Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-09-Speech-2-393"
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"en.20040309.14.2-393"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, with regard to cotton and tobacco, I am bound to begin with a reference to these proposals by the Commission. A quick reaction to them would be that their objective is simply to ensure cultivation of both these crops is discontinued. The implication seems to be that the whole sector is expendable, along with the thousands of agricultural workers involved who reside in the most disadvantaged areas of southern Europe. In addition, the fact that in the Acts of Accession of Spain and Greece the Member States undertook to protect cotton production in those two countries has been completely disregarded.
Due to the penalties imposed pursuant to the 2001 cotton reform, the area under cotton in Spain has already suffered a 20% reduction. Further, it does not make sense to use cotton as a bargaining counter in WTO negotiations with third countries, as the Commission would like to do. After all, the European Union only accounts for 2.5% of world production. In addition, at global level exports are dominated by the United States, whereas the Union accounts for a mere 1.5%. This is not therefore a valid argument for reducing aid to cotton.
The further reform proposed amounts to an additional turn of the screw. The very survival of the crop is now under threat. The proposals for both cotton and tobacco will also cause serious large-scale damage to the entire socio-economic structure based on these crops. I can provide some specific instances drawn from Spain. The cotton picking and ginning industry represents 2 000 jobs. A further million jobs are directly linked to the sector. There are also 600 motorised harvesting machines used exclusively to gather cotton. They would all have to be scrapped. The situation is even more serious in the case of tobacco. Tobacco production involves up to 2 200 hours of work per hectare. I shall take the town of Talayuela in the Extremadura region of western Spain as an example. It is the leading producer of tobacco in Spain. Five thousand of its 10 000 inhabitants are employed in the tobacco industry. The livelihoods of over 20 000 families depend on tobacco in Extremadura alone.
It has to be said that the report adopted by the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development does substantially reduce the level of decoupling of aid proposed by the European Commission. It goes some way towards lifting the threat to the survival of the crops. It is vitally important for the House to support this report. That will send a clear message to the Council of Ministers, namely that Parliament is in favour of retaining these particular sectors that generate so many jobs in disadvantaged areas."@en1
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