The Office of the United States Trade Representative announced an end to Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) eligibility for India and Turkey after finding the countries no longer meet the conditions for getting duty-free access to U.S. markets as developing...
Newsweek Uses Datamyne to Dig into Toxic Fashion
Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013, which buried over 1,100 workers, arrested the attention of American consumers. But the environmental crisis in Asia, driven by outsourced apparel manufacturing and impacting hundreds of millions of people, has gone...
Agricultural Juggernaut: California’s Almond Exports
This caught our eye in the story about the reboot of US-India trade relations: Almonds round out India’s top five imports from the US. Almonds are an export success story for the US – and for California in particular. In fact, almonds are a leading US export crop,...
US-India Trade Relations: “Forward Together”
Earlier today, US Trade Representative Michael Froman surveyed recent progress toward liberalizing trade achieved by India and the US in a speech to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. Froman is in New Delhi to co-chair with India’s Trade...
Opportunities to Buy at Bargain Chemical Prices Rise as Rupee Falls
by Brian J. McCormick, guest columnist Our search for “The New Cheap”*, which took us to China in August and South Korea in September, now leads us to India, where declines in the value of the rupee against the US dollar should set the stage for attractively priced...
Guar Is Thicker than Water
In demand for fracking, supplies of the Asian beans are thin on the ground The new “black gold” isn’t oil, but guar, a bean whose seeds are made into a gum used to thicken sauces, ice cream, yogurts – and now “proppants,” the materials that are forced into fractured...
Rising Tide of Honey Laundering
Chinese honey gets around US and EU trade barriers Honey carries a nature-made “country of origin label:” the pollen picked up by bees as they collect the nectar from which the honey is produced. Indeed, melissopalynologists (honey pollen scientists) can get pretty...
Peru Ramps up Ag Exports
Cultivating what the world wants to eat pays off If you follow FreshPlaza, the portal for global produce news, (and we do) you may have noticed the news on Peruvian agricultural exports is all good. Peru’s export sales of table grapes to newly opened Asian markets are...
Chinese Solar Imports Draw Fire
Do surging shipments and dropping prices signal dumping? Potential scandal aside, Solyndra’s August bankruptcy filing, close behind the failures of Evergreen Solar and SpectraWatt, signals a fast and hard shake-out of the US solar energy industry. A global glut of...
Whisky to Flow Freely
And that’s not all as FTAs come into force July 1 Here’s a new take on the classic UK-centric newspaper headline, “Fog in Channel. Continent Cut off.” The BBC reports that “South Korea lifts Scotch whisky import barriers”. True, as far as it goes: Effective today, a...