Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-12-13-Speech-4-027"
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"en.20071213.4.4-027"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, with the Memorandum of Understanding between the EU and China set to expire imminently, it seems to me that the questions presented clearly express the valid concerns of industry and those in the sector regarding the impact, in the past and present, of the importing – or rather the massive invasion – of Chinese products into the EU Member States.
On several occasions I have highlighted the fact – and I have not been the only one to do so – that genuine competition and competitiveness for our products in the internal market, more so than in the external market, is assured not only or not so much by a system of quotas, but chiefly by defending the sector from unfair competition. Such competition is unfair because it is based on vastly lower cost and production conditions. The added value of Chinese production at that cost is disproportionate, because of well-known production factors that are inconsistent with those on our much more civilised continent.
How can we imagine we can compete with manufacturing where the costs are infinitely lower but where, even in terms of comparative quality, the products are now almost equal to many European products? I believe there is really only one option open to us, the only thing that can re-establish a bit of what I might call fair trade and sustainable competition: a surveillance system over Chinese imports should be based, in my opinion, on checking that manufacturing conditions are not very different from those our industry has to provide. We may not be able to demand that labour costs are the same but we can demand that products are definitely made without the use of child labour or in conditions that are shameful or akin to slavery, and that they are made without causing massive damage to the environment, beyond the insufficiently verified environmental safety, consumer safety and certified quality.
A different policy should also be applied to European industries that relocate outside the EU and engage in unfair competition with respect to industries that continue to manufacture within the EU, perhaps through tax measures that counteract the advantage over companies that do not relocate, to achieve a new balance.
To conclude, distribution conditions in Europe should also be monitored more closely, in view of what is certainly going on in Italy at least, where what is actually wholesale marketing masquerades as retail distribution."@en1
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