Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-11-Speech-2-146"
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"en.20000411.6.2-146"2
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"Mr President, the first EU-Africa summit was an important event and had a great deal of potential for taking meaningful steps to reduce the marginalisation of African countries. So it is a pity that a number of things prevented that potential from being fully realised. Firstly, neither the European Parliament nor the EU-ACP Joint Assembly was invited to participate in the summit. Secondly, it is very sad that civil society was not able to have a greater input into the meeting. The NGOs from the EU and African countries took this summit very seriously and it was a missed opportunity not to engage in more meaningful dialogue with them. Civil society has a key role to play in Africa’s development process.
Finally, this meeting could have resulted in a far-reaching action plan of concrete actions. What we have is a plan full of warm words and good intentions but short on firm commitments, in particular on trade issues. While it is nice to recall the EU’s important decision to grant duty-free access for essentially all products, it would have been even more significant to have gone beyond the famous "essentially all" to include those products of real importance to the poorest countries, such as agricultural goods.
Finally – sadly – commodity prices were conspicuous by their absence from this agenda. A majority of African countries are overwhelmingly dependent on just one or two commodities for the bulk of their foreign exchange earnings. Until action is taken to reverse the fall of commodity prices, poverty in Africa will not be properly addressed."@en1
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