UN General Assembly
2007

on the pretext of free trade while simultaneously practising the crudest and most ruthless protection of the world’s predominant systems of production and stubbornly refusing to comply with part V of the Agreement on Agriculture, annexed to the Marrakesh Agreement, whose objectives include the elimination of subsidies and the opening up of markets. Unfortunately, we have not managed to convince the United States and the European Union of this. To put it briefly and concisely, developing countries do not need to be “helped”; they need guarantees of free access to markets and, in particular, the elimination of domestic production subsidies, which violate the competitiveness guarantees, which are so highly touted. It is in agriculture that the southern countries are highly competitive and produce consumer goods of high quality, generally free of genetic modification. Real free trade would not make them turn to international credit and would enable them to generate their own resources to finance their own development, integrate their economies, to expand their markets, create their own multilateral credit institutions and diversify their products and, as a result,