Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-24-Speech-3-237"
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"en.20030924.6.3-237"2
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"Madam President, the failure of the ministerial conference in Cancún on 14 September has made many people fear that the first victim will be the multilateral approach to international trade negotiations. That would be a pity. We are in fact convinced that world trade and international life in general must be based on simple multilateral rules respected by everyone, applied by transparent international organisations.
Which rules, though? That is the whole problem, because since 1995 and the Marrakech agreements, the WTO has been living by a major underlying principle: the systematic opening of the markets and the doctrine of global free trade which are supposed to give everyone, in all circumstances, maximum profit. It is this rule, contested by more and more countries, which has just exploded in Cancún and we must be aware of this if we want to reconstruct something. In order to reconstruct, we would need to keep the rule of free trade, of course, but complement it with another rule: that of the sovereignty of each national democracy or each preferential trade zone, which must be free to modulate trade to its needs, especially when it comes to agriculture.
Now we need to learn the lessons from the failure of Cancún and admit the specificity of these questions, which should doubtless even be taken away from the WTO and dealt with by a specific international organisation. At all events, the fundamental rules should be the right of each country or each region to maintain its agricultural model, its food independence and the health of its population.
This implies two twin demands. First, we have to accept the total abolition in the long term of agricultural export subsidies. Let us not hide our face, let us recognise it frankly, it is a moral necessity. Then, we have to accept equally frankly the legitimacy of the Community preference in the form of an import levy or internal aid when it is needed to achieve the social objectives that we have democratically set ourselves.
These two simultaneous frank acceptances are necessary if we want to start again now on the right foot, but they also imply the need for an in-depth review of the internal reform of European agricultural policy, which was prepared too quickly in the run up to Cancún. This reform should now be the subject of new reflection and should be reoriented in line with the lessons we have learned from this failure."@en1
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