Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-11-14-Speech-1-127"
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"en.20051114.16.1-127"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, this debate provides evidence of how important socio-environmental criteria are in the argument about international trade, and how important it is that the Commission should bring these quality criteria into the WTO negotiations. The same can, I might add, be said of sugar, which is a good example, although here in Europe – with the possible exception of our peripheral areas – we produce hardly any bananas. The situation is, then, better than it was at the time the Soviet Union disintegrated and Germany was united. When the central and eastern European states acceded to the European Union, West Germany’s former suppliers – the producers of dollar bananas – thought they could now supply the rest of the EU. ‘With this common market organisation’, they thought to themselves, ‘which was not there before, there will now be free trade in bananas, and we will be able to offload our dollar bananas throughout the EU’s territory, and let the others look after themselves.’
This House, at the time, debated this in depth. In those days, the Commission was on our side, and we worked out a proper market organisation, which is now becoming the subject of recurrent debate. It is not the case that the dollar bananas have done anything like cede any of the market and that the Americans are doing less business; the very opposite has happened, and their share has increased dramatically.
If, though, we had not introduced these criteria and had no quotas, the ACP countries, with their so-called small bananas, would have been out of business ages ago, and hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of small banana farmers would have lost their livelihoods. They are not yet exactly out of danger, but at least we have, by holding this debate, made our contribution.
What I would welcome from you – and I am also thinking of sugar here – is that this debate should go forward in the European Union, and that, instead of liberalisation being simply proposed as a quantative solution while policy and social and environmental concerns are disregarded, the Commission, as an advocate for these quality criteria, should speak up clearly and ensure that social, labour, and environmental concerns should be brought to bear on global trade relationships and be taken into account in them. That is most particularly the case where the use of quotas is concerned."@en1
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