Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-02-18-Speech-1-221"
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"en.20080218.27.1-221"2
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"Mr President, I am afraid I did not catch the interpretation of all of the last question that was put to me. I got just the last fragment, which seemed to suggest that we had suspended the operation of the trade defence instruments and that we were no longer initiating or pursuing cases.
I do not quite understand the premise of the question, because any examination of DG Trade’s website will be able to yield the information that the Member wants about cases that are currently being initiated and investigated and on which proposals will be brought forward in the ordinary way.
I do not complain about being accused of being unduly ambitious – that is the benchmark for what I do and how I set about my job. If a Commissioner lacks ambition, then he or she is going to be judged, I think, by pretty low standards. I am, however, not sufficiently ambitious to embrace straight away my friend Mr Schlyter’s proposal of moving from my inability to propose consensual reforms of trade defence instruments against the low cost of production dumping to a new concept of organic or ecological dumping. I think we will continue to concentrate on the former before we shift our focus to the latter, but I hope he does not take that as a sign of any lack of ambition on my part, only great realism.
Mr Caspary seemed to suggest that he was disappointed that proposals were not being brought forward. Well, I can understand his disappointment, but I am really not sure that even this Parliament would have shown any greater ability to arrive at a simple consensual view about what reform should take place than the Member States have been able to achieve.
Mr Arif has suggested that my motivation is to play off consumers against workers and to play off importers against producers. I am not playing anyone off against anyone – it is just that, in the real world, people do have different interests, and they have different viewpoints and different needs. We do not yet live, I am afraid, in an ideal socialist society, where no one has a different view, no one has a different need and no one has a different interest. I am afraid that we have to operate in the real world and we have to navigate our way through these interests and needs and arrive at a fair and equitable and acceptable outcome in our attempts to steer these policies forward.
I thought that Ms Mann’s understanding of the dilemmas that we face in this policy area was very realistic. It is not that I was seeking greater flexibility per se. What I was seeking to do, in approaching this review, was to arrive at a set of trade instruments that were not fundamentally different or changed from those that we have at the moment, but that operated within a framework that was clearly understood, that were clearly predictable and clearly reasonable and balanced in their impact on the range of different businesses, which are trading in increasingly different circumstances in the global economy in the 21st century. And I make no apology for doing that.
I would just say in conclusion, really in response to Mr Markov: yes it is probably an accurate summing-up that the system of trade defence that we have is not the best, but it is the one we have got. I think that is a fair description of our system.
The questions that I had to put and that remain to be answered were not whether our system is the best – it probably is not, but it is, nonetheless, the one we have got and it is in reasonable working order. I had to ask, will it remain workable, in the way that it is now, in the future? Will it become increasingly controversial and contested amongst European businesses in the future? Will it fit the changing production models and supply chains of increasing numbers of European businesses that are becoming far more internationalised and that will continue to do so more than ever before? Those are the questions that I put. They have not yet been satisfactorily answered, but answers, I think, will remain to be found and we need to continue seeking them."@en1
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