Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-24-Speech-3-236"
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"en.20030924.6.3-236"2
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"Madam President, Commissioners, Mr President, honourable Members, Cancún was a failure just like Seattle. Undoubtedly, this round of negotiations was doomed to failure. Who was to blame? The right – the Group of the European People’s Party and the Group of the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party – are convinced and say that it was the others, the NGOs, the Group of 21. We say it was probably the WTO itself and us as well, who had already negotiated with the United States. Without doubt, we have to admit that the fall is harder for us, the European Union, since you, Commissioners, and you, our leaders, were convinced that we had planned everything for this round to succeed. Everything had been planned, certainly, except the explosion of the Cairns Group, which we had rather sought to neutralise. Everything, except the more coherent emergence, whatever you might say, of the Group of 21, which set itself up as the defender of the developing countries, even if the African, Caribbean and Pacific States (ACP) and the least advanced countries (LACs) are not quite the same thing.
We, the North, need to convince the South, for example on the agricultural question, that we really are more equitable. The CAP has been broadly revised, perhaps a little too much, in order to make it more ‘sexy’ in the eyes of the WTO. But the countries of the South, for their part, continue to have a negative perception of all agricultural subsidies, even those which appear to us to be the most virtuous. How can we make countries like the countries of Africa understand our point of view, when their food crops have been ruined for years by the dumping effects of European Union export subsidies (the subsidies which made battery hens from Brittany cheaper to buy than local chickens in Dakar market)? The CAP, by subsidising the export prices of cereals, meat or sugar, has inundated the countries of the South for a long time. How, then, are we to convince them today of the merits of our re-orientations, without abolishing export subsidies? How are we to convince them when, on the crucial question of cotton for Africa, we have appeared to be the unconditional supporters of American derision, via paragraph 27, which postpones any reform in this sector indefinitely?
Until we find a way of making the countries of the South understand what the second pillar of agriculture and the social, environmental and food security rules represent, until we allow them to adopt the same rules to protect their rural populations, we shall not rediscover a situation which allows them to understand us. It is this democratic reform that we need to maintain and debate with them. It is by redefining the WTO in rules of this type that we are engaging not only in fair trade but also in democracy."@en1
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