Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-01-16-Speech-3-258"
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"en.20020116.17.3-258"2
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". – Mr President, allow me first to congratulate Members of Parliament on having taken this important step in the process of approval of the Cotonou Agreement.
It is true that the objectives of the Cotonou trade agenda are ambitious but doing nothing and continuing with our past approach would incur major risks and would probably not reverse the economic marginalisation of ACP countries. When we look at what has happened so far on the basis of the instruments of the past, this is quite obvious. The Cotonou Agreement provides the instruments to help ACP countries to integrate in the world economy and to reduce poverty. We have to use them in the best possible way. It would be a misunderstanding to think that our agreement here and our instruments can do the trick. There are very good basic reasons why these poor countries are not well integrated into the world economy. There are real problems there.
The report is written as if it were a realistic assumption that as part of the engineering and the negotiations underlying the Cotonou Agreement we could easily have confronted and changed many of the underlying global issues. I hope I am not shocking anyone by saying that it is not as easy as that. It never was an option to offer the ACP countries a framework of economic development that was not based on the fact that the market economy is here to stay. But this is not the same as saying that the market is the only method. The Commission disagrees with that statement. In fact the whole endeavour of our ACP-EU cooperation, as well as the rest of our global development cooperation effort, is proof of the fact that we are trying to do something that could never have been done if development was left to the market as such. This is why we do it. Let me end on a more conciliatory note by quoting from the conclusion of the report, which I strongly support. "In effect the existence of a new ACP-EU cooperation agreement is a victory in itself. Furthermore, it contains innovative aspects that will have to be interpreted and used constructively. As the European Parliament has no powers to amend this text, it is essential to work to get the most out of it, so that aid can make a real contribution to the well-being of the people of the ACP countries, as regards their food, health, educational requirements, etc." This is the kind of language I can identify with. We welcome this conclusion.
I want to conclude by expressing deep satisfaction on behalf of the Commission that the European Parliament has now concluded its part of this process and we hope to see it concluded in general as soon as possible.
You all know how important it is to complete the ratification process in order to be able to implement the agreement fully, including its financial component. You also know how important the ACP-EC relationship is in the framework of the Community’s development policy.
One very important aspect is that the text of the Cotonou Agreement is a negotiated text. This is also indirectly reflected in the comments from many in this debate about the fact that having the agreement is quite an achievement. The way we obtained it was through real negotiations. This is what Mr Howitt pointed out in presenting this as a model for a more global relationship between north and south. There are many deficiencies in it and much of the criticism comes from the fact that it is still very ambitious and it is difficult to implement. This has to do with the expectations we have as to what our partner countries actually put into the programming process. This is not for us alone to decide, which is partly my response to Mr Howitt's comments.
I shall now make some brief comments on the report as such. I find the report’s approach towards the trade dimension of Cotonou interesting, although I cannot agree with all of it. Certainly, the report’s evaluation of the economic and trade regime under Cotonou is based on a political view of development and North-South relations. For example, we do not agree with the report that the Cotonou Agreement is in favour of "development only through market laws". In our view, the Cotonou Agreement provides a comprehensive framework, integrating trade as one instrument among others to promote sustainable development. The core element of future trade relations will be the Economic Partnership Agreements which aim to create favourable conditions to enhance both the volume and the benefits of trade.
It is true, negotiations of regional economic partnership agreements will aim at the progressive and flexible liberalisation of trade flows and at the integration of ACP countries into the world economy. But this will be in line with their level of development and will take into account the socio-economic impact of trade measures. REPAs will be based on regional integration, strengthening and deepening the existing regional integration initiatives. This is also why I do not share the view expressed by Mr Belder that these initiatives could be some sort of risk, in relation to conflict prevention. We clearly have the expectation that this regional cooperation will be part of conflict prevention and strengthen it. This is what experience tells us.
REPAs will also be linked to comprehensive economic and social measures which can be financed through the EDF. This is not sufficiently reflected in the report.
Some statements in the report could, in our view, be more precise. For example, the reference to EU beef exports to Western Africa is highly critical of substituting local beef by subsidised EU beef. However, this argument is based on EU exports from 1981 to 1991. We are now in 2002 and the Community’s export policy to developing countries has changed in recent years. In particular, since the early 1990s we have considerably reduced the export refunds for beef exports to Western Africa, precisely to avoid any substitution of local beef by subsidised EU beef. As a consequence, there has been a progressive decrease of EU beef exports to ECOWAS countries from a level of 54 000 tonnes in 1991 to only 1600 tonnes in 2000. This is a classical case. We have had a number of them in the debate about coherence. Most of these cases are historical cases and they have all been solved. But there are other very real, meaningful important problems to discuss within the framework of the debate on coherence, so I would strongly advise everybody in this debate to put the finger on the real problems instead of providing only archaeological material.
There is also a certain confusion in the report when it comes to trade relations with LDCs. It is stated that LDCs would automatically opt for the Everything but Arms regime, whereas non-LDCs had the choice between Economic Partnership Agreements and the normal GSP regime. This is not the case. On the contrary, it is important to stress that LDCs will be part of the regional economic partnership agreements process. REPAs will tackle all barriers to trade, including issues such as sanitary and phytosanitary measures or technical barriers to trade and will build on the existing regional integration initiatives. Both are highly relevant for LDCs.
Finally, let me emphasise that REPAs need to be integrated into the development strategies of the ACP and the EC. It will therefore be essential that negotiations on the REPAs and implementation on the one hand, development policies on the other, are mutually supportive and that appropriate EU support measures are included in regular EDF financing. REPAs will set a trade policy framework which will need to be fully coherent with development policies."@en1
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