Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-02-03-Speech-4-155-000"
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"en.20110203.25.4-155-000"2
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"Mr President, the trade dispute involving bananas has been one of the longest-running and perhaps the most difficult in the history of the WTO and it is a dispute where the European Union has been squarely and unequivocally in the wrong. Its policy has been to favour producers in some former colonies at the expense of the principles of free trade which are, of course, enshrined notionally in the Treaty of Rome.
This policy has been bad for everyone. It has been bad for consumers in Europe, who have had to pay much higher prices, it has been bad for exporters, it has been bad for international harmony and the community of nations, and it has been bad for the people it was notionally designed to protect. The former British and French dependencies have now become dependencies in the fullest sense, tied to an artificial and unproductive export when they might have diversified their economies and integrated more widely into the world economy.
I want to say one more thing about this which has not come up in any of the debates. The EU has disgracefully been applying pressure on banana producers to form political and economic unions around themselves, in mimicry of the EU model, which is truly none of our business. The whole point of free trade is to swap on the basis of differences, not to sell each other bananas and indeed, for that matter, not to have an artificial customs union among the industrialised economies of Europe."@en1
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