Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-24-Speech-3-221"
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"en.20030924.6.3-221"2
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"Mr President, instead of looking backwards I would like to look forwards. Commissioner Lamy, in our meeting this morning, I asked you what the status of your Seattle mandate was. You replied that, as yet, you were not sure. I would like to make the case as strongly as possible that the mandate given to you in 1999, even before the Seattle Ministerial – let alone the Doha and Cancún Ministerials – must now be null and void. We cannot pretend, now that two out of three ministerials have collapsed, that we are dealing with business as usual. In particular it seems that the EU must now accept the verdict of developing countries that they do not want negotiations on the Singapore issues. Therefore we must drop not just two, but all four of those issues.
At the same time we need to go further in eliminating export subsidies and much further in responding to ACP and LDC concerns in particular. The statement by Botswana on behalf of those groups said very clearly that the revised texts fell far short of their expectations.
We can debate the causes of the collapse at Cancún. I suspect my own analysis will be rather different from many we have heard so far this afternoon, but what is clear is that collapse offers us an opportunity to start a root-and-branch transformation of the WTO. What we need now is a full review, not just of the working procedures of the WTO, which you have rightly called medieval, but of its trade rules themselves, which I would call imperialist. In many ways the rules of the WTO are not neutral ones that can be used defensively to protect the interests of the weakest players. The rules are too often institutionalising the current system of global inequality.
Take the overriding principle, for example, of national treatment that effectively denies poorer countries the right to promote their own national industries and economies, a right that was indispensable to most richer countries and which they used with impunity in their own development processes. It is clear that we need fair, multilaterally agreed rules to oversee and regulate trade in the interests of poverty eradication. But whether the current WTO can actually deliver those outcomes is frankly much harder to believe.
If we are to rebuild confidence in the multilateral system, we have to expend much more political capital in making its rules and procedures genuinely fair and sustainable. Can you tell me if you are prepared to do that?"@en1
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