Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-11-30-Speech-3-040"

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"en.20051130.10.3-040"2
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"Mr President, the statements made by the President-in-Office of the Council and Commissioner Mandelson exemplify in clear terms the old British colonial logic that once underpinned the British Empire: a clear division of labour, with commercial goods from the industrialised countries, cheap food from the colonies and the agricultural area left to sheep. I have to tell Commissioner Mandelson that this traditional attitude is a thing of the past; today, you come to the table not with the power of military persuasion, but with ideology and the instrument of liberalisation, yet it will not work, for the countries of the developing world are now standing up for themselves, making their own interests visible and countering the intellectual property that we want to sell to them in the form of over-priced services with what is theirs culturally, socially and ecologically, along with the right to basic sustenance. When talking about agriculture, it has to be clear to us that the European Union is the largest importer of food and feeding stuffs and that we, when obtaining agricultural products from the countries of the developing world, have to pay prices at our levels for them if these countries’ economies are to develop. One sensible course of action would be to put the customs duties into a fund to finance projects for the development of rural economies across the world, which would also kick-start the enterprise economy. That is the sort of contribution that we could make, but if we think, Commissioner Mandelson, that we could buy up their stock under the poverty threshold, we will then be making famine worse. Trade does not fill stomachs and the only people it makes rich are those who make a profit out of it – in the main, multinational companies that do not have a presence in the countries of the developing world."@en1

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