Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-05-31-Speech-3-100"
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"en.20060531.13.3-100"2
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".
Madam President, greetings to all my fellow Members and, of course, to the Commission and the Council. As so often, I have the great pleasure of preparing the accompanying report on behalf of the Committee on International Trade and, in this, I am concentrating more on foreign trade and economic themes.
Madam President, I know that you are nervous. Nonetheless, just two more points I have to mention. In the case of bioethanol, I should like to introduce a verbal addition. I forgot to include bioethanol and biodiesel. Therefore, I shall say tomorrow: and diesel. On this subject, too, I hope that I shall obtain your support. And that, in theory, is everything. Thank you.
As in the past, I also share the views of my fellow Member, Mr Brok. Like many of our fellow Members, we have worked together for many years, and we have also always received the considerable support of this House, for which I should expressly like to thank you.
If we look at business and trade relations, then my report essentially contains one key idea. The Commission does, of course, share the view that we should proceed on the basis of how things really are. We already have a transatlantic market. It exists. It is just that we are often scarcely aware of it. We always talk about all the things we have to do, and we always focus completely on the trade barriers that exist. It is these trade barriers too with which the press concerns itself on a daily basis, but what frequently we no longer see at all are the positive things we have achieved. What this report says, therefore, is: let us for once just be aware of the way things really are. How much trade really goes on between the European Union and the United States? What investments take place? Another thing: what is the volume of trade done by enterprises established in both Europe and the United States? As can be seen, the figure is huge. I do not want to bore you now with it, but it is astronomical.
The number of jobs that depend on such trade is really extremely high. The figure for those that we know about on each side of the Atlantic – and there are very many more, because there is a lot of data we have not obtained – in itself amounts to EUR 7 million. Here is an example that I come up with again and again: that of our famous flagship, Airbus, on the European side and of Boeing on the American side. We are always so proud, with Europeans and Americans each believing the one to be a purely European business and the other a purely American one. Yet that is not the case. The two companies are 40% dependent on each other. This provides you with a good example. Go to MTU. I have had the great pleasure of looking at the operation in my own constituency. When, for example, repairs are being carried out – with the work benches, as it were, running parallel – you can see Airbus and Boeing planes each in their turn, now one and now the other. That is only one example, however.
Building on an awareness of how things really are and proceeding on the basis of the New Transatlantic Agenda of 1995 and of the economic agenda that we have had since 1998, which has been upheld at all the summits, in all the decisions of the European Parliament and in the Commission’s work programme and which was upheld and confirmed in the legislative dialogue that took place a couple of weeks ago in Vienna between our fellow Members and the Americans, we should therefore take a further step – not an earth-shattering step, but just a small one – and say: let us at long last remove the barriers that are causing problems.
This is not, as many people outside believe, about removing barriers to create a free-trade zone – ATTAC has been stirring things up a bit in this case – but about removing technical barriers, as we have been doing for many years. In that way, we stick to our standards and to our precautionary principle, and we continue to maintain the rules of the internal market.
The EU’s and the Member States’ sovereignty is not encroached upon. Nor is this a naïve proposal because we know that there will, of course, be further trade disputes. That is only natural and to be expected. What we have here are the two largest trade blocks. Obviously, there is a clash of interests. That is also the way it should be. The fact is, we have disputes in the EU too, but they do not send us into a panic every time they happen. Disputes are normal. Some of them we can solve within the framework of the world trade round. Many of them we cannot solve. The Hamon dispute is one that we have not been able to solve for many years, and we are paying for the fact.
There are also problems on the American side. For example, the Americans have difficulty recognising non-pasteurised milk, which they see as a health problem. So what about their precautionary principle? All right, that is just the way things are. Let us live with the situation. There are, however, many other barriers that we should remove. In this report, I am asking that we do just that.
There is a point about which I still need, in a moment, to say something. I should expressly like to thank my colleagues in the Committee, all the rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs, the Commission which, as always, has worked excellently with me and all my colleagues, and, also of course, the Council, the NGOs, the think tanks, the trade unions, the companies and those otherwise involved, as well as my own group. Some parts of my own group – I am referring to the group of the Greens – have some problems with the term ‘barrier-free’, because it always sounds as if it refers to a free-trade area. Hence, my proposal for tomorrow concerning split voting. I would propose that we simply remove such concepts and the figures referred to in connection with them. I hope that I shall obtain the House’s support in this connection. We can then all breathe a sigh of relief, and we shall have a sound basis on which to proceed. I hope that we shall then also obtain the House’s full support."@en1
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