Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-10-Speech-3-316"
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"en.20020410.10.3-316"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I unequivocally welcome the favourable opinion the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development has on Mrs Ayuso González' report. Rejection of the Commission proposal for a Common Market Organisation for agricultural alcohol is the only sensible response that the committee could have delivered.
I would like to use this opportunity to briefly recapitulate on why this is the case. The Commission had not been tasked with the setting up of a new market organisation and with using it to intervene in a healthy and intact market. Despite that, and with great zeal, it drew up a proposal whose substantial loopholes are evident even on first sight.
Thus, synthetic alcohol is left completely out of the equation, even though it now has a 50% share of use in the EU and is, above all, indispensable in fields as important as the cosmetics, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. This gives rise to the danger that distortions in competition may result to the detriment of the market for agricultural alcohol.
A new market organisation is also to be rejected in view of the EU's enlargement, and of the fact that very large quantities of agricultural alcohol are produced in many candidate countries. We cannot, shortly before the accession of these countries, make a regulation that takes no account of their circumstances and thus would not sufficiently prepare their existing markets.
A further significant point of criticism lies in the Commission proposal's manifest complete disregard for the cultural and economic importance of agricultural alcohol. Alcohol, when produced on an agricultural basis, originates as a natural product in small and medium-sized enterprises mainly situated in rural areas, and makes a substantial contribution to preserving traditional cultural landscapes. Mrs Jeggle has pointed this out.
Its production is also of great significance from an ecological point of view, and the by-products are, indeed, still used as agricultural feedingstuffs. Rural areas characterised by fruit meadows would find themselves in a serious crisis situation if the Commission's plans were implemented. It is easy to see that not only the regions shaped by private business and farming would suffer as a result of this, but that there would also be massive loss of jobs.
The Commission cannot and must not overlook this, and so I find it utterly incomprehensible that they are disregarding the adverse consequences for agriculture and above all for small and medium-sized enterprises in this way. The Commission paper before us is thus, in my opinion, a futile approach to shaping the market in alcohol. Any new regulation must cover all types of alcohol. There cannot and must not be partial solutions that bring more imbalances in their train.
Quite apart from that, it makes sense not to provide a transition period for the current national aid arrangements, but rather to integrate these into the overall framework in a rational way."@en1
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