Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-24-Speech-4-034"
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"en.20050224.4.4-034"2
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". – Mr President, I know that the Commission proposal is based on the best of good intentions and we support good intentions in the wake of the awful tsunami disaster. The trouble is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
20 000 vessels under 12 metres in size were destroyed by the tsunami in the affected countries. The Commission proposal is to send somewhere between 150 and 200 old, redundant vessels from the Mediterranean to help replace the 20 000 that were destroyed. It is, as the Commission has pointed out, no more than a symbolic gesture. It is nevertheless a very expensive symbolic gesture. The cost has been put at roughly EUR 9 million, with an additional EUR 400 000 to pay for transporting these vessels to the affected part of the Indian Ocean. Therefore we are talking about roughly EUR 47 000 per vessel with the costs to be met entirely by Member States.
I am reliably told from experts on the ground in the Indian Ocean that replacement vessels of exactly the size required can be built for EUR 2 000 each. For the same amount of money that we propose Member States should spend, we could build 3 500 fishing vessels. This would be a much more meaningful response.
The Commission's response to the amendments tabled by the various groups this morning would nevertheless suggest that the entire focus remains on this regulation to transfer vessels. I would suggest that the Commission refocuses and looks more closely at sending the things we can provide quickly, such as skilled experts, fishermen, carpenters, engineers, blacksmiths, boat builders, and the money to get people over there, as quickly as possible, to start rebuilding the kind of vessels they need to help replace the ones destroyed, instead of this nonsense of sending redundant, old, decrepit boats from the Mediterranean as a symbolic gesture."@en1
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