Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-11-Speech-3-289"
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"en.20050511.21.3-289"2
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"Mr President, we have, tonight, already heard a great deal about fair trade and about trade in a spirit of solidarity. The rapporteur wants it to benefit all, and Mr Caspary has calculated for our benefit that EUR 500 billion will make everyone rich and happy. Even Commissioner Mandelson gives me the impression that he believes that the abandonment of agricultural production by our own countries would cause an outbreak of prosperity in the countries of the developing world.
I do not share their idealism. Trade neither feeds the hungry nor makes the poor rich, and those who make money out of it are primarily those interest groups who demand free trade out of the desire to profit from it to the exclusion of others. To Mr Caspary, who so breezily talks about ‘free and fair trade’, I say that free trade and fair trade may well be mutually contradictory and exclusive. We ought to examine more closely whether that is so, and that is what I would like to do.
Commissioner Mandelson spoke of the need for us to do away with restricted market access, particularly for foodstuffs. I would point out to him that the European Union is the world’s biggest importer of foodstuffs, so this is not about market access but about the conditions subject to which the products find their way onto our market. If the European Union gives the least developed countries free access to our market, that free market access does not automatically make them rich; one must, on the contrary, consider the conditions applicable to the free access to the market in this instance. If they manage to sell their products at our price levels, then they will be able to develop their national economies, but if the multinationals buy from these countries at below the poverty threshold, it will be the ruin of them. They bring their goods to our markets at prices that destroy our agriculture.
The Commissioner spoke of the need for a proactive movement towards the provision of services, but we cannot all cut each other’s hair; on the contrary, we also have to produce something. In the agricultural sector, we need services through production. The maintenance of cultural landscapes renders a great service to European society, one for which farmers must be paid subject to the terms and conditions obtaining here.
On the global market, professors, bankers and even Commissioners reach a lower price than agricultural products, and that is why we have to talk about terms and conditions, which means about adjusting them and making them fair. It is not a simple matter. It is simple to define the word ‘free’ in quantative terms, but to do so in qualitative terms takes some effort.
Although abolishing export subsidies in one of our major importing sectors was the right thing to do, it would be pure lunacy to abandon our own production and let the world come to us. We need a special form of external protection, with the conditions to which production here and our own farmers are subject replicated abroad, and we have to set the conditions, the prices and the levels in such a way that these countries can develop their economies rather than being forced under the poverty line, and without our own farmers going bust.
Commissioner Mandelson, I hope that we will soon be able to discuss these matters with you at rather greater length and in somewhat greater depth in the Committee on Agriculture."@en1
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