Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-02-10-Speech-1-101"
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"en.20030210.9.1-101"2
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"My group is also of the opinion that the mandate that the Commission has been given is a good one, and that it is quite happy to be publicly associated with it. Negotiations have only just begun, and we are sure that if the Commission
Europe
takes a certain step, other trade blocs will have to follow. For us the most important thing is that we have found that the European people do not fully support European agricultural policy at this moment. Clearly this must change, so we must change European agricultural policy. We are in favour of the maximum possible reduction trade subsidies that distort trade, and this applies in particular to export subsidies and other similar subsidies imposed by other trade blocs. We are therefore generally in favour of greater liberalisation of trade in agricultural products. Something else enters into this, however. In Europe we have all sorts of rules which have little to do with the health of the product but much more to do with ethical principles, such as animal welfare, the bird and habitat directive, and so on.
Elsewhere in the world, farmers have far fewer of these kinds of rules to contend with. I always find it very difficult to explain to European farmers why they have to adhere to these rules and at the same time compete with farmers elsewhere in the world who do not have to. This seems to me to be a recipe for unfair competition, and I think that the Commission should emphasise this, particularly in its negotiations with the World Trade Organisation. What is more, farmers in various parts of Europe do not always enjoy a very good income.
We cannot change everything from one day to the next, and I therefore think that we need to pay great attention to the European agricultural model; this is something that we can certainly defend in an international context. We must be able to reward farmers for their performance on a basis other than their production of agricultural products. I can therefore only emphasise the need for the Commission to defend the worldwide recognition of regional products grown in Europe and the ban on their being grown elsewhere under the same name. The Commission must also emphatically underline our endorsement of a system of integrated agricultural production, with control from stable to table, so to speak. I would also like to emphasise that in addition to the policy of improving product prices, we need another policy to cover the use of agricultural products for industrial purposes. Finally, everything but arms: the overwhelming majority of my group supports this, and we must do something for the poorest developing countries. The great question for our group is that of how the Commission is dealing with the principle of origin, and how, as we intend, we can be sure that products imported by us really do come from the poorest countries."@en1
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