Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-27-Speech-2-052"
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"en.20050927.5.2-052"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, the agreement between the European Union and the United States on trade in wines, which was initialled by the European Commission on 14 September following 20 years of negotiations, divides opinions. There are the European operators for whom this agreement will safeguard their exports to the United States, which is their most important market, with exports valued at EUR 1.6 billion. They believe that this agreement will also enable a climate of confidence to be restored in the sector and trade to flow smoothly, provided, of course, that a prompt start is made to negotiations for a second phase of the bilateral agreement and for defining common positions in the multilateral negotiations, particularly in Hong Kong with regard to aspects related to intellectual property.
Yet there are the other operators too, in particular the European wine growers, including my colleague, Mrs Klass, to whom, moreover, we owe the initiative behind this debate, and for that I offer her my thanks. She has expressed very competently the concerns which, as chairman of this Parliament’s ‘Wine, tradition, quality’ intergroup, I share to a very large extent. According to these concerns, this agreement is in danger of further aggravating the crisis that is currently hitting the wine-producing sector and, in the long term, of destroying once and for all the individual nature of European wines, which are characterised by their traditional roots in the soil and by natural and quite specific wine-making practices.
As political men and women, we know that we often have to water down our wine, but please, not the wine that we drink. Mutual recognition of the wine-making practices on both sides of the Atlantic poses a problem – my fellow Members have spoken at great length about it – all the more so because some of these practices used by European wine growers are also banned by the WTO. I hope that you are not going to propose that we change that state of affairs when you make proposals for reforming the common organisation of the wine market.
Being traditionally attached to production models in keeping with their environment and subject to an arsenal of stringent Community regulations, European wine growers, who are anxious to deliver quality products, are in danger of ending up in a situation of unfair competition if the United States’s practices are accepted, so much so that, in the long run, they will find themselves forced to abandon their ancestral practices which have, over hundreds of years, created the individual nature of Europe’s wine-making sector.
Therefore, Commissioner, it would be wise to pull out all the stops in order to protect this sector, which is undoubtedly fragile from being subjected to a large number of varying factors such as the climate but which has always been at the centre of European culture. It is therefore a question of continuing to defend and promote our wine-making practices; it is a question of supporting the quality-focused efforts of our producers, in particular at the WTO, and, finally, of agreeing on a definition that restricts the production models that are unacceptable and that give rise, as I have already said, to a kind of competition that is detrimental to our quality products.
The use of geographical indications is a further issue that unquestionably creates a problem. This subject has been provoking controversy around the negotiating table for a long time now. I took part in a seminar in Washington on this matter. We maintain good relations, in fact, with our colleagues from the US Congress, whom we are trying to convince about the validity of our arguments. Yet they wanted us to buy back – to pay in order to buy back – our designations of origin. I held the view that the reasoning was, nonetheless, slightly odd. I come from Luxembourg, where the Moselle river flows, and the wine from the Moselle valley, while it can be produced in Germany, Luxembourg or France, is emphatically not, as far as I am aware, produced in California.
I believe, therefore, that there should be an end to the costs and, Commissioner, that it is crucial to protect our designations and to implement, once and for all, a system for registering geographical indications within the WTO. We hope that you will vigorously defend this point of view in Hong Kong, because it is a question of the future of quality products and of Europe’s wine-making culture."@en1
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