Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-13-Speech-4-024"
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"en.20000413.2.4-024"2
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"Mr President, the reason we are having to express our opinion on a draft for the banana COM yet again, for the fifth time since 1993, is the relentless attacks on the Community regime by three large American multinationals. They dominate the world market in bananas and the WTO backed their interests after an appeal was lodged by the United States, which is also imposing very heavy unilateral sanctions on a series of our companies.
But, in fact, almost 60% of the 4 million tonnes of bananas consumed annually in the European Union are supplied not by Community or ACP producers, but by Latin American third countries where the American companies run vast plantations under production conditions characterised by scant regard for social and environmental concerns.
In traditional ACP countries and Union countries, which already have only a minority share of the European market, bananas are grown in small production units, usually family concerns, and in areas where there is no real possibility of alternative occupation. So they represent an essential element in the balance of the economic and social fabric of these fragile territories. After having driven the Ivory Coast to despair to allow five multinationals to lower their production costs to the detriment of cocoa producers, are we now going to grant three American multinationals the exclusive right to the world market for bananas, including the European market, ruining our own producers and those of our ACP partners into the bargain? Are we willing to sacrifice production which means life or death to some of our territories for peace at the WTO?
Unfortunately, that certainly seems to be the route the Commission has chosen, with a short and dangerous transitional system and an exclusively tariff – and uncertain – formula as from 2006, which would imperil both ACP and European production and put the Community banana market under the control of a few large operators, able to set the profit margins through the commercialisation of dollar bananas.
So the Commission’s proposal is in line with neither the interests of Community and ACP producers, nor the long-term interests of European consumers, because it actually encourages the emergence of a far from competitive market situation. That is why it has been unanimously rejected not only by our Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, but also by the ACP-EU Joint Assembly and the French Parliament. So I hope our Parliament will follow the Committee on Agriculture, and the European Commission will feel obliged to make new proposals to us, more in accordance with European interests and our cooperation with the ACP countries."@en1
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