Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-05-16-Speech-2-045"
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"en.20060516.5.2-045"2
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".
Mr President, Mr Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen, let me start by saying that the Greens will, of course, support this programme, even if there is too little money for it; that must be made clear. It was because we hoped that one result of the negotiations might yet be the extension of the programme that we did not immediately give our assent to everything. The hope may have been there, but it was, unfortunately, not fulfilled.
I have to say quite frankly that the halving of the figures originally proposed was, in my view, a setback, but the programme itself has come out of the evaluation in a positive light, and it is for that reason that we will – as we must – support it. The fact is that Marco Polo, as a programme, had the potential to – and indeed does – play a core role in addressing the problems to which transport gives rise, and would not only actively help improve modal shift, but also boost intermodal transport, for, this time, the focus is on inland waterways and on short-distance sea transport – which I will not call ‘motorways of the sea’, since that always strikes me as a rather peculiar term – and we have had to accept that certain switches from one mode of transport to another are made impossible by the absence of key points and interconnection points between them. I regard intervention in this area as crucial and important.
The programme would also send out a message to the general population, who suffer from the adverse effects of goods transport by road, such as emissions, noise, and the other hazards to health and the environment that people talk about, which they regard as tragic and which they wish to reduce. It is for that reason that this programme is so important to me right now. It has, unfortunately, appeared to us from some interventions by representatives of the Commission that consideration is being given, in the course of the mid-term review of the White Paper, to regarding the switching of transport to environmentally friendly modes of transport as no longer an objective of the European Union, and that I would regard as absolutely the wrong thing to do.
If we regard the protection of the environment and public health as things to be aimed at, then what is needed is not just a programme costing EUR 400 million, but rather the sort of focused determination that intervenes and says clearly that transport cannot simply be allowed to trundle along as it is doing, but must be guided – which it now is being, albeit in the wrong direction. If the mid-term review really does entail the abandonment of the ‘modal shift’ change, we will lose credibility in the eyes of the public. Merely giving way to the interventions of the most powerful lobbyists and forgetting the interests of the people who live along roads constitutes an abandonment of policymaking; such a thing is no longer worthy of the name, for it amounts to nothing more than allowing the economic interests of a small economic sector to prevail."@en1
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