Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-24-Speech-3-219"
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"en.20030924.6.3-219"2
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"Mr President, Commissioners, ladies and gentlemen, the general disappointment at the failure of the WTO negotiations in Cancún is evident, and the Group of the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party too is of the opinion that this negative outcome is a missed opportunity. Nevertheless, on behalf of the Liberals, I share your view that despite this failure, we need to make a new start in the area of multilateral negotiations in order to bring about trade liberalisation. Stubborn bilateralism is not the way forward. In addition, I endorse your ideas about reorganisation of the WTO. Clearly, the secretariat's organisation, structure and mandate in Geneva are not equipped for preparing and running negotiations effectively. The question then arises as to why the negotiations in Cancún failed. Several times in this House, the Singapore issues have been blamed for this. Apparently, the EU was even inflexible in the negotiations and this is why everything went wrong. This appears to me to be a serious misconception, and, on behalf of my group, I concur with what was said by Mr van Velzen, who also spoke highly of the work of our Commissioners.
As a member of the delegation, I took umbrage at the fact that the entire week was dominated by agriculture and that knowledge about our agricultural policy is very minimal in various countries outside of Europe. Only at the eleventh hour did the negotiations about the Singapore issues and trade in services open, and the conference collapsed no less than half a day later. It is, moreover, regrettable that the developing countries were not prepared to negotiate on this, for it is precisely they that stand to benefit from a favourable investment climate, reduction in import levies and transparent legislation. In this respect, they would gain from trade facilitation
Indeed, 80% of all import levies are paid by the developing countries combined. One ray of hope that I saw in Cancún was the success of the Parliamentary Conference, which is of crucial importance in lending the WTO democratic legitimacy. We managed to make a final declaration calling for the installation of a parliamentary pillar in the WTO. This seems important to me, for we cannot leave democracy to the NGOs. They, at least some of them, once again demonstrated their dubious role in Cancún by cheering on the sidelines when the negotiations had failed. And this while the developing countries lost out! I would ask Commissioners Lamy and Fischler what their first step will be to breathe new life into the multilateral negotiations."@en1
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