Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-29-Speech-4-027"
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"en.20050929.3.4-027"2
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"Mr President, the European textile industry is in crisis, and China is being blamed for that. This House’s left-wing Members in particular are calling for the market to be sealed off again. The Committee on Regional Development is calling for new programmes to support the European textile industry. Sealing off and subsidies – if that is all we can think of in this age of globalisation, then this sector must be in a really bad way in Europe.
Fortunately, the European textile and clothing industry is a lot further ahead than the politicians, because the companies in question have been facing up to global competition for decades. For a long time now, they have been strengthening their competitive core areas in the European Union: research, marketing and finishing, and developing supplier structures in the Far East, especially in China. The European textile industry did not receive any subsidies for this structural change. That is why more than 100 000 jobs were lost in the Dutch-German border region, for example.
Unemployment is nevertheless now far below average in the regions concerned. That is precisely because there were no subsidies to preserve the existing structure. It is because the European Union supported structural change outside the textile industry, in technology centres and redevelopment, for example; you remember the RETEX programme from the past.
New programmes specifically to support the textile industry are not the way. Firms in Europe that have regained their health by slimming down would not understand if their ‘reward’ was now to have to compete with neighbours that were suddenly subsidised. Instead of distorting competition with subsidies, we must shape the regulatory environment. This includes, for example, making patent protection easier, prosecuting product and trademark pirates consistently and expanding research capacities, particularly in nanotechnology, new materials and production processes. We must help the affected regions, not by using operating subsidies to delay structural change but by pursuing an active structural policy."@en1
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