A European conception of trade policy. I would like to come back to what I said in this column yesterday about the forthcoming replacement of the Commissioners for the trade and agricultural policies within the Barroso Commission. Pascal Lamy, with the highly effective support of Franz Fischler and the sometimes easily obtained, sometimes hard-fought (but always won) approval of the Council, has laid the foundations of a reasonable EU trade policy against the backdrop of globalisation, and these must be kept and consolidated. It is true that the conception of trade liberalisation I have stuck my neck out to define as "European" has not yet been fully accepted internationally, and the compromise attained in Geneva for the next round of WTO negotiations does not include all of the EU's initial requests, far from it. But some principles have been achieved, others are on the way, and in any case the Union must stick firmly to its guns on this. Before leaving office, Pascal Lamy will open the debate on an additional plank, that of "collective preferences", a somewhat opaque piece of jargon (I would prefer "the preferences of the collectivity"), which underlies revolutionary ideas which may make serious changes to world trade rules. I will come back to this before long, before Mr Lamy officially opens discussions on 15 September, and for now I will just summarise the starting premise: world trade should be increasingly free, that's a given, but with the environmental, social and regulatory rules and disciplines without which trade becomes a jungle, to the advantage of the most powerful, the multinationals, unscrupulous traders and dishonest producers, and to the detriment of the poorest and of quality and safety of products, but most of all of the consumers, and therefore of all of us.
The impenetrable veil of ignorance and misunderstanding. The disciplines to be brought in were not first thought of by political forces, but result from the growing demands of the public: spontaneous movements of consumer organisations forcing multinationals to respect certain rules on, for example, child labour, and which prefer the development of trade loyalty; and producers are calling for better protection of their geographic denominations and for more to be done in the fight against counterfeiting.
The specific problems of agriculture are up against the same backdrop. I am almost embarrassed to be talking about this, given how often it crops up in this column. However, I get the impression that the veil of misunderstanding and ignorance which covers them is still substantial, and the arrival of a new Parliament and a new Commission prompt me to stress this time and again. My position has never been easy, because it is troublesome to both agricultural organisations (when I flag up abuses and deviations from the common agricultural policy), international trade, agro-food multinationals, the demagogues who try to make out that the total liberalisation of agricultural trade would be a good thing for the poorest countries (which, on the contrary, are its main victims). That's a lot of people for a mere journalist. At the same time, however, I receive some comfort from the fact that voices such as that of Jacques Delors have been stressing the same (and my regular readers know how much that particular voice means to me), and there has been other, impromptu comfort, from a letter by a Dutch industrialist (Julius Hosman, Head of European and International Public Affairs for Corus Group), who, last year, sending me a highly interesting study on the anticipated benefits of the Doha Round, added: "as a Dutch industrialist, I am supposed to disagree with your thoughts on trade policy and the agricultural policy. In fact I have learnt a lot from your arguments, and I sympathise with your conclusions on international trade in agricultural products. Even for an industrialist, it is not hard to understand that market rules applicable to industrial products cannot be the same for agriculture".
Ideas gaining ground. In fact, some ideas are gaining ground. The dichotomy between the various NGOs (non-governmental organisations) is becoming clearer: those targeting their own visibility and political success are calling for total liberalisation of the world agricultural market, and criticise the "protectionism" of the largest importer of agricultural products from the poorest countries (the EU), whereas those NGOs which work "on the ground" defend the right of these countries to develop a subsistence agriculture first and foremost to feed their own people, and criticise "mono-cultures for export" as the worst threat for hundreds of millions of hungry people. For the former, the well-being of the "damnés de la terre" is the least of their worries.
I expect the Barroso Commission to take position clearly on these vital issues. (F.R.)