Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-05-13-Speech-1-078"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20020513.7.1-078"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, every year, around 200 million Europeans leave their place of normal residence to become tourists for a while, usually in other countries of the Union. As Mrs Torres Marques rightly states, Europe remains the main tourist destination for third countries, despite facing increasingly stiff competition.
Nevertheless, the Treaties provide no specific legal base for a Community policy on tourism, despite the fact that our Parliament has been calling for such a policy for a considerable amount of time in order to give the Community major scope for intervention whilst respecting the principle of subsidiarity. Since the Treaties do not provide for such a measure, the European Union must contribute to improving and encouraging cooperation in this sector in order to harness the enormous potential of tourism.
I welcome the efforts of the Commission, whose communication proposes an operational framework for European tourism as well as a range of measures and actions to be implemented by the various players involved. The Commission highlights the complexity of this sector due to its diversity and its wide-ranging nature, which gives it little visibility at political level, a situation that does not properly reflect its true economic and social importance. The Commission has, however, shown a lack of ambition: its proposal does not raise hopes that a real boost will be forthcoming because it fails to envisage a genuine strategic framework for monitoring an industry with enormous potential but which is experiencing little growth.
I agree with all of the recommendations contained in Mrs Torres Marques’s excellent report, not least making tourism an issue to be considered by the Convention on the future of Europe and I do not think that a joint action runs counter to national actions to promote tourism. Employment in the tourism industry is often highly seasonal and precarious, which is an obstacle to achieving sustainable development in this field. I therefore call on the Commission to draw up at the earliest opportunity proposals to include the restaurant sector, and possibly other as yet ineligible tourist services, on the list of sectors of activity entitled to a permanent reduction in the VAT rate, so as to boost employment and modernisation in the industries concerned and better equip European tourism to deal with international competition.
Furthermore, know-how in the field of management and technology must be acquired and spread in order to encourage new methods of production and to promote a form of tourism that responds as well as possible to changes in the market. Tourism is also a crucial element for the economic development of certain regions of the Union whose development is lagging behind, and for the outermost regions in particular, the tourist industry is the leading source of income and contributes significantly to their efforts to ensure the convergence of their economies towards the Community’s average rate of development. Tourism whose development is handled with prudence over the long term must provide local economies with a source of sustainable income and employment and must also contribute towards safeguarding and enhancing the landscape, cultural, historical and environmental features of the regions of the Union.
Lastly, I wish to stress the crucial role that the European Union must play in encouraging new forms of tourism in new places, not least by helping continental Europeans to discover the wonders of Europe’s outermost destinations."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples