Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-11-30-Speech-3-033"
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"en.20051130.10.3-033"2
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"Mr President, we must not despair of anything or anyone, even if Mr Mandelson is beginning to believe that, and I quote, whatever we offer will not be enough for such highly competitive and aggressive producers and exporters as Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
Seven, employment and training in all parts of the world must become objectives in their own right towards which economic agreements must work; this is the opposite of the liberalisation that is destabilising whole sections of industry and services.
Eight, social and environmental standards. Instead of the obsession with cost cutting, there must be mandatory and constantly upgraded minimum standards, and the countries in greatest difficulty must be given compensatory aid.
Nine, the WTO must be democratised as a matter of urgency, each member country enabled to take part in the talks on equal terms, the transparency of the debates guaranteed and elected representatives involved in the decision-making process.
Finally, ten, the WTO must be incorporated into the United Nations system with a hierarchy of international law standards giving primacy to fundamental rights and in particular to international conventions on the rules of international trade.
Mr President, if the EU is able to draw inspiration from an approach of this kind, I think its existential crisis will begin to look like a bad memory.
It is not therefore too late for the 25 to seriously revise their negotiator’s mandate, which for the most part dates back to 1999, that is before the double failure of Seattle and Cancún. My Group is therefore pleased to submit to you ten proposals for closely linked new priorities, which I will call the ten commandments of an alternative view of Europe’s ambition on the international stage.
Firstly, given that tomorrow is World Aids Day, I will mention the requirement to find a definitive solution to the problem of access to medicines in countries that have no pharmaceutical production capacity. The persistent blockages, in the name of intellectual and industrial property, are criminal and unacceptable in this respect.
Secondly, I will mention the Doha Round’s official priority, which has been completely marginalised in practice: development. One after another, Europe has sacrificed all the gains of Lomé on the altar of the WTO –Stabex, Sysmin, the banana agreement, the sugar protocol – in order to get free-trade agreements signed, with the bonus of the introduction of visas for nationals of the countries we used to call our privileged partners. We believe there needs to be a reversal of approach in this regard so that we never again see tragedies such as those of Lampedusa, Ceuta, Mellila or elsewhere.
Thirdly, I will mention agriculture. We are in favour of defending genuine European small farming, the right to guaranteed remunerative prices, the principle of food sovereignty, respect for the social, environmental and territorial multifunctionality of agriculture. What we need to fight is the obsession with productivity, dumping practices that destabilise the weak economies of the South and make them more dependent, and the all-out liberalisation that gives the multinationals access to land, seed, water and the market for goods and services.
The time I am allowed obliges me to mention our other priorities very briefly.
Four, the WTO must prohibit the patenting of living things and protect local communities’ biological resources and technological knowledge against biopiracy.
Five, health, education, culture, audiovisual services, water and all public services must be expressly excluded from any trade agreement. We are against the GATS and in favour of designating world public goods as outside the scope of the market.
Six, the cultural exemption: no WTO rule must prevent a state from defending what it considers its cultural heritage."@en1
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