Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-05-18-Speech-4-010"
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, I should like to begin by expressing my gratitude for the positive contributions of many Members from the various political groups, and the helpful support of members of the Committee on Agriculture who worked with me on this report.
I hope that the Commission and the Council will give due attention to these proposals, taking account of the urgent nature of the circumstances.
The huge scale of some disasters in recent years, and last year in particular, has led Parliament to give due consideration to this issue. Three committees have been set up to provide solutions, from their particular perspective, for preventing disasters or for offsetting the impact thereof when it is not possible to prevent them.
I have worked on this report for some six or seven months and, having spent that time listening to many MEPs, specialists, economic agents, local, regional and national authorities and the communities affected, I found the experience highly rewarding. I was also able to go to the six worst affected Member States last year, namely Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, France and Italy. I was delighted with the welcome accorded to us everywhere we went and I have no doubt that in bringing Parliament closer to the citizens, we performed useful work for our institution.
I also worked hard to establish as broad a consensus as possible on the proposals that I shall present to you. I was able, in fact, to accept all the amendments that were tabled – 53 out of 60 – and the few exceptions were for formal reasons of redundancy or duplication and not because of their content.
The report before us is based on three main ideas. Firstly, agriculture and forestry are activities that are closely bound up with the natural world and are therefore at the mercy of climatic phenomena, and exposed to bio-sanitary risks resulting from air, water and ground pollution and from increasing globalisation. Secondly, the exodus from the countryside is one of the main causes of the increase in forest fires in southern Europe, especially acute during times of drought, as the year 2005 sadly proved. The EU’s budgetary limits must, however, be respected. The proposals therefore submitted fall within the financial perspective that we adopted yesterday.
The main thrust of my proposal is therefore to optimise the existing political instruments, for example the Solidarity Fund, the European Agriculture and Rural Development Funds, the Veterinary Fund, regional policy instruments, the future Life+ Regulation, by improving them and adapting them within the context of genuine disaster and risk management systems. In the case of the latter, this will be done by communitarising a system of insurance and reinsurance to be cofinanced by the farmers, the Member States and the EU via the EAFRD.
The Solidarity Fund will need to be broader in scope and more flexible, to cover disasters that unfold over time, such as drought, which is currently not included. In order to make it more effective, a flexibility clause should be attached to it to ensure the provision of adequate financial resources when they are needed, from common agricultural policy headings that currently go unused.
The funding priority of EAFRD, on the other hand, should be actions aimed at the forestation and reforestation of burnt areas, along with all possible prevention measures, such as upkeep of forests, the use of biomass to produce energy, the training of economic agents involved and the supply of information to them, and awareness raising on such problems, all made possible with greater cofinancing from national rural development programmes.
This is just a brief summary of a few points, which illustrate the importance of Parliament addressing the agricultural aspect of such disasters, and I hope that Parliament will lend its fullest possible support."@en1
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