A senior Brazilian official welcomed Friday Brazil's decision to postpone trade sanctions against the United States over its cotton subsidies.
The two countries reached a preliminary agreement Thursday that Brazil would not apply WTO-sanctioned reprisals against the U.S. until late 2012to give it time to change its agricultural regulations.
The agreement strengthened international trade and would reduce illegal competition, said Miguel Jorge, the Brazilian Development, Industry and Foreign Trade minister.
But Jorge said, if the U.S. did not make appropriate changes in its agricultural regulations by the end of 2012, Brazil would enforce the trade sanctions.
"If we feel at any moment that there was an infraction, we will go back to the sanctions," the minister said.
Brazil was authorized to apply the tariffs in 2009 after a long dispute in the World Trade Organization (WTO) over illegal cotton subsidies granted by the U.S. government to U.S. cotton producers, which were damaging international trade.
The sanctions amount to 830 million U.S. dollars a year, of which 590 million U.S. dollars are to be applied over products and about 240 million U.S. dollars in suspension of intellectual property rights.
In recent years, the "smart city" has gradually become a hot topic, give the public a expectation on better future city life. In the international arena, has been more than 200 "smart city" projects are being implemented. Some domestic cities are taking positive action, Shanghai put forward that take advantage of urban wisdom to building a smart city, Wuhan in October last year, has taken substantive steps to construct smart city, Ningbo in September 2010 to make a decision on building a smart city, then introduced five-year Action Platform for the smart city construction. The city has also been classified as hubs of the province to build a central hub "smart city system. Conform to the wave of smart city, develop intelligent industry in the city to promote the construction of “two districts six cities ", the first to build a moderately prosperous society of a higher level to benefit the whole people, should play an active role.
An "intelligent life", and "smart city" is closer to us
Last year, two reports on Zhejiang may not seem like much, but let us smell the atmosphere of "intelligent life", see the dawn of the "smart city".
The first report: Ningbo held the first China Intelligence Fair, provincial ministries tripartite signed a "smart city" pilot cooperation agreement. September 2, 2011, China's first smart city Expo - 2011 China Smart City technology and application products Exposition "held in Ningbo. Three days exhibition, 310 enterprises participate in the exhibition, 16 total investment of 6.5 billion smart city cooperation projects located in Ningbo.