Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-06-11-Speech-2-178"
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"en.20020611.9.2-178"2
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"Mr President, I would like to thank the Commission and the Council, and I think we can rely on the Commissioner to take a very strong stand on these important issues. As she acknowledges, the European Union has a particular and important role to play: as a major donor of aid, as the biggest donor of humanitarian aid in the world and as the biggest trading block in the world. We have clout and we need to punch our weight in Johannesburg, but I acknowledge that it will be difficult.
Market access is a key issue. President Museveni, after the Bali meeting, said that talk about sustainability is all very well but that market access is the most important issue. Ghana also challenged the European Union last week, saying that the Union talks about opening borders and about bringing down barriers, but is clearly protectionist and unfair. Ghana, of course, is talking about the high tariffs that have to be paid when an attempt is made to introduce processed coffee into the European Union.
Nor can we preach about free trade when we continue to hand out subsidies to our farmers which artificially depress the prices of commodities such as cotton. We need coherence, we need consistency, we need to have an understanding of what self-reliance actually means, providing a ladder out of poverty, and we also need to understand about creating real global partnerships.
Commissioner, you need alliances in Johannesburg. The United States is blocking plans to halve the number of people who lack sanitation – two fifths of the population of the planet – while 2.4 billion do not have any sanitation, not even a bucket to use, in a world where that is one of the main causes of disease. Twenty five per cent of urban Africans have no piped water whatsoever.
The US position is always a very negative one, as it was when I was at the UN Children's Conference. The world's superpower is not prepared to address these imperatives, and I hope that we will make a clear case that we will not meet the millennium development goals unless we take strong action."@en1
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