Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-07-07-Speech-4-045"
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"en.20050707.5.4-045"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the action launched some months ago by the European Union, which has been hit hard by the intolerable increases in textile and clothing imports from China, has started to produce results by means of the memorandum of understanding. Total liberalisation, however, will only come about in 2008.
The report by Mrs Saïfi, whom I truly thank for her excellent work, rightly insists that the utmost attention continue to be paid to verifying the good will of the Chinese authorities and to keeping a worsening situation under control.
By means of the amendments to the final text, I wished to emphasise a number of extremely important aspects for the European textile sector and for manufactured goods in general.
Suitable penalties today need to be laid down, such as putting a ban on trade with the European Union for a certain period of time for all of those found guilty of illegally importing goods or of importing counterfeit goods, and who are thus implicated in a crime, the severity of which must be judged in terms of its repercussions on European society as a whole, not only on producers, but above all on consumers.
I call for constant monitoring of the Chinese authorities’ commitment to combating piracy the counterfeiting of trademarks and products, and child exploitation, and to ensuring respect for workers’ rights.
Another important problem arises from the fact that the boom in textile exports from China has caused devastating effects in those developing countries whose principal and essential market for placing and selling their goods used to be the European Union, which is now overloaded with Chinese goods. The needs of those countries must also be taken into account as the sector finds a new equilibrium in the next few years, which will be marked by trade liberalisation.
It is the Commission’s responsibility to implement strategies providing vital support for modernisation and enabling businesses to confront, in an informed way and with a clear outlook, a path that is still an uphill climb, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Liberalisation of the global market cannot occur if the parties involved do not all respect the same rules and the provisions resulting from the agreements. The absence of rules or the failure to respect them prevents fair competition, and, in actual fact, invalidates the very concept of the free market. We are not only protecting an important EU sector of production, but we are also protecting the right of consumers to have access to safe and quality products, and the right of workers to know the true prospects for their future and to have the social clauses implemented with respect for human rights.
The European Union has to forcefully say to the rest of the world that there can be no free market without fair competition, and that in order for competition to be fair, the common rules must be respected."@en1
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