Latin American nations are seeking greater sales outlets in Europe for their agricultural products.

The European Union aims to give a new boost to free-trade negotiations with Latin America at a summit on Friday and Saturday in Lima, but the discussions remain eclipsed by long-struggling WTO talks.
“Lima will give us the opportunity to take stock of negotiations launched in 2007 with Central America and the Andean Community and where we are with Mercosur,“ said EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner. “We trust that if we continue to make progress we will be able to conclude the agreements toward end of 2009,“ she was quoted by AFP as saying.
Although all three sets of negotiations face their own tough political hurdles, the so-called Doha round of WTO free-trade negotiations currently looms large over all of them as the talks enter a crunch period.
“At the center of all of these challenges is the possibility of a Doha deal in 2008,“ said EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson.
WTO members are struggling to make a breakthrough in free-trade talks this month in order to clinch a broader agreement this year, widely seen as the last chance before the US administration and the European Commission change.
With trade ministers focusing squarely on Doha negotiations in recent years, long-running free-trade talks between the EU and Mercosur--which were supposed to be concluded in 2004Ñhave remained on the backburner.
Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay make up Mercosur along with Bolivia and Chile as associate members.
In the talks at the World Trade Organization, the EU wants Latin American countries to make their markets more accessible to its goods and services while Latin American nations are seeking greater sales outlets in Europe for their agricultural products. But the talks have stalled at the WTO, especially in the face of tough demands from Brazil and as well as because of differences over tropical products such as bananas.
“I hope we can use (the) summit to give renewed momentum to the Doha negotiation which is at a crunch point in Geneva,“ Mandelson said. “Around the table ... in Lima will be some of the countries who can make a key contribution to making that happen,“ he added.
Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said at the end of April that an EU-Mercosur free-trade agreement would not be possible before the first half of 2010, when Spain holds the EU’s rotating presidency.
Meanwhile, free-trade talks between the EU and members of the Andean Community, which were supposed to be concluded in the first half of 2009, remain hobbled by divisions among the Andean countries.
EU talks with Central America have had more success although here too, Europe is struggling to negotiate with such a disparate group of countries.
Currently, Chile and Mexico are the only countries in Latin America that enjoy free-trade agreements with Europe. With trade between Europe and those countries growing at up to 50 percent a year, the EU wants such pacts to serve as a model for other agreements in the region.

Almost one in four companies has been approached to pay a bribe to win or retain business in the last two years, a survey has indicated. The survey of 1,186 executives in 33 countries by Ernst & Young also suggests that 18 percent had lost business to a competitor prepared to pay a bribe, BBC wrote.
Corrupt practices were perceived to be most prevalent in mining, with fewer instances in energy and banking.
Just over a tenth of UK executives said their firm had been asked for a bribe.
This compared with 16 percent in Germany and 10 percent in France.
“Recommendations of best practice in anti-bribery compliance will require companies to take a much more comprehensive view of the way bribery and corruption affects their business,“ said John Smart, UK head of fraud investigation at Ernst & Young. Corruption was more widespread outside Europe. Only six percent of respondents in France and Germany said their organization had experienced at least one incident of bribery or corruption in the last two years.

Fraudsters netted hundreds of millions of dollars through mortgage scams last year, and the trend was likely to continue as the US housing market slumps even further, the FBI said Tuesday.
“We received 46,717 suspicious activity reports related to mortgage fraud last year, compared to 35,617 in 2006 and just 6,936 in 2003,“ the Federal Bureau of Investigation report was quoted by AFP as saying.
“Only 7 percent of these reports documented an exact dollar amount in terms of losses, but even so, the total loss from this seven percent was $813 million,“ it said, calling the monetary loss “the tip of the iceberg.“
The crisis in the subprime mortgage market--loans to high-risk borrowers with patchy credit histories--played a key role in fueling the spike in the scams, the report said. “The trouble actually began when home prices were rising a few years ago, leading to relaxed lending practices throughout the industry and the exaggeration of assets by borrowers anxious to qualify for loans, both of which contributed to fraud,“ the FBI said.

Australia’s center-left government slashed state benefits for the wealthy in its first budget Tuesday, while committing to spend the windfall from a China-led resources boom on ordinary families.
Treasurer Wayne Swan handed out huge tax breaks to low- and middle-income earners and announced big spending on health, education and climate change in what the Australian media have already dubbed the “Robin Hood“ budget, NEWS.com.au wrote.
Unveiling $47 billion (44.2 billion US dollars) in personal income tax cuts over the next four years, Swan said the budget encapsulated core Labor values.
He said it was time that “working families,“--the key demographic in Labor’s election win last November--saw the benefits of the resources boom that has filled the government’s coffers in recent years.
“For too long, working families have watched the proceeds of the boom directed elsewhere, in the form of tax cuts skewed to those already doing very well,“ he told parliament.

Eurozone finance ministers faced pressure on Tuesday to firm up commitments to budgetary rigor with slowing growth beginning to squeeze the state coffers of France, Italy and Portugal.
“I hope that there will be a deep discussion which will lead to clear conclusions and precise commitments from the eurozone ministers,“ said EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia recently, AFP wrote.
One EU official said talks at a monthly meeting of the ministers could lead to a landmark declaration such as the one they made in Berlin in April 2007 when they committed to balancing their budgets by 2010.
The ambitious declaration could include “tough language to encourage some countries to step up their efforts,“ the official said.
Chairman of the meeting, Luxembourg Finance Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, said governments with strong public accounts would be in a better position to react to economic pressures such as soaring inflation, which is hitting the poor particularly hard.