Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-23-Speech-3-348"
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"en.20080423.23.3-348"2
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"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, trade between nations is a good thing. Free trade is desirable, but today the world has changed and the WTO’s rules are ill-adapted and in many cases need to be amended.
The very nature of international trade has changed. In the past trade was based on complementarity: we sought what we did not have and exported any surpluses. That order made nations prosperous. Today, however, social dumping reigns. We abandon what we know how to do in order to import what somebody else is doing cheaper, not because it is more profitable, but because there are less costs, less taxes, less social constraints.
This WTO order allows the poor countries, the poor in the rich countries, to make the rich in the poor countries even richer. It is less and less based on solidarity or on mutual agreements between nations; rather it is an order that is disrupting nations and creating a conflict between the winners and the losers.
The WTO rules therefore have to be changed. They must restore the Community preference and revive the spirit of the Treaty of Rome, which established the common external tariff. That was not over-cautious protection, but fair compensation in the face of social dumping. The founding fathers were not always wrong. The WTO must incorporate the erratic exchange rate fluctuations in its evaluation of trade constraints. It is unacceptable for the yuan to remain so low when the country has such a high foreign trade surplus. It is outrageous that EADS loses a billion euro every time the dollar falls 10 cents against an ideological euro.
In conclusion, the future of truly free trade reminds us that we have a lot to do before we can sit back. On the one hand, we need to restore the border as a condition of the policy and, thus, freedom for the people; on the other hand, we need to allow the monetary and financial policy to take a back seat to the real economy, the productive economy, for it is that economy alone that allows the people to live here in freedom."@en1
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