Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-12-17-Speech-5-023"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.19991217.4.5-023"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
"Mr President, I want to thank Mrs Redondo for her report and for her excellent explanation of what all this is about and why it is important. One of the things that I miss from the information we were given is the cost of this operation or what the cost would be if every Member State involved themselves in it. I do not suppose it is very big. Nevertheless the information is necessary for a Parliament discussing the subject.
Of course, as the common agricultural policy develops from a situation in which we pay subsidies at the point of export or at the point of entry into intervention into a situation where we pay subsidies for individual animals on an acreage or the hectarage of crop planted, obviously it is extremely important that we know exactly how many animals there are in the Union, how many hectares and how many olive trees and all the rest of it. All that information is extremely important. It is extremely regrettable if we, at European level, the institutions who organise the common agricultural policy on which the farmers of the Union depend for their livelihood, cannot obtain correct information on which to base an effective policy. It is very hard to understand why we do not have better cooperation from all the Member States.
When we expand the European Union, or even without expansion, we will not retain all the provisions of the present policy. Nevertheless, we will need this information so that we are able to extend some sort of assistance on a reasonable basis to the new countries of the Union where food production and agricultural production will increase by 50 per cent what we have in the Union today.
It is also advisable to remember that in the Court of Auditors’ report, which has just come out and which was debated this week, we did not find in the whole agricultural sector any indication of massive racketeering or fraud on a large scale but we notice that there seem to be an awful lot of little problems with the number of livestock and the amount of hectarage for area aid and so on. There are small errors over a very wide area and that is a serious problem that we have to address.
Finally, I would say that in the new Europe it is going to be important for farmers to base their levels of production on the projected quantities that will be produced in the Union. That cannot happen if we do not know the statistics of the agricultural industry. Increasingly, rather than screaming at the institutions of Union to solve the problems, farmers will have to come together and try to calculate what the needs of the market are and produce for those needs. That does not mean that we want to bring an end to subsidisation. For example, there is the pigmeat industry where we produce 18 million tons of pigmeat annually and we end up in a situation where there is a million tons in surplus. Prices collapse, there is terrible hardship and indeed terrible profiteering by middlemen. If we had good statistics, we would be able to deal with a problem like that before it arose."@en1
|
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples