ISDS Case Map
EU
European Union
The coup throws a curve ball at EU plans to wrap up an Association Agreement with the six-country Central American bloc this year, whose members included Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama.
The European Union's demands on India to take on higher intellectual property (IP) standards, if adopted, could spell disaster for the supply of low-cost generic medicines, undermine India's development and set a significant precedent for the future of IPR protection globally, cautioned Dr Carlos M. Correa, an expert on IP and the WTO TRIPS Agreement.
The European Commission (EC) has lashed out at Namibia's Trade and Industry Minister Hage Geingob, claiming he knew all along that they would not give written assurances on the concessions on infant industry protection, food security, export taxes and the free flow of goods agreed to in the interim economic partnership agreement (EPA) negotiations.
Dr Cheikh Tidiane Dieye, Trade Programme Co-ordinator for Civil Society Organizations in West Africa, is sure that negotiations would probably continue till January 2010 since both the EU and ECOWAS had not agreed on the percentage of the market they intend to be liberalized.
Right now, the EU's EPAs are devastating Africa's regional economic blocs through divide-and-conquer, reversing the resistance we saw from African countries a year ago.
The European Union and the West African countries have agreed to conclude a regional agreement on trade in goods and development cooperation by October 2009.
The Minister of Trade and Industry Dr Hage Geingob yesterday provided rare behind-the-scene reasons that have kept the protracted Economic Partnership Agreement between Namibia and the European Union from being concluded despite months of negotiations.
The most affected from the EU-India FTA will be India's dairy farming sector, where regularly five million women and 15 million men work to meet their daily needs.
What is slowly emerging is the beginning of a composite oppositition to FTAs in India.
The European Union may have bowed to pressure from Nigeria and other African Caribbean and Pacific countries by shifting the commencement of the controversial Economic Partnership Agreement from the June 30 deadline to October 2009.
