Police clashed Wednesday with hundreds of fishermen protesting against the high cost of fuel outside the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels reported BBC.
The European Central Bank (ECB) left interest rates for the Euro zone unchanged at 4% but admitted an increase was possible at its next meeting because risks to price stability over the medium term have further increased.
The Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, MPC, decided Thursday to hold interest rate at 5%. The decision had been widely expected amid concerns about the pace of inflation.
The United Nations World Food Programme said on Wednesday that it will provide 1.2 billion US dollars in additional food aid in the 62 countries hit hardest by the current crisis resulting from the surge in food and fuel prices.
Oil fields abandoned by Royal Dutch Shell in Nigeria's Ogoniland in the Niger Delta 15 years ago will be given to another oil company this year, President Umaru Yar'Adua said on Wednesday during a visit to South Africa, according to press reports.
Oil giant Shell corporation Chief Executive Jeroen van der Veer said on Monday he did not see any shortage of physical oil supplies, echoing the view of many OPEC ministers who say the world market is well-supplied.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will issue an urgent plea to world leaders at a food summit in Rome on Tuesday to immediately suspend trade restrictions, agricultural taxes and other price controls that have helped fuel the highest food prices in 30 years, according to U.N. officials.
The European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet set the tone at the ECB's 10th anniversary event by warning that bad management of the oil crisis in the 1970s (meaning large wage rises and low interest rates) seriously hurt the economy and jobs, and that the errors of the past must not be repeated. This anniversary is no time for complacency, Trichet said.
Noting that the time for talk was over and that action was urgently needed, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf appealed to world leaders for 30 billion US dollars a year to re-launch agriculture and avert future threats of conflicts over food.
Driven by rising consumption worldwide, the international trade in fish products is expanding at a rapid pace, according to an FAO paper presented on Monday at an intergovernmental meeting in Germany.