Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-01-16-Speech-1-147"
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"en.20060116.17.1-147"2
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"Mr President, Mr Mandelson, following the WTO Conference, you pronounced that the outcome needed to be a constructive compromise because most people are dissatisfied. That is a good point and, if it were a question of budget negotiations – a zero-sum game in which concessions in actual fact cost money – you would be right. In this case, the situation is precisely the other way around. In trade negotiations, just as much is gained from abolishing customs duties ourselves as from forcing others to do away with them. This is no zero-sum game. Even if the conference was not the disaster that many had feared, I think we must be honest and say that it was a failure. The problems were deferred to a future in which disaster will loom ever closer, and I even think that, for important parts of the industrial and services sectors, the conference made slight changes for the worse to the document.
I detect two worrying reactions. Firstly, there is a noticeable sense of resignation where multilateral negotiations are concerned and a desire to pin one’s hopes on regional and bilateral agreements instead. That would be a big mistake. Such agreements would never produce results such as to enable world trade to be liberalised in significant areas, and opting for them would be an all too easy way of avoiding phasing out the protectionism that we ourselves practise. Secondly, I hear people adopting the attitude that ‘we did our bit in Hong Kong; it is other people’s fault if we are not making progress’. I think that that attitude is a recipe for failure. People should realise that progress in negotiations does not stem from the ability to point the finger at the protectionism practised by other people. That is like seeing the mote in one’s brother’s eye without noticing the beam in one’s own. Instead, progress is driven by an understanding of the costs of our own protectionism.
For Europe, the conference in Hong Kong should be a call to wake up, and not only to the obvious fact that the protectionism we practise in agricultural matters is costing us the far more important matter of the liberalisation of trade in services and industrial goods. Above all, we must realise, together with the United States, Japan and others, that the costs imposed on our consumers and taxpayers by our protectionism in agricultural matters are reason enough for abolishing them. ‘Free trade, one of the greatest blessings that a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular’, said Thomas Babington as long ago as 1824. The WTO conference in Hong Kong shows that that might equally well have been said today. We must all, as consumers and employees, pay the price for the lack of trade liberalisation around the world."@en1
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