Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-18-Speech-3-105"
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Madam President, I would like first of all to thank the groups that have expressed their support for this strategy, which I have tried to outline in answer to your questions. I will now respond to the few further points raised in your speeches.
Mrs Ferrer, I share your vision for the future of the textiles and clothing sector in Europe. There is a word for it: dynamism. It is a vision of an industry on the offensive. The textiles and clothing industry is not an industry of the past whose gradual shrinkage needs to be managed as painlessly as possible. That is not my view of it, and it is not yours. It is not the idea behind our commercial and industrial policies. It is also what I understood from what Mr Lage said.
Mr Berenguer Fuster, indeed, we will continue to lower our tariff protection only if others do the same. Whether you call it reciprocity or you call it something else, it is the basis of our policy. And you are right to stress, as Mr Hatzidakis also does, that there are intellectual property issues behind all that and that it is important that we continue to fight – as we are doing over geographical ascriptions, for example – to ensure that everything that makes for quality, everything that is of good taste, everything to do with design and that is often our comparative advantage is not illegally imitated and therefore, in a way, stolen.
Mrs Figueiredo, yes, we are working on the impact of further liberalisation on employment, on the regional fabric and on skills. It is in fact part of the idea we are working on with Mr Erkki Liikanen for a post-2005 strategy that we would like to be able to present in the autumn of this year.
Mrs Lambert and Mrs Read have stressed the link between trade and fundamental social norms. To the question: can we make this link? I have a very clear and very frank answer. Yes, we can make it in our unilateral commercial policy. When we give advantages, we can give additional advantages by establishing this link, and that is what we are doing. Yes, we can do it at bilateral level. When we enter into association agreements or trade agreements with some third countries, observance of fundamental social norms is part of our bilateral agreements. Yes, we can do it by working, as we have started to do – and as Mr Bodrato has suggested – on fair-trade labelling, which allows consumers, citizen consumers, to choose between products manufactured under conditions that are more or less sustainable from a social and environmental point of view. On the other hand, no, we cannot for the present do it multilaterally. We have tried, we Europeans. It was virtually the only failure at Doha: on this point we came up, at multilateral level, against a coalition of refusals formed by the United States on the one hand and the developing countries on the other. This link is not therefore part of the programme that will take us to the end of 2004. We will have to come back to it later.
Mr Bastos, I agree with your concept of fair negotiations. But we must make a distinction, in social matters, between, on the one hand, the basic social norms – child labour, equal pay for men and women, trade union rights, a ban on forced labour – that are part of the multilateral commitments given by most of the countries on this planet, and, on the other hand, wage norms. We know that wages in the developing countries are lower than here. In a way, they are lower by definition because otherwise they would not be developing countries. That does not mean we do not all want to see them rise.
Mr Ettl is right: non-tariff barriers often replace tariff barriers when they are removed. A lot of governments play that game. In a way, we have become experts in detecting, attacking and dealing with this kind of device, and we are constantly improving our information system, together with our partners on both sides of industry, so that we can detect such practices better, sooner and more quickly, since in many cases they are in fact incompatible with international trade rules.
These are the answers I wanted to give. I will conclude by saying that in a sense this sector is a textbook case of globalisation as we Europeans and the European Commission conceive it. Yes, globalisation has its effects. Yes, globalisation results in relocation. Yes, it is a challenge to our competitiveness, our creativity and our skills. That is why we need public policies to create a framework that will allow the sector to continue to move upmarket, to continue to create added value, to continue to increase in quality. That is only possible if the rules of the game are established and followed. That used to be true at national level. It has become true at European level. It is in the process of becoming true at world level.
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