Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-16-Speech-2-320"
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"en.20010116.13.2-320"2
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". – Mr President, I would first like to say a few words about the intervention of jute organisations and Bangladesh's role as a host of the old organisation. A year ago there were quite dramatic problems and I tried to see if it were possible to rejuvenate the old organisation. There was no agreement between our Member States to do what we in the Commission would have liked to do, which explains the phase that we have been going through with this organisation.
The good news, however, is that the need has been accepted for a special effort, based in Bangladesh I hope, to promote the use and new uses of jute as a raw material, so perhaps it is now possible to continue with the substance of what the old jute organisation could do. There was a meeting in Dhaka at the beginning of October and all the different parties agreed to create what is called an international jute study group. The draft proposal for the constitution of this body will be discussed and hopefully finalised at the meeting of the International Jute Organisation to be held in Dhaka at the end of this month. Subsequently it will be submitted to UNCTAD in Geneva and, once adopted, sent for signing and ratification to the governments concerned and the UN treaties section.
So we now have very high hopes that a new body that can promote renewed international cooperation in the jute sector will come out of the long painful discussion about the old jute organisation. This is very good because the International Jute Organisation is the only international organisation of this kind that is actually based in a least-developed country. This is what I can report on this matter that was brought up in our discussion here.
To Mrs Djubkaer I would say: yes, it is a strong asset for Bangladesh that it is a nation and we definitely should encourage the use of that potential. The Chittagong Hill Tracts problem is a challenge to that picture of Bangladesh but fortunately, compared to the past, the tensions are lower and they still seem set on the right course.
As to the role of IT in Bangladesh, yes of course we will try to be useful and do something but I do not honestly see it as an easy shortcut, so we will stick to the basic priorities of our agreement with Bangladesh. But we will use IT in all possible applications. As to what you say about focusing specifically on women in this respect, I would say that Bangladesh may be one of the places where it would be possible to experiment with this. So we should be open to these possibilities.
I agree very much with what Mr van Orden said about the regional aspects. It seems that Bangladesh is the nice guy around and we certainly should recognise this as a fact and we should relate to Bangladesh in that perspective. It has neighbours who are not all very easy and the whole region is more problematic than we may often think. There are some eleven million Bangladeshi living illegally in India. That is a large number in a European context, so from the point of view of stability, democratisation, orderly elections and so on, it really is facing quite some challenges.
Let me once again thank you for this very positive debate. I look forward to working with Parliament on our relations with Bangladesh. Things are moving so rapidly there that compared to the past we may be able in just a few years to expect and to detect real changes as a result of our cooperation there, and it is a great inspiration.
Finally, we look forward very much to welcoming Bangladesh as one of the leading participants in our conference in May in Brussels on LDCs, to be held with UNCTAD. This will be a big opportunity for Bangladesh and the other least-developed countries to present themselves not as patients on a sick bed in hospital, with the rest of the world looking at them like curious doctors, but as partners in the global society, representing cultures and potentials which are important in keeping alive the diversity of globalisation. So we are also looking forward to that partnership.
The first EC-Bangladesh Joint Committee meeting under the new cooperation agreement is now planned for the first half of March 2001, so the train is on the move."@en1
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