Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-03-Speech-3-264"
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"en.20030903.10.3-264"2
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"Mr President, I would like to highlight two aspects of the Lannoye report on water. Given that we will be represented at the WTO conference in Cancún next week, I would first like to mention the connection with the General Agreement on Trade in Services.
I think that the European Union should make its attitude clearer. If we consider – and that seems very much what you were advocating, Commissioner – that water is a public good, then we should ensure that the public authorities keep control of water distribution in each and every country. Of course, public-private partnerships can be used for funding. But you yourself quoted the comparison – a rather daring one, it has to be said – with what other countries regard as vital. Take anti-missile defence in the United States, for example. No one could imagine suggesting to the United States that they should subject their anti-missile defence to the authority of a WTO dispute resolution body, with rules such as national treatment, most-favoured nation rules, or the obligation to award a contract to any other WTO country if it responds to an open invitation to tender in this crucial area.
When it comes to water, if we take your comparison further, developing countries, such as Burkina Faso for example, even if they have access to investors, to multinational companies, should very much retain control over the way in which those investors are involved. I therefore believe that in the context of GATS – and I hope that the Commissioner responsible for development will have a decisive influence on those discussions, and that those discussions will not just relate to trade policy – we should not put pressure on these countries to liberalise their public services, in particular those relating to water, as a
for giving them access to our markets, such as the agriculture market.
When it comes to financing, we certainly need a European fund, but I support Mr Lannoye's comments. As in the case of the European Structural Funds, we know that creating a market is not the same thing as creating a community. Sometimes we have to support measures designed to make up for delays in development, which means that public finance is essential. A European fund is vital. We should even establish a world water fund, in the same way that UNAIDS exists at world level to treat persons suffering from AIDS. Private finance alone will not be enough to achieve this, and we cannot be content just to indulge in engineering. This will also mean increasing public funding.
As regards Mrs Morgantini's report on the link between trade and development, I would say that even if everyone agrees that trade can contribute to development, it is still not enough just to open up borders – as some speakers including Mr De Clercq have suggested – as if that automatically gave the key to development. Economic diversification is crucial. We should draw more inspiration from what we have done ourselves. Over a period, in a pragmatic and gradual way and by means of sectoral aid, we have to accept that the countries of the South can protect their own economies. Encouraging them to create markets on the huge scale required is essentially the objective of regional integration. But we should not adopt a systematic, dogmatic, one-size-fits-all approach to liberalisation, because that would exacerbate the deterioration in the terms of trade mentioned by Mrs Kinnock. These countries will of course export in greater volumes and Mr Deva is right to say that we should increase their agricultural products' access to the EU market, and we should reduce our subsidies to limit the effects of market distortion. They will, however, always be exporting products with ever lower value on the world market. These countries should be in a position to export more diversified, sophisticated and industrialised products. We therefore need to revise our trade policy towards developing countries, by giving priority to the aspirations and objectives of trade policy and to those of the Commissioner responsible for development."@en1
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