Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-07-07-Speech-4-043"
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"en.20050707.5.4-043"2
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".
Mr President, I cannot fathom the general uproar about the rapid increase in textile imports from China since 1 January this year, for it was clear to all of us that this was precisely what was going to happen. If you open up and liberalise the markets without imposing conditions, you simply have to expect other producers to seize their opportunity and benefit from it by rushing headlong into the newly-open markets.
Just take a look at China’s main imports at present: aluminium smelters, casting machines, presses, moulding dies, and roller mills. What that tells you is that we will have enormous problems in five years’ time – in the footwear industry, in the bicycle industry, in the car industry and in iron- and steelmaking. Not even the stay of execution until 2008 provided for by special safeguard clauses will solve the problem; it will do no more than alleviate it. It is naive to demand the same conditions of competition for trade with China and with other countries. Does that mean that, from 2008 onwards, a worker in the European textile industry will have to take home the same pay as his Chinese counterpart in order to be able to compete? The idea is absurd.
It is both an absurdity and a scandal that the European Union, by going as far as to subsidise those companies that transfer production to third countries, is sawing through the branch on which it sits. The only chance of a solution lies in the complete recasting of the EU’s trade policies. The EU must commit itself to a system of fair trade, and that involves abandoning the unfettered opening-up of markets and liberalisation. A fair balance of interests implies the promotion of trade where it is rational and not an end in itself, alongside the maintenance and promotion of local production and regional economic cycles, not only in our own regions but also in developing countries.
This also involves something for which my own group has called, namely a commitment on the part of the European Union to improved working conditions and workers’ social security entitlements, as also to high environmental standards both in our own industry and in the production systems of our trading partners. This means taking into account, as appropriate, developmental differences between our various trading partners. It has to be said, though, that it is urgently necessary that the Commission’s mandate for trade negotiations be redrafted once and for all. The old mandate, dating back to 1999, has failed twice, in Seattle and Cancún, and it will fail again in Hong Kong. I do not grasp how the Commission is meant – as this report itself puts it – to draw up its future mandate itself.
I endorse the rapporteur’s demand for targeted support for research and development in the textile sector, where priority should be given to the development of safe, chemical-free textiles by way of the consistent application of the principle of mutual recognition, wholly in the spirit of REACH. I believe that there is also a need to ensure that consumers do not become specimens for the testing of textile products derived from every variety of nanotechnology before the effects of this have been adequately researched."@en1
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