STWR - Share The World's Resources

Europe faces new pressure to open its markets to genetically-modified food from the US after the World Trade Organisation ruled that the EU broke international rules with its moratorium on new licences.

A lengthy and complex preliminary ruling from the WTO said that a de facto Europe-wide ban, which prevented new corn, cotton and soybean products from entering the European market, was not based on scientific concerns.

American sources also said that the WTO had found that six individual states - France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Luxembourg and Greece - broke the rules by applying their own bans on marketing and importing GMOs.

Across South Asia, food insecurity remains a major policy challenge.

This is despite the fact the food production has increased in all the countries of South Asia (albeit at a declining rate) so that at a macro level, these countries do not face aggregate shortage. The table below reveals that all countries in the South Asian region have even been exporting some amount of food grain, and the balance is positive in all countries except Bangladesh for 2002. These countries have transformed themselves from food deficit countries in the 1960s and 1970s to food surplus countries in the 1980s and 1990s. However, increased food production has not been accompanied by greater household and individual food security for significant sections of the population.

Every child who dies of hunger in today's world is the victim of an assassination, a United Nations expert on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, said today in New York.

The world's agricultural production should be able to feed 12 billion people, but globally, 852 million are consistently undernourished, 100,000 people die of hunger every day, and a child under 10 years of age dies every 5 seconds, Mr. Ziegler told a press conference. He called this a daily massacre of human beings through malnutrition.

The tragedy is most intense in Africa, where bad harvests have destroyed the lives of millions of people in the Sahel, especially in Niger, where only 430 tons of millet have been harvested this year instead of the usual 1.6 million.

With one third of the population on the verge of destruction, international organizations, and the majority of Member States, have not responded adequately, said Mr. Ziegler, who is an unpaid expert serving in an independent personal capacity. He received his mandate from the UN Commission on Human Rights and regularly reports back to it.

Sugar has long been the sweetener in Mauritius' global trade. But now the island faces an unpalatable fight to keep the industry going in light of a recent European Union (EU) proposal to cut sugar prices to African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries.

The European Commission (the executive arm of the EU) plans to slash the prices by 39 percent over the next four years. Beginning 2006, this will lead to a drop from about 630 dollars per tonne of sugar to just over 390 dollars.

The move follows a World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruling that the above-market prices paid to European sugar producers -- and those in former colonies such as Mauritius which have special access to EU markets -- constituted unfair trade.

However, Mauritians aren't taking these developments lying down.

"'Yes to reforms, but not (those which are) brutal and devastating," said Agro-Industry Minister Arvin Boolell, who is also a spokesman for the ACP group of sugar producing nations.

The warning came ahead of a four day conference in Nigeria to discuss ways to stimulate small-scale fish farming and to improve aquaculture.

Fishing is vital to Africa, supporting annual exports worth about $3bn.

Fish is also crucial to the health of 200 million Africans, providing a source of inexpensive protein.