Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-11-25-Speech-4-121"
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"en.20101125.24.4-121"2
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"Mr President, the purpose of trade is to maximise prosperity and advantage to both participants. Countries do not trade with one another: businesses and individuals do. Yet in this report, and in the EU’s trade policy more widely, we see the Commission’s determination to insert into its commercial agreements all sorts of non-commercial criteria: not only those dealing with human rights, environmental standards and so on, but also, and rather more damagingly, those which insist that other parts of the world form themselves into regional commercial blocs in mimicry of the EU.
The whole point of trade is to swap on the back of differences. There is no purpose in obliging, let us say, the countries of Central America to form a commercial union among themselves in which they are selling one another bananas and coffee and cut flowers. Nor, for that matter, is there much advantage in having in Europe a bloc of similar industrialised economies, where we have cut ourselves off from the growing markets of the rest of the world. It is deleterious to the developing nations and to the Anglosphere, and it is particularly disastrous for my country, which has trapped itself in a cramped and declining regional customs union."@en1
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