This report identifies options that negotiators and policy-makers could pursue in order to reach a permanent solution at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to the problems some developing countries say they face when buying food at government-set (or government-administered) prices under their public stockholding programs for food security purposes. The …
function alien2() { var popurl="image/20040229/30-illus.jpg" winpops=window.open(popurl,"","width=475,height=450,scrollbars=yes") } "A successful invasion is a rare event,' says Suresh Babu, a researcher at the School of Environmental Studies, University of Delhi. An accepted thumbrule is that only one in 10 introduced species become naturalised, and only one in 10 among the latter actually …
70 years ago, a species called the yellow crazy ant (Anoplolepis gracilipes) turned up at the Christmas Islands off Australia, perhaps stuck to a piece of timber. For a long time, it remained dormant. Then in the mid 1990s, its population began to explode. Yellow crazy ants began to form …
ten years since the blueprint for sustainable development of Small Island Developing States (sids) was envisaged in the form of the Barbados Programme of Action (bpoa), many plans have yet to be implemented due to lack of capacity and aid. The overall assistance for small islands has fallen from us …
the eu is dangling the carrot of the World Trade Organisation's (wto) membership to persuade Russia to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. "There are signs of a political link between finalising the wto negotiations and Russia's ratification of the pact,' said G
Addressing a meeting of Russian and European Union (eu) business leaders early this month, President Vladimir Putin said that "we often unfortunately face excessively tough requirements, which are blocking Russia's entrance into the wto [World Trade Organization]'. Russia is the largest economy outside the wto and has been trying to …
Three months since the Cancun debacle, the collapsed world trade talks still hang in the balance. World Trade Organization (wto) members met on December 15-16 to follow-up on the failed negotiations but little substance emanated from behind closed doors except an agreement on procedural issues of restarting negotiations through the …
Cancun: a paper tiger jurgen maier The strategy of the European Union (eu) did seem to be transformed in the conference centres of Cancun. A coherent eu policy is non-existent. Europe is deeply divided between the American satellites (the uk, Spain and Italy) and the Gaullist camp (France, Germany and …
Even as Japan submitted to the World Trade Organization (wto) a proposal to impose tariffs of about 30 per cent on us steel in retaliation for duties on steel imports the us introduced (it has now taken this proposal back) the Geneva-based trade body ruled on November 25, 2003 that …
Land use in China is in for irretrievable change. At the Third Plenum of the 16th Party Congress, held October 11-14, 2003, the world's biggest communist country promised to protect private property and allow farmers to amass large land holdings. According to state-run television, these decisions were part of a …
Subsidies are recognised worldwide as a serious threat to sustainable fisheries management. They distort international fish trade and penalise developing country fishers whose governments cannot afford to provide them subsidies. The debate on the size and impacts of subsidies intensified after the Food and Agricultural Organization reported in 1992 that …
more than a month after the debacle in Cancun, Mexico, where global trade talks collapsed, the stalemate persists. Two crucial World Trade Organization (wto) meetings in Geneva have not yielded any noteworthy results. And while the deliberations have resumed informally, little progress can expected anytime soon. The heads of delegation …
THE tone and tenor of the failed Fifth World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Cancun found an echo in the annual meetings of the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Dubai from September 20 to 22. The developing countries reiterated their demand that the industrialised world …
The earth is hotter than it has been in the past 2000 years and the largest ice shelf in the Artic has broken into two after having existed for 3000 years. But all that Russia does is procrastinate over endorsing the Kyoto Protocol
Everybody keeps cribbing about the wto. What exactly is the problem with the institution? From the perspective of the South, the wto has three main problems. One, it is undemocratic and unpredictable. There are no formal processes of democratic decision-making, such as the majority rule. Decisions do not take place …
At Cancun (“snakepit” in Spanish), it was widely expected that negotiations on agriculture would make or break the talks. However, delegates were quick to point to two other issues as equally damaging: (a) the manner in which the Cotton Initiative was methodically dismissed by the US; and (b) the poisonous …
What kind of ripples were let loose by the breakdown of talks? Celso Amorim, Brazil's minister of external relations and leader of the G-22 group, felt that the lack of engagement (of developing nations) in the Singapore issues, which mirrored the lack of engagement (of the developed world) on agriculture, …
There are worry lines all over the face of M K Bhojan, a small tea grower in the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu. Tea prices have fallen cataclysmically in the last few years, affecting small farmers like Bhojan most acutely. In 1997-98, one kilogramme (kg) of green tea leaf fetched …
The first day of a multilateral conference involving most of the world’s nations is usually spent on procedural matters. So it was at Cancun, Mexico, where the Fifth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was held from September 11 to September 14, 2003. After the usual ceremonial inauguration, …
