Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-30-Speech-2-013"
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"en.20040330.1.2-013"2
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"Mr President, these reports deserve praise for confirming the position of the European Parliament on the important issue of cooperation and solidarity, but they also demonstrate the shortcoming of being simply answers to a consultation, without having the status of a parliamentary ‘opinion’. Despite this limitation, they very clearly express Parliament’s position on the need for the agreements to go beyond what is known as ‘political dialogue and cooperation’ and become genuine association agreements. As a matter of fact, these two reports and four opinions received only three votes against, with the opinions of the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy preventing unanimity. Whilst we all know of Parliament’s unhappiness with simply creating the political conditions necessary and imposing a model and whilst it is a matter of regret that the Commission proposals do nothing more than pave the way for future negotiations, Parliament uses these reports to suggest that the agreements on which it has been consulted should constitute a stage of transition and of preparation.
We feel that what is at stake is the concept of cooperation and we would, therefore, like to go further, as advocated in the opinions of the Committee on Development and Cooperation. It is indeed regrettable that these agreements are geared towards preparing a political framework that makes matters dependent on free trade agreements and that there is no understanding of these agreements as being part of an integrated strategy for economic and social development to combat poverty.
Through these agreements – to use an expression favoured by Commissioner Lamy at the 7th Joint ACP-EU Parliamentary Assembly – it would allow clauses excluded from the WTO Cancun meeting to come in through the back door. The ACP countries are attempting to prevent this in the economic partnership agreements and, amongst other issues, to prevent various forms of liberalisation being imposed in areas for which they are attempting to find solutions that are best suited to their national situations, specific characteristics and processes. In particular, we are talking here about public services, the fields of health, education and water supply – particularly the latter, because this is crucial to many of these countries. It is significant that, amongst the various approaches, as these agreements illustrate, they are looking to achieve the same thing, which is to foist a single-society economic model on a market which is free but not fair. At the moment, the aforementioned cooperation does not cover economic and social development strategies to combat poverty, and everything is dependent on a market- and profit-driven ideology, thus widening the already shocking social disparities."@en1
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