Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-23-Speech-3-340"
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"en.20080423.23.3-340"2
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"(
Madam President, the only thing we will agree on is the urgent need to revolutionise the WTO.
The WTO, like the IMF, is an illegitimate, anti-democratic and dangerous organisation as far as the people’s interests are concerned. It was initially set up to ensure the financial and industrial hegemony of the United States and major transnational groups.
The Union has, of course, slavishly put itself at the beck and call of this system, in the hope of gathering a few crumbs from the table of the American master. This unbridled free trade has today turned against its founders and the planet’s centre of economic gravity has swung towards the East and Asia in particular, resulting in the most terrible financial and food crises the world has ever experienced.
There are few countries that yesterday were classed as emerging nations, went on to become predators and then renounced their role as predators in the name of some benevolent objective or another, with the entire global trading system built around the WTO encouraging them to continue along that path. The rules for all players are to get rich as quickly as possible, irrespective of the means, including speculation on medicines or basic foodstuffs.
In the Union the inequalities have exploded and the working and middle classes are getting poorer and poorer. The food crisis affecting the poorest populations is a direct consequence of the WTO’s policy aimed at destroying subsistence crops to the benefit of export crops. Biofuels are merely the easy scapegoat of a mercenary system that must be revolutionised as soon as possible.
I want to take this opportunity to denounce the irresponsible comments of Mr Mandelson, who called for further deregulation of the agricultural markets at a time when the World Food Programme is highlighting the surge in food prices and calling it, and I quote, ‘a silent tsunami threatening to plunge more than 100 million people into hunger’. Does Mr Mandelson thus want to go down in history under the shameful epithet of someone who was responsible for starvation?
The WTO must therefore be revolutionised in order to curb speculation and support producers rather than a minority of profiteers benefiting the global financial markets, so as to encourage the populations to become independent in terms of food and industry and to urge the nations to cooperate rather than compete."@en1
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