Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-09-12-Speech-3-421-000"
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"en.20120912.23.3-421-000"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, in order for there to be any real point to this debate, we probably need to start from the beginning – with the reason why we are actually debating this matter.
It is because our old trade agreement with the ACP countries, that is to say the countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, was declared illegal. It discriminated against other poor countries. We therefore decided to opt for the approach we are now taking of negotiating economic partnership agreements with the ACP countries. It has taken a long time – an unacceptably long time. It is in all of our interests for these agreements to be in place as soon as possible, as it is only once we have these agreements that we will be able to achieve any real development in poor countries, along with investments and better governance.
The only reason we have had these temporary trade preferences is to bridge the gap between our old, illegal agreements and these new economic partnership agreements. They were just temporary, however.
The entire debate here today is actually about how long we mean by ‘temporary’. Those on the left in this House say that temporary means forever, or at least until 2019. The Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament say that temporary is probably up to 2016. I get the feeling that temporary means anytime except right now. It has now been more than 12 years, however – and that is more than just temporary. Why is that? It is because the temporary customs facilities are essentially unfair – they are unfair to other poor countries that do not belong to Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. They are unfair in particular to those ACP countries that respected the fact that they were temporary and negotiated and entered into partnership agreements with us. We therefore have a responsibility to set an ultimate limit for this temporary scheme.
Let us continue to be honest and admit that we will never have any economic partnership agreements if we say that the temporary scheme is to last forever. What should we say to the other poor countries, to those countries that at one time accused us of not caring about fairness or about World Trade Organisation regulations? Therefore, we must support this proposal and bring this temporary scheme to an end. We in the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) therefore believe that the Commission’s proposal should be approved.
I also think it would be good if we could try to agree to conduct a first reading of this in order to get the rules in place as soon as possible. I therefore think the best thing to do would be to vote on all of the amendments and then postpone the final vote so that we can initiate negotiations with the Council. After all, it is only a date that separates us, a date that is very significant, but it is something on which I believe we could reach an agreement. I would therefore call on both the President and the rapporteur to consider whether we should initiate negotiations with the Council and try to achieve a first reading agreement."@en1
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