Brussels, 26/07/2000 (Agence Europe) - At the Farnborough Air Show (UK), on Thursday, the Defence Ministers of six countries (Germany, Spain, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Sweden) are to sign a framework-agreement marking a new step in the construction of the Europe of Armaments. This agreement concerns six fields: security of supply; export procedures; security of information; research and technological development; the treatment of technical information; the harmonisation of operational military requirements. It must, notably, enable industrialists (including SMEs and subcontractors) to set up different forms of cooperation. Through this agreement, these six countries, which represent most of Europe's weapons production, also set themselves a binding framework in the restructuring of their defence industries. The framework-agreement also deals with the delicate issue of arms exports, also taking account of the growing demands of transparency and moralisation that national parliaments want to see. It complements the 1998 agreement, between Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom, which gave rise to OCCA (Joint Cooperation Organisation in matters of armaments) which currently governs some ten bilateral or multilateral cooperation programmes (Hot, Milan and Roland missiles, the future FASF ground-to-air missiles; Tiger combat helicopters; Cobra radar).