Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-01-19-Speech-2-152"
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"en.20100119.8.2-152"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the revision of the Cotonou Agreement gives us an opportunity to learn lessons from the crises that we face: the economic and financial crisis, the social or food crisis, climate change, energy challenges and the persistence of extreme poverty.
Stopping this haemorrhage is a question of consistency and credibility. A first step could be the signing of a binding agreement, requiring multinationals to automatically declare their profits and the taxes paid in every country in which they operate, thus limiting the abuses and the losses sustained by developing countries.
Finally, I would like to use this debate to stress once more the democratic deficit of this revision, which our parliaments were not consulted on. The role of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly must, however, be strengthened.
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I hope that the negotiators will seize the opportunity they are being given to make the necessary amendments to this partnership and to make it a success of which the principal beneficiaries will be the populations of the ACP countries.
The dominant economic model that is the unbridled free market, and our lifestyles, have not just shown their limitations, but have actually caused these unprecedented multidimensional crises. We must therefore carry out a radical overhaul of all our policies.
The report submitted to you today and adopted unanimously by the members of the Committee on Development seems to me to represent a first step towards this necessary revision.
The main imperative to respect is consistency. European Union trade policy, fisheries and agriculture must be designed consistently and in such a way as to ensure sustainable development, to fight poverty and guarantee a decent standard of living and income for everyone.
I am sorry to tell you that this is not the case today. By making trade an end in itself, and not a means to serve its development policy, the European Union is sacrificing the populations of developing countries for the benefit of its multinationals. Therefore, negotiations on the Economic Partnership Agreements are quite rightly causing controversy amongst the governments of the ACP, unions and civil society, which see them as a threat to their economies.
Agriculture is one of the most problematic issues and remains tragically neglected in cooperation between the European Union and the ACP countries. Although rural areas and this sector represent more than 60% of the population and their jobs, their share of the European funds for ACP countries is virtually non-existent.
This must change. How can we eradicate poverty without making food sovereignty a priority? Agriculture must be at the heart of the European Union’s development policies. Helping developing countries together with local farmers to ensure they have food sovereignty is quite simply essential, all the more so because, today, food sovereignty, like the democratic legitimacy of these countries’ governments, is threatened by a new and particularly worrying phenomenon, the acquisition of arable land by foreign investors following the rise in food prices in 2007.
China, Saudi Arabia and even Qatar now own thousands of hectares in developing countries. The European Union and the ACP countries must tackle this matter, which is likely to create violent conflicts and hunger riots, in particular, by making access to natural resources such as land and water a fundamental and inalienable right of local populations.
Another matter that is close to my heart is that of tax havens. The repercussions of these are bad enough for developed countries, but are even worse for the economies and the political institutions of developing countries. The illicit financial flows that they allow are thought to account for as much as ten times the amount of official development assistance."@en1
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