Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-03-22-Speech-3-205"
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"en.20060322.16.3-205"2
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"Mr President, the purpose of the Cotonou Agreement and the Economic Partnership Agreements is to eradicate poverty and promote sustainable development. That objective must under no circumstances go by the board. The
mentality or idea of reciprocity, based on a principle of equality, is therefore quite wrong. The fact is, we are concerned here with two quite unequal partners, the EU and the ACP countries, so it is not the ACP countries that should be helping the EU countries, but the other way around. That is something I am absolutely certain Mrs Morgantini agrees with me about.
Poor countries’ only export opportunities are in the fields of agriculture and raw materials and in relation to very labour-intensive products, such as textiles, which they should be allowed to export to ourselves in the EU without restriction. The ACP countries also have extremely weak economies. We cannot therefore demand that these countries just go ahead and open up 90% of their markets in return for the EU opening up its own markets as a kind of payment. That is a view also expressed in Mrs Morgantini’s report. I hope, then, that I am right in interpreting paragraph 17 of the report as saying that it is of course only the ACP countries that are entitled to introduce temporary import restrictions in relation to industries threatened by surges in imports. It would be very unfortunate if we were entitled to prevent the ACP countries from selling us textiles and agricultural products just because we had not been skilful enough to adapt to the changed conditions of competition in a globalised world. The fact is that we too were allowed to protect our own markets when our economies were still developing. That being said, protecting markets is a very uncertain way of achieving growth and a healthy economy, and it should therefore be a limited, including time-limited, measure for developing countries too."@en1
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