Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-02-01-Speech-4-027"
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"en.20070201.4.4-027"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I shall start by congratulating my esteemed colleague, Mr Varela Suanzes-Carpegna, and by thanking him for having asked, on behalf of the Committee on International Trade, this oral question on the negotiations under way at the World Trade Organisation regarding the rules on access to public contracts. We need derogations for small and medium-sized enterprises, Commissioner.
The subject bringing us together today is a crucial issue as far as growth and employment in Europe are concerned. The WTO rules on trade in goods and services do not apply to purchases made by a State for its own use, that is to say to public procurement. That is why some countries, operating just outside the Marrakech agreements of April 1994, have voluntarily signed a special annex containing an agreement on public procurement. With the exception of the European Union, all the major countries participating in this agreement – Canada, Korea, the United States and Japan – have excluded from their offer contracts that they reserve for their SMEs. This imbalance is unacceptable, and the public contracts that have thus been excluded are precisely those that concern our small and medium-sized enterprises, while the SMEs from those countries have unrestricted access to all our public contracts.
Our SMEs are thus under-represented where public procurement is concerned, and we need to launch a broad debate on the reasons for this. We need to put right this imbalance by obtaining a derogation on public procurement that favours European SMEs. We cannot accept distortions of this kind.
Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, over and above this negotiation, the issue at stake is the will of the European Union to provide small and medium-sized enterprises with the favourable environment that they need and to use access to public procurement as an extraordinary lever for growth and employment; also at stake is the need to provide legal certainty, within the European Union, between the international legal system, European law and national laws. We are not talking here about protectionism; quite the contrary, we are talking about increasing the supply by having more businesses to meet the demand.
Commissioner, there are three areas on the planet today: Asia, excluding Japan, which has poor countries but strong growth; the United States, which is a rich country with strong growth; and Europe, which has rich countries but weak growth. We need to reflect. When we regulated the internal market by voting for the Services Directive, we built this market on the laws of competition, and the European Union took a great interest in consumers. We now need to take an interest in our manufacturers. The renegotiation of the multilateral agreement on public procurement that is currently under way at the WTO is, in our view, an extraordinary opportunity to act and to reflect on the place occupied by SMEs in terms of accessing public contracts.
We need, Commissioner, to give the internal market the gift of a European Small Business Act that includes social market economy considerations. The debate is open, and I welcome that."@en1
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