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by the Community despite the obligation to supply them, and can only assume that the statistics are still not available. But, if they are not we cannot help asking ourselves where the Community has found the evidence to support its case.
When Mr. Heacher spoke of base levels I wonder if he was confusing Article 3 and Article 4. He went on to talk about the "principle of no cutbacks" having "worked to the serious disadvantage of the importing countries. The reason for this is the protracted bilateral negotiations trade during the negotiation period build up so that base levels were fixed at artificially high levels, as I am sure everyone will agree."
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I'm afraid they won't. There is no principle of no cutbacks. Article 3 and Annex B specifically provide for the roll back formula, which when trade is growing fast, can involve a considerable cutback. But the Community chose to negotiate under article 4. During these negotiations it threatened us (and, we believe, others) with import restrictions under Article 3. There seemed to be in Brussels a mistaken belief that the Community had a right to demand an agreement under Article 4 and, if it couldn't by "negotiation "get the agreement it wanted, to use this threat to force the exporting country to comply.
I believe that the negotiations were protracted because of the way they were conducted and because the EEC delegation'c rigid instructions were permeated with this belief. In fact they had no right to take action under Article 3 because they had never presented a Community case of market disruption or "actual threat thereof". We may have seemed difficult but this was because we were being asked to agree to many things which we thought were not reasonable in the MFA context.
I can't speak for the Koreans but if the Community blamed us for the delay I would point out that we do not have such protracted negotiations with anyone else and that it is a widely-held belief among the participating countries that the Community (whose internal procedures do, we know, take a long time) cannot blame anyone else for the delay in reaching agreements.
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Frankly, the only part of all this where I think you may have a case is in relation to new suppliers "a further weakness is the lack of an adequate safeguard to deal effectively with new suppliers of sensitive products" but I would suggest
that the case is overstated. The weakness lies not in the MFA but in the Community's slow reactions.
Consequently you will, I fear, get little sympathy for your predicament or for your proposed solution of "globalisation".
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