ahead of the United States, an American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting has been told. “Europe has made a major commitment to renewable energy and is leading the United States in deploying it,” said Allan Hoffman, a renewables specialist and senior advisor to Winrock International’s Clean Energy Group.…

BY MARK ROWE and ALAN OSBORN, in London, PHILIP FINE and MONICA DOBIE, in Montreal, and RICHARD HURST, in Johannesburg

RATCHETING up security has been a prime concern of the nuclear industry since the September 11 attacks, with all countries possessing commercial reactors addressing the issue to some extent.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Trade Organisation (WTO) has agreed to admit officials from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and representatives from secretariats for other multilateral environmental agreements as observers to its ongoing Doha Development Round negotiations. The move has been welcomed by the European Commission, which wants these representatives to point out when the free trade talks are in danger of creating an agreement that may undermine or conflict with existing international environmental agreements.…

BY MATTHEW BRACE
WITH Australia sharing the front-line in President Bush’s war against terrorism with Britain and the USA, and also having witnessed its citizens dying in last year’s Bali nightclub terror attack, it is maybe not surprising that it has been tightening its money laundering legislation, especially as regards terrorists.…