European Parliament
-11/14 June: Plenary session
Council of Ministers
-14 June: COREPER I
-13/14 June: COREPER II
-11 June: Environment Council (ENVI),  (Horsens, Denmark) 
-12 June: Agriculture and Fisheries Council (FISH), (Horsens, Denmark)
ACP Group
-11/13 June: 95th Session of the ACP Council of Ministers  (Vanuatu)
-14/15 June: 37th Session of the ACP-EU Council of Ministers   (Vanuatu) 
Research events
-13 June: Market Access Conference 2012, (Copenhagen, Denmark)

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.

The next Brussels Development Briefing will be held on 26 June from 8.30 – 13h00 on Food Losses and Food Waste. Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted! This briefing wants to address the concerns revolving around global hunger, food security, sustainability and waste recovery. A variety of different actors – farmers, retailers, governments and consumers – involved in the food supply chain contribute to large amounts of global food losses and waste. Several strategies are available for the reduction of food losses and waste. However, these strategies are not always known and much action needs to be taken to reduce losses and waste at global, regional and national scale.

As we informed our readers last week, more than 300 officials from the European Union and the Group of African, Caribbean and Pacific States will convene this week in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu for  one of the most important meetings of the year between the two groups.

The EU recently released a new report identifying a staggering increase in protectionism around the world. 123 new trade restrictions were introduced over the last eight months, a rise of just over 25%, bringing the total number of restrictive measures in place today to 534. The report points to a failure by G20 countries in reducing trade barriers and urges G20 members to increase their efforts in preventing the introduction of new barriers to trade and to rectify protective measures introduced since the break-out of the crisis.

In a consultation document recently adopted, the European Commission sets out its intentions for fixing fishing opportunities for 2013. Through this annual document the Commission asks for the views of Member States and stakeholders on the setting of Total Allowable Catches (TACs), quotas and fishing effort (days-at-sea) for the following year. The document shows that the Commission's efforts to phase out overfishing are starting to bear fruit. There are now 20 fish stocks in European seas which are known not to be overfished, compared to only 5 stocks in 2009. Reducing TACs in the past years even made it possible to increase some TACs for 2012. This could result in at least €135 million extra income for the fishing industry.