The tension between the EU and Russia rises again regarding the "war of hams," because it is yet to be reached a bilateral agreement to remove the interdiction of European exports of pork previously imposed by Moscow in late January 2014.
It was actually in late January, after the identification of four Byelorussian boars affected by African swine influenza between Lithuania and Poland, that Moscow decided one-sidedness to block the pork imports from Europe.
The European Commission had already tuned to Geneva in April 2014 in order to solve the problem by bilateral discussions but the outcome was unsuccessful.
For these reason the European commission has decides to ask the WTO the intervention of a panel to solve this argue, which has an economic impact equal to 580 million euros on European exports to Russia on a total of 1, 4 billion euros per year for 750 thousand tons (almost 20% of Russian consumption, of which 3, 3% are products coming from Italy).