Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-14-Speech-3-360"
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"en.20070314.25.3-360"2
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"Mr President, it is clear to everybody that this debate that is going to take place in Parliament comes at a significant time for Latin America in general. It comes at a time when its people seem to be forcefully questioning the policy that has impoverished them. They are currently questioning the policy of neo-liberal formulae. President Bush’s visit to Latin America is ample evidence of this.
The true intention was to produce a balanced report, based on those three pillars that I mentioned before, but, in practice, the amendments as a whole created a document that essentially sought the establishment of a free trade area.
On that point, my intention was to try to tone down that approach as far as possible. I am talking about the approach of trying to give Central America the impression that what we Europeans are seeking is essentially a free trade area. We agreed on seven compromise amendments with Mr Salafranca, of the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats, Mr Obiols, of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, and Mr Susta, of the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, and I would like to thank them once again most warmly for their efforts to agree on a way to tone down the report and not to spoil it.
I would of course, however, like to thank Mr Obiols and Mrs De Kayser, of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, and Mr Romeva, of the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance, for their amendments, because they improve and provide more detail on this desire to turn the mandate into a clear mandate for an association agreement of that kind, one that does not include a free trade area.
This has been a good thing to a certain extent because, as I have said, we have managed to tone down such significant points as letter v), which explicitly recommends that the free trade area should be a priority strategic objective, and makes references to the CAFTA Plan, and we have naturally managed to tone it down, but not sufficiently so.
I do not know whether this has happened before, but I am going to recommend to my group that it abstain from the vote on this report, because I do not believe that it has achieved my intended objective, which was to produce a balanced report.
In any event, I am very interested to hear the opinion of Parlacen, the Central American Parliament, and of Central America’s political organisations, and my hope is that, when the negotiation begins, the European Commission will bear in mind that what Central America is asking for is not a carbon copy of the United States' position, but an equidistant, different and autonomous position.
Specifically, with regard to the Association Agreement with Central America, the European Union owes an historical debt to that region. We played a very significant role during the 1980s in Central America’s process of pacification and democratisation – the San José agreements, the Esquipulas agreement — in which the European Union detached itself from the United States, adopting an autonomous position, and played a crucial role.
Central America’s current situation is abundantly clear: there is very weak economic growth – currently 0.6% – rates of poverty that remain similar to those of the 1990s, and increasing inequalities.
Peace agreements have yet to be verified. The same is true in the fields of human rights, impunity and corruption, and regional integration is still very weak.
Within this context, this humble rapporteur opted for a certain kind of report with a view to determining what type of association we wanted. I based it on three fundamental pillars: political dialogue with a view to good governance, development cooperation to contribute to eliminating the structural causes of poverty and inequality, and trade under conditions of fairness and mutual benefit based on complementarity and solidarity. An agreement that seeks regional integration in order to contribute to the balanced and fair redistribution of Central America’s income and wealth. That was the context. We wanted an agreement that did not turn into an agreement on a free trade area and on privatisation of public services. In short, we did not want political dialogue and cooperation to be overrun by free trade formulae.
I am convinced that a trade agreement of a pronounced neo-liberal nature between unequal regions – unequal in all senses of the word – would simply increase that inequality and promote exploitation by a business elite, leading to an even greater cycle of dependency, exclusion, poverty and extremely high social and environmental costs.
I believe that trade and cooperation must be geared towards sustainable development at regional level, benefiting the people, rather than a series of projects benefiting transnational capital, such as the Puebla-Panama Plan or the European Investment Bank.
It was with that intention that I drew up my humble report, with the cooperation of many civil society organisations from Europe and Central America. Parliament’s Committee on Development and Committee on International Trade then naturally issued their opinions on the report. I would of course like to thank you for all of the contributions that improved the text from the point of view of the approach I wished to maintain throughout this process.
I would like in particular to thank Miguel Ángel Martínez for his always fair and cooperative contributions, in this case from the Committee on Development. In the opinion of the Committee on International Trade, Mr Susta presented some very significant amendments to the text which truly distort the report that I intended to present to the House."@en1
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