Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-11-30-Speech-3-032"
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"en.20051130.10.3-032"2
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".
Mr President, there seems to be a widening gulf between the EU rhetoric on this WTO round – which has the word ‘development’ written into almost every sentence – and the reality, which is that the majority of developing countries are continuing to be ignored. This gulf extends to the contradiction between what the Council is saying and what the Commission is doing.
Alan Johnson, a UK Trade Minister and representative of the UK Presidency, said just a few weeks ago that developing countries must not be forced to open up their markets. He proclaimed that ‘we must reject forced liberalisation’, and yet the Commission is adopting an increasingly aggressive negotiating agenda that is diametrically opposed to this. On non-agriculture market access the Commission is demanding far-reaching liberalisation that will threaten the very survival of local manufacturing in some developing countries. On services, the Commission has completely discarded its former promises about service negotiations being voluntary, and is now demanding a mandatory minimum opening of the market.
There is supreme irony, Commissioner Mandelson, in your being quoted in the newspapers today as saying that one voice which has not been heard in these negotiations so far is the voice of the poor, when the European Union is itself guilty of ignoring precisely that voice: the voice of African countries and other ACP countries, for example, which have all said they do not want a new benchmarking formula in the services sector. We are in real danger of repeating the mistakes made in Cancun. The EU is failing to listen to developing countries and is pursuing its own business agenda with extraordinary arrogance.
A resolution has been tabled by the three larger political groups and I want to explain why our group is unable to sign it. No date has been set for an end to export subsidies. Indeed, ending export subsidies is now made conditional on parallel movement from other industrialised countries. On services, the resolution demands an ambitious agreement with no rejection of the new benchmarking formula, and no clear exclusion of basic services such as water.
On NAMA, there is a demand for rapid acceleration of negotiations on the basis of an extreme formula which most developing countries have already rejected. Extraordinarily, it is suggested that WTO members should remove their non-tariff barriers since they apparently hamper market access. Those so-called non-tariff barriers include hard-won democratically agreed national laws that protect the environment, social standards and health and they must not be regarded simply as barriers to trade.
Most important of all, however, is the pressing fact that four years into the DDA, the agenda is not delivering for the poor of the world. We need a radical and fundamental revision of trade policy so that this genuinely can be a development round worthy of the name."@en1
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