国际英语新闻：EU-Canada summit to be held in Prague on Wednesday

PRAGUE, May 5 (Xinhua) -- Prague will host the summit of the EU with its key business partner Canada on Wednesday, which is to be held within the Czech EU presidency.

    The EU-Canada summit will officially launch bilateral talks on free trade which would enable the lowering of duty fees, the release of investments and cooperation between the EU and Canada on the regulation and the rules to determine the origin of commodities.

    Both partners should gain 20 billion euros a year from the agreement that is to be completed by 2011.

    Canada with the annual trade turnover of over 70 billion euros is one of the EU's key business partners.

    Moreover, the EU hopes the EU-Canada summit could be an impulse to revive the talks on the world trade liberalization, which started in 2001 within the World Trade Organization (WTO), but ended up in a stalemate in the past few years.

    The EU-Canada bilateral trade should also be supported by the aviation agreement to open the airline market that representatives of the EU and the Canadian government will sign in Prague.

    The agreement is to remove the limitation of the number of flights and the places of arrivals and departures, which may lower the prices of air tickets. The agreement is to enable the European airlines to fly to Canada from any destination in the EU.

    The summit may highlight the problem of Czech Romanies' exodus to Canada. The issues of Czech Romanies applying for refugee status in Canada may be touched upon only during bilateral talks between outgoing Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek and his Canadian counterpart Stephen Harper which are to take place ahead of the summit on Wednesday morning