COLOMBO, Oct 11, 2007 (AFP) - The ambitious plans of India and China to ramp up biofuel production will deplete their water reserves and seriously impact their ability to meet food demands, a new study said Thursday.

China and India, expected to account for nearly 70 percent of global oil demand between now and 2030, are using cheaper biofuels derived from crops to help power their economies, the International Water Management Institute said.

BUCHAREST, Oct 10, 2007 (AFP) - Romanian Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu said Wednesday he feared 'delays' in his country's implementation of agricultural reforms requested by the EU would cause the bloc to reduce aid to farmers.

'The most delicate problem is linked to the agency for payments and intervention in agriculture (APIA), through which farming subsidies are distributed,' Tariceanu said after a meeting of the committee for European affairs.

GENEVA, Oct 8, 2007 (AFP) - The United States holds the key to the success or failure of World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks aimed at liberalising global commerce and boosting developing countries, the French foreign trade minister said Monday.

'There is a near-universal consensus that it is chiefly the Americans who hold the keys to either the success or failure of the Doha round,' Herve Novelli told journalists after his first visit to the WTO's headquarters here.

ROME, Oct 3, 2007 (AFP) - Nearly 30 Italian groups representing farmers, consumers and environmentalists on Wednesday launched a nationwide signature campaign against genetically modified food.

'The unprecedented initiative for a popular debate aims to collect at least three million signatures,' said spokesman Mario Capanna, once the leader of Italian student protests in 1968 and today the head of the Foundation for Genetic Rights.

JOHANNESBURG, Sept 22, 2007 (AFP) - Nearly 3,000 people rallied Saturday in the northern South African town of Mafikeng to demand that the country's overwhelmingly black farm labourers are not ill-treated, the organisers said.

The rally follows a threat by the country's land minister to expropriate land from farmers who mistreat their workers.

The demonstrators came from the rural areas of the mainly agricultural North West province, said Solly Phetoe, in charge of the provincial chapter of COSATU, South Africa's leading trade union federation.

HELSINKI, Sept 20, 2007 (AFP) - Predators have killed so many Finnish reindeer this year that the government has already paid out all of its alloted compensation for 2007 to breeders, authorities said Thursday.

Wolves, bears, lynx and particularly wolverines killed 2,822 reindeers in the first six months of the year, the highest figure for the past 20 years, the agriculture ministry said in a statement.

Losses in the first six months were the same as for all of 2006.

BRUSSELS, Sept 20, 2007 (AFP) - The European Union on Thursday welcomed as a 'positive move' what it saw as a new US willingness to negotiate in world trade talks, raising hopes of progress in the Doha round of negotiations.

'It's a positive move which we welcome,' said the spokesman for EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, who represents the 27-country bloc in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks.

The spokesman, Peter Power, said it demonstrated a 'US commitment to negotiate on the basis of the Geneva text and we urge all parters to do likewise.'

WASHINGTON, Sept 19, 2007 (AFP) - The United States is prepared to negotiate a multilateral trade deal on the basis of a WTO proposal calling for big cuts in agriculture subsidies, a government official said Wednesday.

But a spokeswoman for the office of the US Trade Representative, Sean Spicer, said other countries 'must step up to ensure the strongest possible market access outcomes' in agriculture as well as manufacturing and services.

GENEVA, Sept 19, 2007 (AFP) - The United States on Wednesday showed a new willingness to negotiate in global trade talks, a high-ranking WTO official said, raising hopes of progress in the stalled Doha round of negotiations.

The World Trade Organisation's chief agriculture negotiator, New Zealand ambassador Crawford Falconer, said the United States had accepted a proposal by the WTO for cutting state subsidies in the agricultural sector.

JOHANNESBURG, Sept 16, 2007 (AFP) - South Africa's agriculture ministry caused a flurry of disquiet among the country's farmers this week by threatening those who mistreat their workers with land expropriation.

'We are obviously disturbed by the persistent reports of abuses on farms,' Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana told a national conference in Johannesburg on Thursday of the Food and Allied Workers Union that represents farm workers.