Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-05-07-Speech-3-219"
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"en.20080507.17.3-219"2
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"Mr President, I am very grateful to Glyn Ford for his report and for the general support it expresses for the Commission’s line in its free-trade agreement negotiations with ASEAN countries.
I look forward to working with Parliament as we go forward in these negotiations. It goes without saying that I will keep the INTA Committee updated on progress. I am very grateful for this report. It is of the standard I have come to expect from the INTA Committee and to depend on in its understanding and judgements of complex trade policy issues.
South-East Asia deserves our full attention. Understandably, our focus in Asia is drawn again and again to China, but our partnership with ASEAN should be no less engaged, whether we are dealing with questions of sustainable development, of society or trade. That is why ASEAN was selected as a partner for one of our new-generation FTAs in Global Europe.
The dynamism of the ASEAN economies is certainly an opportunity for Europe. However, a lot of that opportunity is still potential rather than real. EU businesses trying to trade or invest in South-East Asia still face tariff and non-tariff barriers and markets tilted against foreign service providers, especially in public procurement markets. The same is true for foreign direct investment in general. They also find that their intellectual property rights are still too poorly protected, and the general transparency of some markets is fairly low.
This is the strongest possible argument for a free-trade agreement that is deep rather than quick and light. I do not believe in FTAs as quick, political fixes. The Global Europe trade strategy is about new trading opportunities, new exports and new jobs. This negotiation was launched on the basis of evidence that we could achieve those things if we were willing to be ambitious.
We are right to reject the idea of an FTA covering certain tariffs only. I could not agree more with this report’s call for ambition, therefore, in this negotiation. We have deliberately chosen to base an approach on region-to-region negotiations. I think that was the right choice. I believe that bilateral agreements can act as building blocks for the multilateral system, where they encourage regional integration and the growth of regional markets. I think that we can see this negotiation as a contribution to the ASEAN blueprint for an economic community.
However, as this report rightly points out, negotiating such an ambitious agenda on a region-to-region basis is not the easiest, nor the fastest, route. Every time an ASEAN member country cannot deliver on a specific issue, we are faced with the lowest common denominator outcome. That is not fair for the others. We are also faced with problems of resources, because the capabilities of the ASEAN states are stretched by the wide number of FTAs they are currently negotiating. As a result, it is hard to see the timeframe for a full region-to-region agreement as less than three to four years, and it is difficult to see us achieving a consistent high level of ambition.
At the same time, of course, our major competitors are cementing their links with individual countries in the region, one after another. Japan, Australia and the USA are all active. I note the paragraph in the report referring to the option of going bilateral, should the regional approach prove difficult. I do not want to give up the regional approach at this stage, but we are in the process of introducing some flexibility in this regional framework – a dose of variable geometry that takes into account the different levels of development within ASEAN and that could allow us to go faster with individual ASEAN countries. This would be economically sound and can pave the way for others to join later.
In fact, our negotiating guidelines provide for a conclusion with fewer than 10 members as the LDCs within ASEAN – Laos, Cambodia and Burma/Myanmar – are not required to take on commitments in the FTA but will be following the negotiating process. Laos and Cambodia are currently working on WTO accession questions and, in any event, they benefit already from wide-ranging preferential access to the EU market via the everything-but-arms scheme. But they have a logical place, in my view, in the long-term agreement. On Burma, the report reflects the position of the EU that, although part of ASEAN, we are not negotiating FTA commitments as such with Burma.
A final point on sustainable development. We hope to include environmental and social aspects in our negotiations with ASEAN, and we will do that in a cooperative spirit. In addition we have contracted an external consultant to conduct a sustainable impact assessment to analyse the likely impact of the envisaged agreement on various issues, including environmental and social concerns. This study should accompany the negotiating process during the next 18 months. Last week we also invited civil society to contribute to our reflections regarding our three ASEAN FTA negotiations. We have not noted any real disagreements that they might have with us. By building these concerns into the agreements from the start, we can ensure that problems are addressed early, if not before they arise."@en1
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