Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-05-16-Speech-4-140"
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"en.20020516.5.4-140"2
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"Mr President, in the parliamentary tradition from which I come, we were not confined to minutes, we were very often asked at a short notice to run down to the chamber and talk for an hour or so, on every sort of insignificant subject. Here we have a different situation.
I was looking at some figures a few days ago. One hundred and twenty years ago there were 1.6 billion people in the world. Europe was one quarter of the entire world. Today there are 6.5 billion people in the world and Europe makes up only 9% of it. We are becoming a smaller component of the entire world. There is the risk that we could become irrelevant. If there is any thing we should do while we still have power and influence in the world, while we still have riches beyond the dreams of the vast majority of people who live on this earth; if there is any objective we could set ourselves which would be a historic achievement for a united Europe, it is to help along the less fortunate peoples of the world. While every individual State in this Union insists on going its own way and designing its own policies for foreign aid, we will not have the political influence, or the material effect on the wellbeing of the people to whom we extend aid.
Pooling our resources is an ideal proposal on the part of this House. We do not necessarily have to administer it all from Brussels. We can tap into the expertise of the various nations in the various regions of the world. We can distribute responsibility around the various Member States, but we must have a coordinated policy. We must not be competing with each other and we must not be dependent on the United States – or any other country which makes a far lesser effort than we do – to design the policies to which we will contribute.
Mr President, this is a subject we could fruitfully discuss for a long time yet. I should like to thank you for giving me the opportunity at least to stretch my thoughts a little bit further than I have ever been allowed to do in this House before.
I am happy that I am able to contribute on this subject because, while I am not a member of the relevant committee, nevertheless, it is a subject that I have thought about.
This morning when we were discussing the Lamassoure report on the competences of the European Union and defining the competences, I thought that we should from time to time re-examine the various competences of the Union. Perhaps we have given ourselves excessive competences over the years and taken on excessive responsibilities in areas where it was not all that fruitful and, indeed, could be an irritant to the citizens of the Union.
However, I have often thought that development cooperation is one area in which we could improve our cooperation. I should have said that I want to congratulate Mr Miranda on his report. His explanatory memorandum sets out what exactly we are doing and, in his motion for resolution, he has drawn up a strategy for more effective policy cooperation between ourselves and the United Nations.
There is point at which we have to arrive before that cooperation can really become effective. In the European Union we devote something like 0.3% of our resources to development cooperation as a whole. As the previous speaker pointed out the ideal is approximately 0.7%. I think only Sweden and Denmark have exceeded that, and the average European State produces something like 0.3%, so we have arrived at half the ideal objective.
Within the European budget itself, we produced something like EUR 4.6 billion in this year's draft budget. This seems like a very small amount of money, but we have the experience of being unable to dispense the money which we provided for many reasons. Nevertheless if there is one objective we should set ourselves in this area, it is to use our economic trading strength and our economic resources for the betterment of the Third World.
If we look at what we are discussing here, the problems we have in the Union today, the rise of the Right or whatever it may be, the slowness of economic growth, the unemployment which we have in parts of the European Union, we find that these are not serious problems at all. And we should not hesitate to tell our people who live in Western Europe today, that they have better lives than any previous generation anywhere.
What is our responsibility as a result? The greatest responsibility we have as a European Union – and this was mentioned by the leader of my party, Mr Bruton, when he addressed this Parliament as President-in-Office – is to extend our good fortune to less fortunate peoples throughout the world. If we could develop a single policy, if we could pool our resources and if we could achieve that target of 0.7%, we would have something like EUR 70 billion to dispense throughout the world.
In dispensing that money, we could offer to the children of many Third World countries something like the hope that we can give to our own children, something like the life expectancy and opportunities for education. We could revolutionise the world. We should not forget that."@en1
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