Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-26-Speech-4-039"
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"en.20020926.2.4-039"2
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"Mr President, I should like, first of all, to congratulate the rapporteur, Yasmine Boudjenah, on her thorough and timely work, which provides us today, on the eve of the opening of negotiations on the Economic Partnership Agreements, with a high-quality report on a particularly important and topical issue.
Incidentally, the content of this report – and I wish to emphasise that it was given unanimous approval in the Committee on Development and Cooperation, in contrast to what Mr Schwaiger appears to be saying – and the introductory words of the rapporteur herself make my intervention easier.
I shall, therefore, restrict myself to discussing a few aspects of this complex issue. First, I wish to state the need not to play down, in order to fall in line with the WTO, a partnership that has already been around for decades and which I believe must be continued and focused particularly on one key objective: the development of our more than 70 partner countries and meeting the fundamental needs of their populations. This highlights another issue: the Economic Partnership Agreements laid down in the Cotonou Agreement and the trade dimension of this agreement as a whole cannot prevail and even less replace a form of cooperation that must encompass various other fields and which, as I understand it, must be extended and seek to achieve better results than in the past.
Secondly, I wish to emphasise that I consider it crucial to ensure that total respect is given to the forms, timing and means of regional integration undertaken by these countries which, as we know, are not always easy or even obvious: and that it is necessary to pay special attention to the new development that is the recently constituted African Union. And, fundamentally, I think it is crucial to ensure that there is no deterioration in the positive situation represented by the current ACP group.
Thirdly, and taking account of the disparity in levels of development between the two parties in the negotiations and, in particular, the well-known limitations in terms of the ACP countries’ capacities, I wish to state that we must have studies on the predictable impacts of the new agreements on their various options and at various levels drafted and, if they are already drafted, presented as rapidly as possible, in addition to the fact that those limitations themselves reveal how crucial it is to ensure these countries special and differentiated treatment, which guarantees levels of protection able to ensure their development.
Fourthly, a more specific issue, however, that I feel is important and which Mr Titley has already mentioned: I am referring to the fact that customs revenues represent a substantial, if not almost exclusive contribution to the ACP countries’ budgets, which means that the measures we adopt on trade liberalisation must take account of this extremely important fact."@en1
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