Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-02-16-Speech-3-041"
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"en.20000216.2.3-041"2
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"I sense some degree of frustration in many of the contributions to this debate. I have given you a statement on behalf of the Commission which I think provides a useful background to this discussion. We will furnish more detailed material relating directly to all the issues concerning coherence. This discussion is not new. We are currently working on it in the Commission and when that work is done I will report on it, as many have been asking if it will be possible to see the report on coherence.
I have no doubt that as a result of the increasing political attention attached to these problems – something which has clearly been reflected in the debate today – it will be easier for the Commission and the DG on Development to bring coherence to the forefront of our working agenda. This also calls for the introduction of further new mechanisms in the Commission system which may very well include, as suggested by some of the political groups in Parliament, the setting up of a special intra-service working group and the establishment of a kind of coherence watch in the Commission.
I have read – and heard in the debate – that coherence is being used as some kind of a miracle formula that takes care of everything. I think it is important to keep it as a relatively clearly defined discipline of trying to reduce inconsistencies where they really exist, and we certainly do have them. Much of this has to do with real disagreement between sector interests in each and every Member State, as has been very honestly said here in this House: people more or less identify with their spheres of interest, and all this is legitimate. I would, however, warn against the illusion that incoherence is the product of some kind of a mechanical deficiency in the system. This exists, but it is only a small part of what we are discussing. The major part of it has to do with well known established differences of interest between sexes and so on, and this is the problem.
Mr Mulder mentioned that no farmer will start producing anything if the price is too low. This is true in our part of the world, but our partners and beneficiaries in Africa have a slightly different perspective. They farm, not just for a living, but in order to live, and this makes a difference. Subsistence farming is not based on price calculations, it is based on the hope of rain in the next season. This does not apply to all farming in developing countries but to the poverty-focusing which we need to deliver better than so far. From that perspective, what I am saying here is of deep relevance.
Other issues have been mentioned: cattle-farming in Namibia, tomatoes and milk powder in the Caribbean. We should not be too masochistic. There is a limit to how useful that is. All these cases are characterised by the fact that they have been taken care of. The intervention prices have been regulated, and the problems we had with beef in Western Africa and in Namibia were actually solved by reducing the intervention support. These are real problems, but they have all been dealt with.
As regards the issue of cacao, chocolate: I repeat that the 5% has to do with creating a basis for a living in the neighbouring countries. What we are talking about here are the local nuts which are as important to the people collecting them and making a living out of them in Burkina Faso as coconuts for farmers in Ghana. This is not a clear case of incoherence, it is more a case of a competition between suppliers.
What was mentioned concerning sugar in the Caribbean is more complicated. In the Overseas Countries and Territories Framework the accumulation of some of these trade aspects represents a complicated problem, but it may be that what we are talking about here has more to do with promoting the interests of some European companies than with generating income in the Caribbean. In any case, this is a matter which we are currently dealing with.
I am committed to try to create a balance in all these issues and I would mention the achievement of the trade development and cooperation agreement with South Africa. In all modesty, I would claim that this is something that documents that the Commission is willing to walk or fly the extra mile in order to ensure coherence between the perspective of development cooperation and the perspective of trade interests. We certainly have done our share to solve that problem, and I sincerely hope that we now will have a soft landing and a peaceful implementation in the forthcoming years of that agreement.
Finally, I thank you again for this debate. We will come back again with material on these issues, because these problems, in one way or another, are here to stay, simply because development cooperation represents basically doing something in the world that is different from taking care of traditionally-defined trade interests, etc. We have to reconcile those different approaches."@en1
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