Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-25-Speech-3-173"
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"en.20001025.6.3-173"2
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"The rather bureaucratic term ‘outermost regions’ encompasses women and men from New Caledonia, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Reunion, Mayotte, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna and all our territories in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, which form a bridge of intelligence, solidarity and beauty between Europe and other continents and other civilisations.
The Europe of Brussels, with its mania for levelling out and standardising, has acted unfairly and even stupidly towards our compatriots who live according to European values thousands of kilometres away from Paris, Madrid or Lisbon. The technocrats, the European judges, wanted to abolish the ‘dock dues’, which provide resources for our municipalities in the French overseas departments and, in particular, protect our traditional workforce. From this distance, Brussels has put our Martinique rums, our rice and our tropical fruits at risk. Most especially, this has resulted in the planned destruction of our banana industry, in Guadeloupe, Martinique, Madeira and the Canaries.
The European Commission has kow-towed to the banana multinationals. Every year, EUR 2 billion in customs duties are given away to Chiquita and Del Monte.
How then can we refuse to give our remote departments and territories the funding they need to make up for the costs involved in transportation, dealing with cyclones and investing in universities or hospitals?
When our regions, in the West Indies for example, or the Pacific, are tax havens used by the American multinationals, from Kodak to Microsoft, Boeing or Cargill, for massive tax-fraud exports, then the right to geographically equal competition, together with the right of all Europeans to equality, requires that we devote part of the European budget, in which taxes make up 17% of revenue, to developing the economic, social and cultural life of our compatriots who live in regions that may well be outermost in terms of geography but are central in terms of civilisation."@en1
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