This weekend, GMF is hosting with its partners the third annual Brussels Forum, a gathering of political, academic, and business leaders to debate the countless items on the transatlantic agenda. Public sessions will be streamed live in video and audio from Brussels, and transcripts and video for … Continue Reading…

WASHINGTON — The news from Afghanistan on the counter-narcotics front is bad.  Opium production from Afghanistan’s 408,000 acres of poppy rose almost 50% in 2006, contributing to global heroin production that set a new record high of 606 metric tons in 2006.  The effort to stop the growing and production … Continue Reading…

European Union Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel will be in Washington DC on Thursday and Friday this week for meetings with all the key farm policy players in the Administration and in Congress. A deal between the EU and the US on cutting farm tariffs and subsidies holds the key to the stalled WTO ‘Doha Development Agenda’ trade negotiations. While EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson is responsible for Europe’s trade policy as a whole, it is important to remember that agricultural trade remains the exclusive domain of Mrs Fischer Boel. Last week the US Administration published its draft Farm Bill, will this week’s talks help break the logjam? Continue Reading…

The Financial Times has reported on new figures from the French government statistical service showing that French farmers are “getting steadily worse off compared with their fellow citizens and their European peers”. Such figures are grist to the mill of those calling for a strong defense of EU farm support from the internal pressure of the EU budget and the external pressure of the WTO’s Doha Round of multilateral trade liberalization negotiations. What such figures fail to show is the changing structure of farming in France as in other European countries and the likelihood that subsidies are actually accentuating inequalities. Continue Reading…

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and US Trade Representative Susan Schwab held a very short press conference immediately following European Commission President José-Manuel Barroso’s visit to Washington DC on Monday. Mandelson said “we’re in the end game” of a multilateral trade negotiation that Schwab described as resembling “three-dimensional chess”. Continue Reading…