Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-02-18-Speech-1-199"
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"en.20080218.26.1-199"2
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"Mr President, I wish to thank you and the honourable Members for what has been a very constructive and useful debate on this excellent report. I am particularly grateful to the Member who intervened to urge a reassessment of the staffing allocations of Commission delegations in key economies. I thought this was an excellent proposal, and one that I will have no hesitation at all in communicating to my colleagues. I could rehearse for you the details of the small number of delegation staff working, for example, on trade matters in China compared to the considerably larger numbers of staff working on what is a very small amount of development aid and cooperation in that country, set alongside the billions that are at stake for Europe in trade. But I will not; I will simply pocket the suggestion and pass it on.
In concluding, I would say that when it comes to local procurement it is indeed important to support and encourage the capacity of emerging economies and developing countries to supply their local procurement markets. However, if this means higher costs for public procurement in those economies, if it means inefficiencies, if it means a lack of transparency, and indeed in some cases corruption in the operation of public procurement, who shoulders the costs of that? The answer is the very local people, the very local workers and the very local taxpayers in emerging economies and developing countries who can ill afford to shoulder those costs.
That is why it is important to bring openness and transparency to public procurement policies and behaviour in emerging economies. It is not simply to please and to satisfy the ‘poor little’ European Union.
It is certainly not the case that I am advocating free-trade agreements at the expense of the world trade talks. Anyone who is familiar with the global Europe trade strategy that we presented in November 2006 will realise that my advocacy of deep, comprehensive free-trade agreements that really contribute to increasing the sum total of world trade, and not simply divert it, has been a feature of our approach alongside our commitment to the WTO talks – the Doha Round. I can assure the honourable Member that I am continuing to work for their success rather than their failure. Rumours about further unacceptable or inappropriate concessions on agriculture are unfounded. Indeed, the only rumours that I have picked up about such unwarranted concessions actually came from the Irish Foreign Minister in the General Affairs Council today. These rumours seem to be circulating within a relatively small community of interest.
The fact is that on agriculture – and other areas of the Doha talks – we will move as far as it is prudent for us to go in order to contribute to the success of the world trade talks, but ultimately this must be within the limits of the mandate we have been given on the basis of the 2003 CAP reform.
It is true that we have two new negotiating texts that have been presented by negotiating group chairs in recent weeks. On agriculture, we have a text in which not everything is to our liking, but there is nothing that we cannot handle in that agriculture text or that will push us beyond our mandate.
In the case of non-agricultural market access – industrial goods – the situation, in my view, is not so satisfactory. There, the new text presented by the chairman has created a greater fluidity in the negotiations, rather than more concrete foundations. I regret that, but again it is something that we have to work with and negotiate our way through.
These debates would not be so enjoyable if it were not for Mr Schlyter’s contributions. Whenever he intervenes I always feel reinforced in my personal commitment and conviction concerning free trade. His interventions always reassure me that we are indeed on the right track. It is not a question of the poor little European Union struggling against the mighty titans amongst the emerging economies, nor is it about a sort of fit of aggressive bullying that has taken over the Commission in the area of trade, in which we seek without consultation or consideration to impose our interests on others.
The fact is that those of us who believe in international trade are seeking balance and we are seeking reciprocity, but we are also seeking mutual advantage. When we seek openings in the economies of others, we are not doing that in order simply to satisfy ourselves, or to serve our own interests and our own needs. We are also contributing to the welfare and growth of the economies whose greater opening we are trying to bring about.
Of course, the liberalisation of economies is something that has to be achieved progressively. It is an incremental process, rather than a big bang or a sudden shock. The fact is that emerging economies benefit from greater opening. This means useful competition to stimulate innovation and to spur productivity in those economies, it means lowering the costs of inputs to local industry, it means lower-priced goods for consumers in those emerging economies, and it means bringing capital, technologies, creativity and modern management skills to those emerging economies.
The fact is that this process of opening and integration to the global economy secures the growth and strengthening of those emerging economies to enable their businesses to grow, to create much-needed employment for their workers in these economies, and to generate products and services for export so that they can create and secure a growing share of international trade. In other words, opening begets opening; trade begets trade. Our prosperity and our opportunities beget opportunities for those who live and work in those emerging economies. It is, in other words, a virtuous process that we are talking about, and that is what the market access strategy which our rapporteur has presented such an excellent report on is all about."@en1
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