Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-09-Speech-1-133"
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"en.20050509.18.1-133"2
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"Mr President, I would very much like to draw conclusions, but unfortunately that is still a long way off.
For the time being, in reply to Mrs Mann, it is clear that Parliament’s role is of key importance. This is the reason why the Commission is funding exchanges; I am thinking for example of the Parliamentary Delegation for Relations with Mercosur. We would therefore view it as very positive if, on their coming visit to those countries, the honourable Members, within the context of their competences, could take things in hand. The problem is that if we want more WTO, it would be better to wait until the WTO is operating in its present form before forging ahead. That is precisely the conflict between the countries that want to move ahead bilaterally as quickly as possible and others that want to wait for a WTO decision.
I have nothing to add to the Commission statement that I made as an introduction to this debate, apart perhaps from the following elements. It is important that, when they visit Mercosur, the honourable Members are aware that the latter is defensive about the majority of the issues of interest to the European Union: industrial tariffs, services, investments, geographical indications and public contracts. The European Union’s agricultural offer, for example, amounting to EUR 2.7 billion, is the largest ever made within the context of bilateral negotiations.
With regard to the proposals already on the table, we believe that there is an imbalance in favour of Mercosur. I shall give you some examples. The Union’s offer on liberalisation of the trade in goods is more generous than that of Mercosur in terms of the products it covers, the dismantling of tariffs and the timetable for that dismantling. The offer relating to access to Mercosur’s market in services remains unsatisfactory in a number of key sectors of interest to the European Union, such as financial services, maritime transport and telecommunications. The Union’s specific demands relating to services, investment and public contracts are not aimed at achieving broader access to the market – in practice, Mercosur’s market is already entirely open – but at reaching an agreement on rules providing legal security for our operators in the region. In fact, Mercosur has specifically refused to make an offer on rules of this type relating to public contracts, intellectual property and European Union geographical indications – an extremely sensitive issue for countries such as Spain, Italy and France in relation to wines and spirits.
To summarise, the Commission is available to the honourable Members to provide them, before their mission begins, with all the information they will need in order to help establish, under the best possible conditions and as quickly as possible, a balanced relationship between these two regions of the world."@en1
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