Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-05-09-Speech-1-103-000"
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"en.20110509.19.1-103-000"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, there is something wrong about holding a debate in May 2011 on a natural disaster that occurred in summer 2010, a disaster that left 12 million people homeless and destroyed 20% of the country concerned.
I do not support the socialist position, which was expressed by Mr Susta just now. It is partly due to this hesitation that we are still racking our brains trying to work out which instruments we can adopt in order to actively help Pakistan, and on top of our frustration at not having achieved that yet, we are also conscious that we need a trade policy approach that is more mature in political and humanitarian terms: trade policy must become one of the instruments for helping populations in difficulty.
I admit that the Commission has acted swiftly and effectively by proposing a package of measures, which obviously needed to be discussed and rebalanced so that they did not penalise a European sector that has already been tested by the crisis. It is thanks to the work done by the Committee on International Trade, including that contained in certain amendments – among which the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe supports Amendment 37 – that businesses, too, can request application of the safeguard clause. However, it seems that these are bad times for Pakistan and that too many people are failing to face up to their responsibilities.
We are asking India to change its attitude and to soften its ‘no’ stance at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as a tangible sign of good-neighbourly relations. True, relations are difficult between those two countries, since there was also the Mumbai attack and Pakistan’s poor cooperation in identifying and capturing the perpetrators of the attack. Yet that affair could be something that breaks the bad habits of a bad relationship between neighbours.
We are also asking the Pakistani authorities for something, namely, to be more determined to consider this issue from a bilateral point of view in their relations with India. Bilateral meetings have recently taken place, though little has come of them, perhaps due to a pride issue on the Pakistanis’ part. It is clear that cricket diplomacy, emphasised by Pakistan’s Members of Parliament, whom we met just two weeks ago, has so far failed to produce meaningful results.
Lastly, it is the WTO, above all, that we are asking – as we did in Geneva during the recent Interparliamentary Assembly – quickly to adopt mechanisms that will enable international trade rules to respond swiftly and flexibly to emergencies in a country hit by unforeseen disasters. This tariff reduction affair may end up achieving nothing, or it could open a new era in trade relations."@en1
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