Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-25-Speech-2-057"
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"en.20070925.5.2-057"2
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"Madam President, Commissioners, ladies and gentlemen, I have been enjoying myself inserting ‘toys’ and ‘China’ into Google. I would recommend you all do this, too. You will then get entire lists of suppliers, the Chinese supply industry and producers and see all that you can buy there. 80% of the toys from China end up on the Commission’s website and vice-versa. The European market imports 80% of its toys from China. If you look at these two figures together, you can imagine the scope of what we are dealing with here.
Of course, you have to see that on the one hand we are now in a context internationally where the world economy is becoming interlinked and European industry and jobs are naturally dependent on supplies from China. On the other hand, it must also be said that world-wide networking of this kind in industry only works when there is trust. This trust is based on certain aspects that also have to be maintained.
Trust grows when there is fair competition. Fair competition is achieved when there is assurance from the Chinese, and also from the producers and the supply industry, that they are actually able, and have the know-how, to carry out all the necessary checks for exporting their products to Europe according to the criteria of the European market.
However, trust grows, of course, and fair competition can be generated only when the producers, and specifically the Chinese government in this case, guarantee that the environmental, social and worker standards that we have will also be gradually introduced to the same extent by the Chinese, as otherwise we shall have conditions of unfair competition.
Unfair competition always has an impact on this country’s ability to make checks. We can see this because all the data show that most of the problems we have with dangerous toys from China do not necessarily come from producers of the major brands, but from those who are involved in unsafe supply chains. This monitoring operation therefore needs to be considerably developed by the Chinese.
Honourable Commissioners, we too must put our house in order, of course, and I believe much still lies in disarray in Europe. I would not like to repeat what my fellow Members have already addressed, but instead list a few points concerning the Committee on International Trade and particularly the responsibility of European importers to introduce border checks and the need to initiate legal product recall campaigns and the issue of when to resort to import bans and import restrictions as a whole and under what conditions. We will soon be having difficulty – at least in certain sectors, such as the textile sector – as the safeguards we currently have are expiring. We shall then have additional problems at least in that sector."@en1
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