Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-06-11-Speech-2-187"
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"en.20020611.9.2-187"2
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"Mr President, honourable Members, I wish first of all to express my thanks for an important debate and for constructive contributions which we shall of course bear in mind in our assessment of Bali and in our preparations for Johannesburg.
I want to thank you again for this important debate. In our preparations, we shall bear in mind everything that was said. I hope that we can count on the support of the European Parliament and that we shall also, hopefully, be able in as active a way as possible to employ the European Parliament’s delegation in the preparations.
Let us remind ourselves of the difficult position from which we are in actual fact starting, with, first of all, a quite different political climate than that which prevailed when the Rio Summit took place. Now, we are living in a much more polarised world. The fight against terrorism and the Axis of Evil has meant that the mood in the G77 Group naturally feels completely different.
Expectations of the Bali Summit were incredibly high. There was a very long wish-list covering every political area imaginable, and a poorly focused political agenda. Against that background, it is important not to ignore what has been achieved. We had a whole range of colleagues working very hard to ensure, in fact, that we could ‘clear the decks’ and agree on as much as possible in the action plan. There is also a great deal which has been achieved and on which we have reached decisions.
Nor must we forget the negotiations on climate change, which also collapsed at a certain phase but which could be resumed and made to yield a satisfactory result.
It is hardly surprising that the poor countries are complaining and demanding more of us now, for the experiences in Rio were alarming. The money needed to pay for the thousands of recommendations decided upon in Rio was never forthcoming. That is why there has been such poor implementation of all these recommendations. It is therefore very important that we now prepare ourselves for our role as bridge builders. I can imagine our having to play that role very actively in Johannesburg.
We need to take more practical measures in precisely those areas mentioned here in the debate. In spite of everything, none of this is news to the Commission or the Council. These are areas which we have already discussed and in which we have already done some preparation, but we need to see what progress we can make when it comes to grants, trade, access to our markets and development aid. We need to describe still more clearly the practical objectives we have put forward with regard, for example, to water and energy issues. Perhaps we need to supplement our descriptions with calculations of costs and to demonstrate how we are to achieve our objectives successfully.
There is naturally opposition from those who do not wish to go beyond the objectives of the millennium declaration and who do not want to draw up practical timetables, deadlines and practical objectives expressed, for example, in terms of years.
We need to ensure that we can preserve the status of environmental issues in the debate. We need to rescue the whole concept of ‘sustainable development’. I naturally appreciate how important it is to link it to trade and development issues and issues of funding, but it is also important to safeguard the whole idea of our being concerned here with a single whole. It is a question of seeing the whole picture, in which environmental, as well as economic and social, issues have their place.
What, finally, will happen if Johannesburg fails? These are not, of course, issues under which it will be possible to draw a line in Johannesburg. The objectives we draw up for the European Union are ones which, after Johannesburg too, we shall of course have to comply with and continue to work on. Possible failure there should not prevent us from finalising and implementing the plans we have jointly decided on."@en1
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