Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-05-Speech-2-015"
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"en.20060905.5.2-015"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, the Doha round has failed, and what you, Commissioner, are presenting us with today is a rehash of what caused it to fail. You say that you hope that it will be completed nonetheless, but on what do you base that hope? You say that the developing countries are losing out and that the
damages them more than anyone else, but why is it that the developing world countries and their representatives have not completed the round? Perhaps they took another view of it and were even smart enough not to, on the grounds that the liberalisation that underlies your thinking, the liberalisation that you want to push through, has self-evidently not made them rich. Far, too, from filling the stomachs of the people who live there, it has driven them into debt and has failed to solve the problem of famine. This is the first time that these countries have come together, and if they manage to wield enough clout against the industrial nations of the West to cause this thing to fail, then that puts things in a different light and we need to see if we can come up with another offer.
You say that the reduction in customs duties as offered will bring EUR 20 billion to European agriculture, but are these EUR 20 billion not surplus to it, and – if we make this cut – would these EUR 20 billion not at least benefit the countries of the developing world, or would this be nothing more than a reduction in food standards? Are the countries there being bought off for less than they need to rise above poverty, with agriculture here being ruined as a consequence?
Qualified access is what is needed. The market access that you offer in return for access to the developing world’s markets for industrial products and services, destroys their infrastructures and the fragile development of their own industries and trades, while denying agriculture here a chance of existence, even though we need, as a matter of urgency, to produce food. It follows that quality and qualified market access are what is needed to enable the countries of the developing world to enjoy our price levels and standards and to develop their own economies.
The agreement on sugar showed us that those ACP countries that were able to supply sugar while complying with these conditions saw their economies develop, while those that were unable to do so found themselves having to sell to the multinationals at prices below the poverty level, and that state of affairs is going to continue.
So, Commissioner Mandelson, what you should do is make a proper offer of the sort that these countries can agree to, one that stabilises food supply and improves the stability and quality of trade, rather than one with a general tendency to put farmers around the world out of business. It is then, I believe, that the multilateral approach will be the right one, and everyone will be able to benefit from it in a way that they certainly cannot from the liberalisation that you are proposing."@en1
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