Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-02-16-Speech-3-031"
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"en.20000216.2.3-031"2
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"Mr President, the Director-General of the DG for Development has said that to produce a report on coherence of EU policies with development policies, before this spring’s paper on development policy itself, is like putting the cart before the horse. Never mind that the Commission’s requirement to produce an annual report, set out clearly in the Council resolution, has produced only one “non-paper”, the real problem here is that at the time of rising world poverty this particular horse is climbing uphill and the cart of other EU policies is so heavy that development policy is actually being pulled slowly backwards.
Time after time development policy is forgotten or is an afterthought when the major policies of this European Union are considered. Take the new chocolate directive, which shows that EU countries spend more on chocolate every year than on development aid. There has been no proper development assessment of this directive which the producer countries, 90% of which are our ACP partners, estimate could cut incomes to cacao farmers by at least 15%.
Take the fishing agreements, where we recognise the unsustainability of current fishing practices within the EU waters. We are, at the same time, negotiating joint ventures allowing increased access for Europe’s large-scale fishing vessels in developing country waters at the expense of 190 million small-scale fish workers in those countries world-wide.
Take the trade agreements. As Mr Nielson said this morning with regard to Lomé, preferential access is only for “essentially all the products of the least-developed countries”. In other words, when EU commercial interests are concerned, poverty considerations go out of the window.
In the stance that we took at Seattle, why such a silence on the EU’s failure to implement the trade concessions for developing countries already agreed in the GATT, including for the crucial textile sector?
On the common agricultural policy, the biggest culprit – no development impact assessment of the Agenda 2000 CAP reforms. Everyone now knows of the scandal of the export refund scheme which dumped 54 000 tonnes of excess subsidised beef on West African markets, slashing prices for local cattle farmers by half. Today beef stocks stand at 300 000 tonnes. Who will be next, quite literally, for the chop?
I welcome Mr Amadeus’ statement this morning, which acknowledged the difficulties of non-budgetisation of the EDF, which called for a more active role for the Development Council and which called for development priorities to be central to the EU’s emerging common foreign and security policy.
I welcome too the Council declaration of 1992, its resolution of 1997 and successive changes in the Treaty of European Union. Action simply has not been taken. That is why we want annual reports, we want an annual inter-service group and we want a complaints procedure, to make sure action is actually taken. I ask Mr Nielson, in his summing-up, to directly address those points in the resolution."@en1
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