Examination of witnesses (Questions 200
- 219)
WEDNESDAY 21 JANUARY 1998
MR PHIL
BLOOMER, MS
PENNY FOWLER,
MS HELEN
O'CONNELL and MR
CLIVE ROBINSON
Dr Tonge
200. Thank you, Mr Chairman. A lot of the
memoranda we have received have criticised the European Union's
rules of origin. How do you think that they should be revised
and what should be reformed under Lomé V?
(Mr Bloomer) Mr Chairman, I wish I could answer
this in more detail, but I can give a very short answer, which
I think is the best I can do. In terms of the rules of origin
there is
Mr Grant
201. First of all though, just explain what
rules of origin are?
(Mr Bloomer) I am trying to avoid the jargon here.
The rules of origin are where the European Union, for instance,
says, "We will accept products from the African, Caribbean
and Pacific countries and we will give them access if 60 per cent
of the value of that product is from that country". That
is not very important in terms of apples, because in terms of
an apple all of it comes from South Africa, so that is fine, we
just say 100 per cent there. If however that apple is, for instance,
imported to make cider in South Africa and that is then sent on
to the European Union, and if the apples happen to come from a
non African, Caribbean and Pacific country, then the European
Union may say, "Sorry, that is not really an ACP product
because making the cider represents only 20 per cent of the total
value".
Mr Grant:I understood that too!
(Mr Bloomer) Goodness, I am astonishing myself
here too!
Dr Tonge
202. What about pesticides?
(Mr Bloomer) Sorry?
Mr Canavan: Okay,
order, order!
(Mr Bloomer) That is the difficulty that the European
Union faces and also it is the problem that the African, Caribbean
and Pacific countries face. It is particularly difficult in manufactured
goods because generally if you are producing, say, to take an
extraordinary example, a microwave oven, you may be bringing in
the cases from Korea, you may be bringing in the microwave generator
from Japan and some of the steel may have gone from one of your
countries to Korea and come back again as a shell for the microwave
oven, and then you are assembling it, say, in Namibia in a free
trade zone in Namibia and you are importing it into the European
Union, so you can see the level of complexity once you get to
manufactured goods. Now it gets very complicated. Therefore, I
think that what most people are seeking is a simplification of
those rules of origin. Now if we are serious about providing opportunities
for diversification out from bananas, out from copper, the primary
commodities that are losing their values, if we are looking to
achieve that diversification, then rules of origin are very important
in promoting manufactured goods. It may be that we are looking
at initially simply assembly in some of those ACP countries, but
in terms of their opportunities to start getting plant in to provide
work- and I am sure that Helen O'Connell will come on later
to say that we need to make sure that that work which is often
in assembly women is with good standards of labour and reasonable
salary levels- as I say, if we are looking to create those
industries, even though they be assembly industries, having complicated
rules of origin that make it almost impossible for an investor
to know what they are going to get in terms of the tariff that
will be raised on those microwaves is extremely important and
the less that there is in terms of a tariff which is raised on
those imports, the better for the possibility of beginning to
get manufacturing industries, that is to say, incipient manufacturing
industries, in some of the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries.
Mr Rowe
203. As you spoke I thought to myself, well,
maybe they should look instead at the proportion of the take which
returns to the countries who are trying to export, but then I
thought to myself, but there is a problem there because the ownership
of the corporation that is assembling your microwave may well
be in either Tokyo or Birmingham and I wondered whether you had
any comment on those thoughts?
(Mr Bloomer) Again, Mr Chairman, it is a question
for the European Union to look at very carefully. I have not got
a specific proposal on it, but what I can say is that the European
Union perhaps understandably, if it was to see more flexible rules
of origin, not looking in detail at where the different components
had come from, but saying, it is coming from the ACP countries
and therefore it has got to be good for giving access, if it wants
to make sure that the producersand they are almost certain
to be foreign investors if it is a microwave oven because very
few investors in the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries
have the marketing knowledge and the technical knowledge and know
howif it is going to be a foreign direct investor, then
it should be a European Union manufacturer. There are reasonable
arguments about that from simply a European Union self interested
perspective, and there is nothing wrong with self interest as
long as it is not very damaging to the development potential of
the Lomé agreement and the future Lomé agreement,
and so it is a matter of finding that balance. We have not been
able to do enough work it to say where that balance lies, but
it may well be, I would say, that certainly the European Union
investors and ACP domestic investors in particular should be encouraged,
and there may be ways in which other investors may be encouraged
also to invest in ACP states if they are seriously generating
good quality employment for poor people in those countries, but
there has to be a balance between European Union self interest
and the development interests which the rules of origin provide.
Mr Grant
204. This is a very interesting point because,
if we take the microwave, if they took the component parts from
the European Union presumably the rules of origin would apply?
(Mr Bloomer) Yes, that is right.
205. So it is like tied aid?
(Mr Bloomer) Yes.
206. A similar situation, so is anyone actually
saying that the ACP countries should not be allowed to import
the component parts for a microwave oven, say, from anywhere and
they should not have a tariff? What is the European Union saying,
the Commission?
(Mr Bloomer) In terms of what is being said in
the European Union, it is that the least developed countries,
that sacrosanct category, will be given more flexible rules of
origin but the non least developed countries will not be provided-
or, it is being talked about in those terms, because obviously
it is still early stages of the debate. The president of the World
Trade Organisation has asked and the European Union has I think
demonstrated a very welcome commitment to providing no tariffs
and flexible rules of origin for the least developed countries,
and not just in the ACP group but also the other nine that are
outside the ACP group, and that is very, very welcome. What we
come back to is, is the least developed country category adequate?
It misses out entirely the Caribbean, for instance, it leaves
those out, and therefore their ability, for instance, to begin
to manufacture in the Caribbean products for the European Union
is very curtailed.
Mr Rowe
207. That leads on directly to the next
question, which is that paradoxically, as I understand it, that
some of the Lomé preferences are not actually exploited
to the full because of supply side constraints which I suppose
in non-jargon terms means creating goods of a standard which anybody
wants to buy. What sort of trade development measures should the
ACP countries be helped to create to overcome that difficulty?
(Mr Bloomer) As I started with, the first difficulty
is that many of the tariffs, the preference, the difference in
the tariff, is not sufficient to provide a real incentive, a significant
incentive, for the ACP countries: only 7 per cent have a 5 per
cent preference for the ACP. Nevertheless what you say is very
important in terms of the ability of the African, Caribbean and
Pacific countries to manufacture goods at a competitive price
at a good enough quality to become competitive in a European Union
market. We believe that one of the difficulties in the past of
Lomé IV, for instance, but particularly Lomé III
and II, is that there has not been sufficient emphasis in the
aid programme on really tackling the difficulties that the ACP
countries have in producing goods at a good price and a good quality.
Of course, one of the most important things to improve the quality
of goods and the potential of the ACP countries to export is first
to raise the level of education in the country. In the longest
term that is one of the key determinants, the Asia model, the
South East Asia model, demonstrating that investment in social
services is key to generating your competitive abilities. Alongside
that there needs to beand the European Union is involved
already in trying to assist countries in thisdevelopment
communications infrastructure so that there can be rapid communication
around issues of quality, and in developing I would say a key
area should be the whole information technology area. In certain
countries, for instance, particularly in the Caribbean, if you
have an educated workforce there is a significant possibility
of bringing in information technology service industries which
will generate significant employment. What that demands, of course,
in a number of instances, is technology transfer and with the
development of intellectual property rights, that is to say, the
patents which are created and the increasing number of years for
which a patient is held, that does create significant difficulties
for the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to get hold of
that technology early enough for them to be competitive. Therefore,
the direction
208. I am sorry, can I just interrupt you
there and say that when I was working in the Department of Trade
and Industry it was very clear that a lot of the Asian countries
from whom we wanted contracts were insisting that a very substantial
proportion of any contract was actually technology transfer, so
presumably that is not an insuperable obstacle, but you have to
have a contract sufficiently attractive for someone to be prepared
to sell out their property right?
(Mr Bloomer) Yes, that is right, and there are
two parts to it. The European Union has to be mindful enough of
the potential of that in terms of technology transfer when they
negotiate the forms of contract with the African, Caribbean and
Pacific countries, but also the African, Caribbean and Pacific
countries have to want to desire to get that technology transfer
into the contract and therefore also negotiate away perhaps other
aspects of it. However, I think that at the moment that issue
of technology transfer is not as central to the debate as it should
be.
209. But, you see, yesterday many of us
were lobbied by the National Farmers' Union and some of the farmers
in my constituency were saying that they now have entered into
quality control arrangements, integrated pest control programmes
and so on, and the supermarkets are saying, fine, if we really
cannot get supplies anywhere else, we will come back to you, but
actually we want even higher standards than that. If that is happening
to deeply sophisticated British farmers, it must presumably be
an appalling spectacle for the African, Caribbean and Pacific
countries just to watch the standards being driven further and
further out of sight, and often by people over whom governments
have virtually no control at all, is that right?
(Mr Bloomer) Yes, I think that that is a good
summary of the increasing height of the hill which a number of
the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries feel that they have
to climb in order to gain access to the European Union market.
Mr Grant
210. If I can just have a quick question
here, Mr Chairman, coming back to the Caribbean countries and
the banana situation, if the European Union is asking those banana
producing countries to diversity into other industries, unless
they relax the rules of origin it is just a futile gesture because
they do not have the materials in their own countries, for instance,
they do not have any aluminium or anything like that?
(Mr Bloomer) Or energy even.
211. Yes, or energy even, therefore, to
talk about diversification on any serious scale, the only thing
they could possibly diversify into would be some other kind of
agricultural product, mangoes or something like that?
(Mr Bloomer) The issue of more flexible rules
of origin for small island states is crucial and that is why we
would want to see the least developed countries category starting
to include a vulnerability index, if you like, to bring in small
island states. It is important to say, for instance, that the
issue of energy is very important too. As you say, it is the provision
of raw materials for manufacturing, but it is also the energy
which is very difficult. Now the European Union leads in some
of the renewable energy resources and there is therefore a real
potential for importing at relatively low cost the energy technologies,
particularly wind, for instance, in the Windward Islands and also
solar energy which I believe the Caribbean has quite a lot of,
so there are at least two areas there where you can see the potential.
212. With the White Paper the British Government
is talking about conflict prevention and about poverty eradication
as aims. Can I ask you whether in terms of the trade negotiations
as far as the European Union is concerned they take any of these
into account when they discuss trade and come to trade agreements
under Lomé
(Mr Bloomer) Mr Chairman, first of all, it is
only fair to say that conflict is becoming much more central to
development co-operation for all institutions and we know, for
instance, that DFID now has its own unit around the issues of
conflict prevention and Oxfam has been working hard, for instance,
over the last five, six years to ensure that in all our procedures
we are mindful of conflict prevention. It has also to be said
in terms of the Commission that there tends to be a time lag in
some of the areas and conflict prevention may be one of them so,
for instance, the Green Paper that was produced in 1996 with Lomé
I think mentioned the words conflict prevention once in something
like 100 pages of report. However, it is now the case that in
the latest paper, the guidelines, there is much more mention of
conflict prevention. We certainly feel that in terms of trade
issues there is not sufficient emphasis put on the issue of conflict
prevention, particularly because Oxfam's experience at least in
terms of conflict is that one of the greatest risk factors tending
to make social conflict spill overand social conflict sometimes
can be goodinto violence and war is perhaps economic shocks
and rapidly rising levels of inequality and sudden dramatic decreases
in a nation's or group of nations' income. At the moment, as I
think I tried to describe through the options which are on the
table, and particularly the two more extreme options of graduation
to this general system of preferences which is the loss of real
access to the European Union market and, secondly, the free trade
agreement, we feel that for a number of countries which are already
in a state of some instability there is a possibility of driving
them further into conflict by that kind of economic shock in terms
of a free trade agreement or sudden loss of preferences and therefore
a shutting down of manufacture that might be provoked. The other
thing I would add to that is the issue of international criminality
and the fact that a few of the African, Caribbean and Pacific
countries will, if they lose some of their advantage into the
European market, find that their only other real comparative advantage
is in the manufacture or trans shipment of drugs, either into
the European Union market or, in the case of the Caribbean, into
the north American market; that is to say, international criminals
will use those places as sites either for the cultivation of or
the trans shipment of drugs. Dominica, for instance, has become
a significant site according to the International Narcotics Report
of 1997, that is, a significant trans shipment point for cocaine
into the United States and inevitably marijuana production is
registered as increasing in the Caribbean over the period. All
that we can say at the present time is that if we see some of
the countries of Africa and the Caribbean lose their comparative
advantage in the legitimate imports into the European Union, inevitably
of those that are driven out by that some will see their only
option in terms of their livelihoods the entry into criminal opportunities,
outlawed opportunities.
Mr Canavan
213. Before we move next on to aid questions,
may I just ask Penny Fowler whether she has anything that she
would like to add at this stage?
(Ms Fowler) No, thank you, I think that is fine.
214. Right, thank
you. We will move on then to aid questions and, as I say, they
will be directed more to Ms O'Connell and Mr Robinson. My first
question relates to the Maastricht Treaty which commits the European
Union to policy coherence in its pursuit of development objectives.
What degree of policy coherence already exists and are there any
measures that you can think of which might improve policy coherence
under Lomé V?
(Mr Robinson) Mr Chairman, I am very glad that
we have returned to this because I think that in the last remarks
which Ms Fowler contributed she put her finger on the impact of
the common agricultural policy on all the policies that are pursued
under the Lomé Convention, both aid and trade, the potential
that the agricultural policies, the trade policies, the industrial,
economic, financial, policies of the European Union have for undermining
the good work that can be done through aid programmes and I will
try to come to the point in terms of the graphic examples that
I know the Committee appreciates, but also in terms of the mechanisms.
I think that the two clearest cases that we have seen over the
past few years are the interferences by other European Union policies
not just with the prospects of developing countries but interferences
with the Maastricht Treaty commitment, and these are in beef dumping
and unsustainable fisheries. In 1993 Christian Aid was one of
the agencies to expose the adverse effects of European beef dumping
in West Africa and in 1997 we have seen similar adverse effects
happening through European Union export subsidies in terms of
beef dumping in South Africa taking livelihoods away from stockholders
in the region, both in South Africa itself and in Namibia. In
the case of fisheries we have seen a number of fisheries agreements
concluded very much in the interests of European Union Member
State fishing fleets in very distant parts of the world. We know
that there is a very great problem of depletion of fishery resources
in European waters, we know that there are industrialised and
far travelled fishing fleets leaving European ports. Now what
normally happensand this affects a number of ACP countries
in particularis that the European Union negotiates fishing
rights in the waters of some of the poorest coastal countries
in Africa in return for relatively small contributions to the
national budgets of those countries so initially there appear
to be two actors in play, one a government which sells fishing
rights and the other the European Union negotiating on behalf
of its fishing fleets to enable its fishers to go and exploit
those waters. There is in fact a third actor who is often overlooked,
and that is the artisanal fisherman or fish worker because very
often the industrial fishing fleets from Europe displace the local
fishers and deplete the resources more fully than the local fishers
would normally do. I think that those are the two most vivid examples
which bring this question home. We have raised for many years
the question of policy coherence and the need for instruments
and mechanisms to establish policy coherence in European Union
policy making. We have talked to Commission officials, we have
talked to officials in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries
and Food here and we have talked to officials in former ODA-DFID
about it, and unfortunately the progress has been very slow. Last
year it seemed under the Dutch presidency that there was going
to be an opportunity to have more coherent mechanisms for policy
coherence. The idea was put forward for an inter-service working
group within the Commission, the idea of an annual report on cases
of incoherence, the idea of a complaints mechanism for those who
feel affected or aggrieved, and those ideas did not get very far
when they were debated by all Member States. I think that what
we would recommend now, particularly bearing in mind the way that
ACP countries are affected, is a complaints procedure, perhaps
some sort of ombudsman procedure. As we have the European Parliament,
as we have the ACP-EU joint assembly, it would be possible to
construct an ombudsman procedure attached to that assembly so
that complaints could be heard both from ACP countries and from
groups with interests within Europe.
Mr Rowe
215. May I just stop you there for a second.
It seems to me that that kind of complaints procedure would be
most likely to be government witnesses and so on and that that
would go straight back to your original anxiety that one of the
players in this game is the poor countries, the least developed
poor countries' governments, but the people you are trying to
protect are the citizens of their own government. Are you saying
that this complaints procedure would be open to individuals or
consortia?
(Mr Robinson) Oh, entirely, yes, and particularly
for individuals or organisations, groups of workers in ACP countries
who are affected. There are other models already. There is an
inspection panel established by the World Bank so that groups
who are aggrieved by World Bank projects can complain about the
damage that those projects may be doing. It is simply that we
are talking in an EU context, we are talking with the existence
of an ACP-EU joint assembly. The ombudsman concept is a European
concept. That may be the easiest way to provide aggrieved individuals
or groups with means of redress. Another mechanism we would advocate
is a strengthening of the annual report by the Commission to the
Council and Parliament on cases of incoherence. It was just about
agreed during the Dutch presidency last year that there would
be a report preferably annual, but we need something like that
for coherence. We would like to see that develop into something
much more comprehensive and that is a single annual report on
all European Union co-operation with developing countries from
the Commission. That does not exist at the moment. We are familiar
here with an annual report from DFID and other government departments.
One problem within the Commission is that its external policies
and its development policies in particular are fragmented among
a number of different directorates and a number of different commissioners
and because the question of putting right the weaknesses in a
fragmented aid administration is essentially a management question
for the Commission it is clear that the Member States cannot go
very far in tackling that and saying that the Commission should
have a different kind of organigram. One way in which greater
coherence could be established is to ask the Commission and all
the fragments of the aid administration to get together to produce
a single annual report taking as its structure the commitments
to sustainable development in the Maastricht Treaty. If I could
just add one last mechanism, Mr Chairman, because I referred to
fish, this is another area where a more structural or better mechanism
within the EU-ACP context would be of benefit. At the moment fisheries
agreements are bilateral, they are negotiated by the European
Union but bilaterally with individual African, Caribbean and Pacific
countries, rather on a parallel with the bilateral EU-South Africa
negotiations which Mr Bloomer was describing. It would be a benefit
if there were a joint EU-ACP committee for fisheries agreements
to ensure that experience of sustainable development between different
affected countries were fully shared and also, frankly, to give
the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries greater bargaining
power when it comes to dealing with the European Union and with
the industrialised fishing fleets.
Mr Canavan
216. Ms O'Connell, would you like to add
anything?
(Ms O'Connell) Just briefly, thank you, Mr Chairman.
The question of aid and development is a highly political question
and I think that when you look at coherence it brings to mind
immediately the kind of ideological underpinnings of the different
parts of the European Commission and the different Member States.
The aid policy is very clear, that it wants to promote sustainable
development, poverty eradication, but the trade policy is coming
from a completely different perspective. Within the Commission
itself there are people whose objectives, perhaps rightly so,
would be to promote the European Union's own economic policy,
their own access to markets in African, Caribbean and Pacific
countries and the free movement of finance. Those objectives run
counter to the objectives of DG VIII and DG IB who are talking
about development as we all understand it. I think that we need
to get the contradictions out on the table and look at them very
clearly and recognise that it is an intensive political debate
just as it is an intensive political debate in Whitehall between
the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department for International
Development and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.
We should not kid ourselves, I think, that just because the Maastricht
Treaty talks about coherence, the coherence is going to be with
development and poverty reduction at the top and everything else
supporting that. The Maastricht Treaty says that development co-operation
objectives should be taken into account; it does not say they
should be given top priority. We would argue that they should
be given top priority and that what you do in the field of agriculture
and what you do in the field of trade and what you do in the field
of foreign policy and so on has to be measured and tested by whether
or not it is going to achieve what you say you want to achieve
on development, poverty elimination, equality between men and
women, protection of the environment and promotion of respect
for human rights and democracy. Obviously as non governmental
organisations these are our priorities and we think that they
should be the test. We have not quite won that battle with parts
of the Commission that have other priorities or other parts of
Whitehall that have other priorities, but I do think that we have
to keep it in mind that there are conflicting objectives.
Ms Follett
217. I am on to decision making here and
in particular decision making for some of the EU delegations in
each country. There have been memoranda which have argued for
greater responsibility for decision making to be given to the
EU delegations in each country. How will it be possible to combine
efficient devolved decision making with a consistent developmental
approach and value for money?
(Mr Robinson) I think that we have covered a number
of fairly controversial areas this morning, but this seems to
be one of the least controversial now in that every memorandum
that I have seen in the preparations for the successor Lomé
Convention seems to agree that it would be a good thing to devolve
responsibility to the delegations. The particular questions of
consistency and value for money I think can be addressed. We are
no longer in the situation that we were in perhaps even ten or
15 years ago where the European Union delegations were isolated
posts with difficult communications. Modern communications have
made it much easier now for European Union delegations or for
that matter for the aid management offices of the DFID to be in
constant touch with headquarters offices and we have also seen
a great development in the methods of appraisal, of monitoring,
of evaluation of programmes and projects so that consistency is
established both through good communications and through refined
methods of progressing development programmes. One can know, one
can easily use e-mail or the telephone to get to know, that a
delegate in Botswana, say, is taking forward development programmes
with his country counterparts following formats and policies and
procedures that have been established and fully discussed in Brussels.
That does not seem to be a problem. The question of value for
money I think can also be addressed by looking more imaginatively
at how delegations are staffed and resourced. Some evaluation
reports have noted that each delegation at present seems to have
a fairly small number of European experts posted to it with very
little use of local specialist staff, local professionals, who
could be recruited at I suspect cheaper rates than are paid to
officials posted from Brussels. They could be recruited to complement
the expertise which is available from the European staff. It has
also been remarked in a different context that if the European
Union is moving into greater attention to the social sectors,
to gender, to poverty eradication, then it needs to enhance its
capacity both in the delegations and in Brussels to deal with
those areas. I am sure that it would be possible to recruit more
local staff to the delegations to reflect the cultural approaches
to those questions in their own countries. It would equally be
possible to make greater use of a method which the Commission
has already employed, that is, having detached national experts
from Member States. DFID in particular has posted a number of
social development advisers on short term contracts to the European
Commission to assist in the development of social development
expertise there. That could be developed further and probably,
as we were also talking of greater civil society and private sector
involvement in the new arrangements, there could be greater secondment
from NGOs, both African, Caribbean and Pacific and European Union.
Mr Rowe
218. May I just take that point up, Mr Chairman.
It has been my observed experiencemy wife works in the
international fieldthat there is a lamentable tendency
for the people who get these prestigious overseas jobs to be selected
because of who they know, not what they know. Would it be possible
to have some kind of internationally agreed recruitment procedure,
for example, that could diminish the risk of someone's nephew
getting a post whether in fact they know anything about development
or not?
(Mr Robinson) Mr Chairman, I do not have an intimate
knowledge of recruitment procedures, but you allow me through
the question to mention the one concept that I meant to mention
under the heading of consistency, and that is rotation, because
our experience is that the best results for development are obtained
when both the Commission and the DFID manage to rotate staff between
different overseas postings and headquarters, so if that is the
existing practice and it is one that we should encourage even
more in the future, then it is the career possibilities for all
staff working in development that we are talking about rather
than particularly attractive overseas postings. That is the way
that I think we can get the best possible understanding of development
conditions on the ground fed back into headquarters offices, and
it is also another way to ensure consistency if there are going
to beand we strongly support the basic concept, let me
just say that nowgreater devolution of decision making
power to the delegates. I think that the reason that this question
of devolution comes up so starkly with the European Union programmes
is that the European Commission is inevitably more bureaucratic
than any national administration. If what has been forged in Brussels
over the past 30 or so years is a blend of so many different national
administrations with all the different types of checks and balances
that they have, whether it is in auditing or legal affairs and
so on, you can imagine that the end product would not be a product
that is simpler than any national administration.
219. Can I just go back to that. For example,
if you take the Gambia, Save the Children Fund was one of the
only two non governmental organisations working in the Gambia,
of which there are thousands, who did not actually have their
local premises on the attractive coastal strip. If in fact sophisticated
international aid agencies assisting the poorest of the poor insist
on siting themselves in an untypical part of the country merely
because it provides the best possible conditions to their staff,
how much greater is the temptation for a struggling country where
this may well be the only opportunity for somebody to escape to
do the same. What bothers me is that in a highly bureaucratic
organisation like the European Union the kind of advice that is
often tendered comes from people who actually sit on their butts
in comfortable air conditioned offices and do not actually have
a very clear perception of what is going on on the ground. I wondered
whether you had any views on that?
(Mr Robinson) Not so much on what you say. I think
that the day of the golf course delegate is over, if ever there
was such a day, and I am not saying that there was. I think that
day is over. I think that
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