This call for the defence of maize and all peasant seeds comes amid increasing pressure to impose the so-called UPOV laws through trade agreements and other neoliberal policies throughout the region.
As debt pressures rise, South Asia’s economic strategies are increasingly revolving around FTAs. The frenzy, however, is not only reshaping the region’s trade dynamics, but also a wide array of national legal frameworks, from labour rights to agriculture policies.
More than $100bn of public money has been awarded to private investors in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) courts, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet.
The Council of the EU adopted a historic decision to withdraw the European Union from the Energy Charter Treaty, an international investment treaty from the 1990s increasingly used by the fossil fuel industry to sue governments over their climate and energy policies.
The modernized agreement updates and adds new language in areas such as trade in services, investment, temporary entry for business people, telecommunications, digital trade, labor and the environment.
Kenya and the European Union have enforced a trade deal after a decade of negotiations, opening up the domestic market for tax-free goods from the 27-country bloc after 25 years.
The EU has taken the final step to exit the Energy Charter Treaty; the Union and its Member States have also reached a formal agreement to put an end to the continuation of intra-EU arbitration proceedings under the ECT.
With its inclusion in the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, the agreement promotes the concept of ‘Data Free Flow with Trust’, a guiding principle for international cooperation on data flows.
The Netherlands is keen to have a bilateral investment protection agreement with India and is fully backing the proposed India -EU free trade agreement (FTA), the country’s deputy prime minister Wopke Hoekstra said at a briefing in his office.