Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-23-Speech-3-336"
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"en.20080423.23.3-336"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, it is essential to complete the Doha Round but it is also essential to examine once again the functioning of the WTO. Every day we can see that it is beset by problems concerning its efficiency, legitimacy and interaction with the other bodies of the multilateral system.
To some extent it was inevitable that, just over 10 years after its creation, its operating mechanisms would need to be reviewed. By changing from the GATT to the WTO, the multilateral trading system did not just change in dimension; in some regards it changed in nature, too. The trade rules were extended to a considerable range of new areas: services, intellectual property, investment, non-tariff barriers. New member countries joined the original ones and this enlargement introduced a diversity, a disparity of situations and Member States, with different resources and different problems. All of that obviously means that, in addition to the efforts to complete the negotiations on the Development Round, the necessary reforms have to be examined.
I welcome the work carried out by our rapporteur, Mrs Muscardini, and the fact that we were able to cooperate with her and with the other groups. I would like to emphasise several points in this extremely important report, which, I hope, will be adopted by a large majority of this House tomorrow.
The first element is the balance in terms of international standards and the establishment of new relations between the WTO and the other international organisations. You will see in the report that we obviously mention the interaction with environmental issues, health issues – and this is clearly vital, as seen in the case of generic medicines and intellectual property – but also with social issues. We cannot fail to discuss this topic in the WTO.
Cooperation between the ILO and the WTO, which was resumed by the Directors-General of the two organisations, must go much further and the European Union must act as the driving force in this respect. We are putting forward two specific proposals: the first is that the ILO should be granted observer status in the WTO, as is the case for the International Monetary Fund; the second is that the WTO should set up – and the Union should propose this – a committee on trade and decent employment, modelled on the Committee on Trade and Environment, which has enabled a great deal of progress to be made on the interaction between environmental and trade rules.
Secondly, I would like to emphasise the aspects of the report that encourage the WTO to give more resources to the weakest members, to the least developed countries, to ensure equal, effective and efficient participation in all the negotiations and in all the committees in which future agreements and trade policies are shaped.
Thirdly, we also stress the importance of external transparency and the possibility of civil society, parliamentarians and a truly dynamic parliamentary dimension playing a greater role in the WTO. We want to see a genuine parliamentary assembly. At present, a Parliamentary Conference meets alongside the WTO. The Director-General has recently addressed it and the trade ministers, too, but we want it to be recognised, which is why we are putting forward very specific proposals, for instance in relation to the appeal body and on dispute settlement. Since these proceedings are similar to those in a court or tribunal, they should take place in public and the documents should be publicly available. I also believe that that would help to dispel certain myths and make the organisation more transparent.
Finally, the secretariat’s resources represent another important issue, which has been highlighted. The WTO’s budget today is USD 135 million: six times less than that of the IMF and almost 10 times less than that of the World Bank. It employs around 600 staff, a figure that is again much lower than that of the other multilateral organisations. As a result, increasing the resources of a WTO that is better incorporated in the system of multilateral organisations is, in my opinion, one of the conditions for better trade rules that promote development."@en1
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