Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-02-10-Speech-1-112"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20030210.9.1-112"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"(
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, two new worrying developments have emerged in connection with the latest round of WTO negotiations. These developments concern the atmosphere of negotiations on the one hand and the subject of negotiations on the other. The atmosphere has changed due to the strong pressure exerted by the United States representatives on their European counterparts. Mr Robert Zoellick has referred to European partners such as France and Ireland as colonialists who are two hundred years behind the times. You are an exception Commissioner, as you have all but been awarded an honorary doctorate by the Bush administration. All this has taken place against the background of references to ‘Old Europe’, or even cheese-eating monkeys. We know that your opposite number Mr Robert Zoellick, signed an open letter from Mr Wolfowitz in January 1998 calling for a war on Iraq. You seem to be negotiating with a hawk Commissioner! You know him better than I do, however, so you must be best placed to judge if he really is one.
The subject of negotiations has also changed. To date, we had been discussing subjects which lacked soul. Now, as we discuss agriculture, we are negotiating on quality, the environment, welfare, animals and consequently essentially cultural matters. The present round does not concern goods. It concerns knowledge. It concerns the very essence of people, and their very being. Hence the fear of nothingness, as the Louvain students made clear to you. Agriculture constitutes an exception to the rule. There is its unique structure, the AOCs and the countryside. Hence the deep-rooted fear that you might not stand up for this agricultural exception which goes right back to Mesopotamia. It is nothing new.
Serious misgivings abound, and they are mainly of a political nature. We fear that Cancun will be a ‘Munich in the sun’. There are moreover precedents for this. There is the mysterious agreement of 2001 on bananas. Chiquita collapsed just like Enron. There is the failure to challenge the issue of dependency on oil-producing crops, even after the opening-up of former Eastern bloc countries and the consequences of mad cow disease. Above all there is Mr Fischler’s project, begun in July 2002 and confirmed in January 2003, which involved deep cuts in subsidies. At the same time, the United States established proposals to spend 190 billion over ten years from May 2002. Nonetheless, the
rule would keep all this within the green box.
Our fears are also based on an unfathomable contradiction. Surely it cannot be right to destroy our agricultural infrastructure and know-how when by 2020 there will be two billion more mouths to feed. This is the basis of my fundamental fear. Commissioner, we seem to be already condemned as we speed along on board the shuttle Earth which is as riddled with cracks as the shuttle Columbia. Yet here we are discussing commerce and global free-trade when we know drinking water supplies are dwindling and when two billion people lack electricity or medicine. I am beginning to wonder therefore whether the WTO, like the European Union, is a museum piece."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
"Martinez (NI )."1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples