Search Results for: food

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Trade Organisation has agreed to launch a new wide-ranging round of talks on liberalising international commerce, negotiations that will include industrial goods, which will be combined with the ongoing discussions on services and agricultural products.

Ministers at the summit in Doha, Qatar, struck a deal after six days of bargaining, with their task being made achievable by the wide-ranging draft communiqué that was drawn up beforehand.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CYNICS may look at the hastening political process of allowing eastern European countries, and their large agricultural sectors, into the European Union, and ask, ‘what’s in it for us?’

It’s a good question given that the 10 countries that are at the front of the membership queue, (with the tiny exceptions of Malta and Cyprus), are hardly wealthy.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE WORLD Trade Organisation has agreed at its ministerial meeting in Qatar, to intensify its ongoing agriculture talks. Ministers ruled that by the end of 2003, member governments should propose formal concessions on quotas, tariffs, subsidies and other trade barriers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INTERNATIONAL Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture has been approved by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. Once it is ratified, the treaty will ensure access by all countries to plant genetic resources worldwide, to related knowledge and technologies, plus financing to make use of the agreement.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FRANZ Fischler has been making a lot of speeches recently. It is not because he has time on his hands, he is in charge of the European Commission’s largest two budgets, agriculture and fisheries after all. Rather it is because he is cross with the Americans, whom he accuses of playing Janus at the WTO.…

BY DEIRDRE MASON
AIRLINES and airports have always claimed to put the comfort and well-being of their passengers to the top of their lists, and many already set out in a charter or other document what standard of service their customers can expect.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EU health and consumer affairs commissioner David Byrne has called for a strategic rethink by the food industry regarding the safety, quality and cost of its products, so that the sector is not driven purely by the desire for low prices.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has called on food safety experts to bid for contracts worth Euro 39 million to stage studies funded by the EU’s outgoing Fifth Framework Programme for research. Brussels says it will fund work on detection tests for infectious and toxic agents in the food chain and on ways to eliminate them.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
DON’T hold your breath, but it looks as if the European Union may soon be moving away from the worst features of the Common Agricultural Policy. Yes, this has been said many times since Britain joined what we once called the European Economic Community and critics say every reform effort until now has failed – even the ambitious Agenda 2000 reforms could be said to have only really tinkered with the system at the edges.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE FOOD processing industry could help make the EU economy more sustainable by increasingly spreading its waste on farmland, a European Commission report has claimed. It highlights the “elements beneficial to plant growth…rapidly available to plants,” with “very few trace organic compounds or heavy metals.”…