Dear reader of this newsletter, the team of the CTA Brussels Office would like to present you our kind wishes and hope you will spend a pleasant Easter holiday. CTA will be closed from Friday 22 April to Monday 25 April. We will be back on Tuesday 26 April.
European Commission
-27 April: Weekly Meeting of the College
ACP Group of States
-26-29 April: 6th Regional meeting of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly
European Economic and Social Committee
-29 April: Conference on Energy Security
You can also read our newspaper “CTA Brussels Daily” (fed by our Twitter account), follow our new Facebook group CTABrussels and our Twitter account CTABrussels to receive up-to-date information on EU-ACP events.
Our video guest this week is Professor Tony Allan from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, who coined the term "virtual water". We spoke to him in the margin of a Brussels Briefing on the Water we eat.
As the EU embarks on further reform of the Common Agriculture Policy, the Union's newest member states are demanding that their views are taken into account. Agriculture no longer absorbs most of the European Union funds. But even now, when summit communiqués are peppered with references to “innovation” and “competitiveness pacts”, some of the EU's biggest rows are still about how much money farmers get. The farm subsidy row will resurface in the coming months. The EU has embarked on another reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which is currently worth €56 billion, or 42% of the EU budget.
Scientists in the UK have found a new way to produce water efficient seeds that they claim will help plants cope with drought resistance, thereby contributing to global food security. The research was partially supported by the PHARMA—PLANTA ('Recombinant pharmaceuticals from plants for human health') project, which clinched EUR 12 million under the 'Life sciences, genomics and biotechnology for health' Thematic area of the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6).