Mr President, thank you and congratulations to Mr Deva for a very wide-ranging and comprehensive report. It is, as Commissioner Byrne said, appropriate that we are here just as those long and arduous deliberations are taking place in Johannesburg. But perhaps more important and appropriate for us is the fact that the economic partnership agreement negotiations will begin this month. They have a wide-ranging agenda in Johannesburg, just as we have here. The fact is that there are agreed goals in place and we now need all audacious and principled people to get down to working out how we meet the challenges: the challenges presented by the needless deaths of 11 million children under five every year; how we feed eight hundred million people who still go hungry; the 2.4 billion who have no adequate sanitation and the six million people we are losing every year to AIDS, TB and malaria. Aid is essential, as Mr Deva says, for developing countries, but trade will bring benefits on a far greater scale. If sub-Saharan Africa had just one percent more of the global export market, it would bring in an extra USD 70 billion each year. That is five times what the region now receives in aid and debt relief combined. Of course poor countries need more aid, but they also need better and fairer export opportunities. The great thing about trade is that it brings self-reliance; trade brings opportunities for jobs and for investments. Trade also provides that ladder out of poverty which is what our committee and this report are all about. There is nothing inevitable about all the concerns raised in Mr Deva's report. It is not written on tablets of stone that global politics and global policies should be about 'them' and 'us' and about the survival of the fittest in an unequal world, as President Mbeki said when opening the summit in Johannesburg. We must take into account too the impact of the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank and the conditionalities which they impose upon developing countries and which actually make their trading possibilities more difficult. What we need to say is that all the global actors on the global stage need a fair and comparable opportunity to perform well. Trade barriers hurt poor people in general and women in particular, since it is these groups of poor people who tend to produce the goods that are most affected: agricultural goods and labour-intensive manufactured goods. As this report suggests, we clearly need a radical shake-up of world trade rules. What we see now is untenable; the unfairness and the inequity have to be tackled and trade is the key to doing this. Certainly in terms of the ACP-EU negotiations, we have a real opportunity to be centre stage and to be offering that equity and fairness. We are an agricultural superpower and we can lead in the whole post-Doha agenda by opening markets and by ending the dumping of what we produce on to the world market, thereby producing distortions which developing countries simply cannot deal with. On TRIPS, the EU should maintain a strong and determined leadership. TRIPS must be implemented fairly. The issue of compulsory licensing must be resolved. Returning to the EPA negotiations, we should use the Doha Declaration on TRIPS as a ceiling for any discussion with the ACP on intellectual property. Finally, as Co-President of the Joint Parliamentary Assembly, I think that we have a very serious role to play in the EU's negotiations. We are saying very clearly in the Joint Assembly that we want a strong and unequivocal dimension, which is a development dimension. This will require a huge investment in building capacity and a serious analysis of the implications of the impact of reciprocity on our ACP partners. So, as Mr Deva makes clear, we have a long 'to do' list – a list which will not be dealt with unless we confront the vested interests that benefit from the plight of the poor. Europe has to be driven by the moral imperatives which we face. It is time, as Mr Deva suggests, to challenge the orthodoxies and abandon the prescriptive notion that free flows of finance and information and trade advance welfare in all cases. It is time not for defeatist language but for constructive and practical answers.

Political group: PSE