Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-07-06-Speech-4-042"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20060706.4.4-042"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
".
Madam President, last night I was driven home by a Ghanaian taxi driver. I believe he was one of the few working, because of the World Cup excitement. I asked him whether he liked living in France. He said it was OK, but he missed Ghana. Here in France, three of his children were able to go to university, something that was impossible to imagine in Ghana.
I was in Ghana last year. What the taxi driver said confirmed what I had seen there. I went to northern Ghana to meet tomato and rice farmers. They were unable to make a living wage and therefore unable to send their children to school or to have any access to medical care. At the same time, on the markets in northern Ghana, there was US-subsidised rice and EU-processed tomato products, cheaper than the local produce.
On the same trip, we visited Fair Trade cocoa farmers in central Ghana. They were certainly not rich people but they had a sustainable price, they had a long-term contract for their product. Therefore they were able to access medical care, there was a school for their children, and the Fair Trade premium meant that there was investment in water in their local villages. I saw the same differences between Fair Trade farmers and non-Fair Trade farmers in the Windward Islands, on the banana farms.
We want fair prices for farmers in all developing countries. We hope that the WTO will deliver a more just system, but in the meantime we need Fair Trade, with a capital âFâ and a capital âTâ. I am pleased to hear that the Commission will support that.
On the issue of other labels, yes, other ethical labels are being developed. Some of them are very good, but we have to be careful here. We cannot have Fair Trade on the cheap. As the market gets bigger, there is a temptation for more and more players to want an ethical label, but they do not want to pay the real price. So we have to watch who we support and make sure the labels really are ethical. Fair Trade is about price and sustainability. It is about the Millennium Development Goal of tackling poverty."@en1
|
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples