Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-12-11-Speech-2-053"
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"en.20011211.3.2-053"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, good work was done in Doha. I believe we have three good reasons to appreciate the results.
The first is the real involvement of the southern countries and the evidence that multilateralism is effectively beginning to happen. Before Doha we did not have a pre-negotiated agenda; after Doha we have to deal with a whole range of claims put forward by the southern countries. As a result, the WTO, still fragile but better recognised, is therefore strengthened. Of course this is not yet the kind of democratisation the NGOs and European parliamentarians had hoped to see, but there has clearly been progress and Mrs Neyts-Uyttebroeck is right to emphasise the transparency and improved method seen in Doha. Unlike Caroline Lucas, I was not aware of general anger or frustration; on the contrary, I noted a sense of relief all round because this method enabled us to finally reach some degree of consensus. Let me add, and I was surprised that this was not mentioned in the opening statements, that we are committed to negotiating the reform of the instrument for settling disputes.
Secondly, a window has been opened for examining the coherence between social questions and trade rules. Liberalisation is indeed continuing, in particular in order to respond to the southern countries’ interests with regard to market access. Thanks to the European Union, however, and here I believe we can thank Pascal Lamy for his firm stance, we have the beginnings of a broad agenda – the environment, investment and competition can be negotiated on the basis of an explicit consensus. In substance, this is still not much and we can understand why some of the NGOs wanted a more ambitious agenda, one that included the social aspect in particular. If we are to achieve that, however, they and we will have to overcome some major inconsistencies. Indeed we must not conceal the inconsistencies between different interests and claim to always speak in the name of the south. Differences must be expressed if they are effectively to be overcome and that is how we managed to make progress on the question of medicines, when the north-south conjunction proved effective. Similarly, we can make progress on the social aspect only if we carefully reflect on how to help strengthen international trade unionism.
Thirdly, for the first time, as much importance was attached to implementation as to the new subjects introduced. Here again, I did not interpret the results in the same way as Caroline Lucas. We made progress on the method and thanks to India we had a system not of prior evaluation but of ongoing evaluation during the negotiations: textiles, agriculture, anti-dumping measures, subsidies and even intellectual property were negotiated – with the possibility of renegotiation.
To conclude, we still have to make great efforts for the future to ensure that the process runs smoothly and in the right directions and here I have two points to make. The first is that there is a strong risk that the Union’s trade policy will be handicapped by the absence of a common policy. We have a certain lack of cohesion here and it is up to us to clarify our agricultural and industrial social model. My second point is that the social question is emblematic. There is no question of giving up and adhering to the ILO. The European Union must demand the establishment of multilateral social dimensions for development and solidarity. So we still have a lot of work to do on this subject, but this should not frighten us."@en1
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