Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-12-14-Speech-3-301"
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"en.20051214.20.3-301"2
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".
Mr President, on this occasion I would like to offer very genuine and heartfelt congratulations to the rapporteur and thank her for her support for the ALDE amendments. These largely related to the issue of international fisheries agreements. I have to say, Commissioner, I was rather disappointed by your response to them.
We do not deny the importance of these agreements, but we believe that if we are expending European taxpayers’ money, whether for targeted assistance or in relation to fishing rights, we should know exactly how this money is being expended. Amendment 16 in particular was crafted very carefully to get over the international legal difficulties in that respect.
We are talking about fisheries partnership agreements with obligations on both sides. If we do not have this information, if we cannot evaluate what is going on, how can we decide whether we should renew them when the time comes? There are serious concerns about what is going on in some third-country waters. Only last week, the Environmental Justice Foundation published a report on illegal fishing in Guinea and its links to the European Union. A telling statistic cited in the report is that Guinea is losing over 34 000 tonnes of fish every year to illegal fishing, worth an estimated USD 110 million. The EU fleet is only one of several implicated in this, but it is implicated all the same.
It seems to me that this one example demonstrates why it is crucial that care is taken with regard to the EU’s fishing agreements, ensuring that the Union is helping to improve governance in third-country waters, but also addressing the urgent need on all sides to step up the quality of monitoring and enforcement. Several of the amendments in this report would help the Union move towards more responsible fishing agreements.
On a slightly different topic, the ALDE Group welcomes Amendment 11 proposing that funding for the operating costs of regional advisory councils should not be restricted to the first five years. As the Commissioner has said, they are the cornerstone of the governance of the revised common fisheries policy."@en1
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