Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-13-Speech-1-163"
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"en.20061113.20.1-163"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, let me take this opportunity to once more express warm thanks to all my fellow Members from all the groups who have supported me in creating a framework worthy of this debate, which is of such great importance to this House and to Europe’s farmers.
If we want our contribution to future debates on the valuation of the agricultural budget to be taken at all seriously, then we should firmly and forthrightly reject this proposal. I hope that the Council’s response to the vote in this House will be to embark on a more in-depth discussion of the matters at issue. My colleagues in the committee, and I myself, are willing to join them in this, but the Council must make a move. It has to be said, though, that it probably does not entertain very high hopes at the present time.
You, Mr President, by your wise and astute decision, have ensured that Members from all groups will get the chance to speak, albeit at a rather later hour. Following a decision by the Council – which, as is so often the case with agriculture debates, is notably absent today – the Commission submitted a proposal according to which 20% of agricultural direct payments would be shifted from the first pillar of CAP to the second, from which they could be spent without mandatory co-funding.
That is a concession by the majority on the Council and, whether it wishes to or not, on the part of the Commission, as part of the budget compromise reached in December 2005. The Commissioner has confirmed as much. This House has already expressed strong misgivings about this in the interinstitutional agreement on the Financial Perspective. When I say that the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development firmly rejected this proposal, I mean that it did so with only three dissenting votes, and its rejection of the draft legislation was indeed unanimous.
This is not just about differences of opinion where specific policies are concerned; it is also about where Parliament, as an institution, should stand in the forthcoming debates on the reorientation of the Community budget. As part of the Budget compromise, all the institutions agreed that all the Community’s outgoings, among them the post-2013 agricultural expenditure in particular, should be subject to review, and that this House will play a full part in this process from an early stage.
Now, though, we see the Council adopting, through the back door, an extensive remodelling of agricultural funding, and this House has no option but to kill it off, for there was no prior consultation with us. Instead, the Council has decided to proceed with such an extensive reallocation of resources that there will be such limited scope for debate in 2008-2009 that serious discussion will scarcely be on the cards. This is something that we in this House cannot tolerate if we are to be taken seriously in future, and the proposal is, moreover, questionable in terms of financial policy.
What is worthy of note on the agricultural policy side is that there is no impact assessment accompanying the proposal. On the contrary, the impression is given that a short-term reduction of 20% in direct payments would not cause farmers any problems. Taken together with the cuts resulting from mandatory modulation and those generally expected after the accession of Bulgaria and Romania, what this means, for those Member States that want to apply this voluntary modulation, is a reduction in payments of something like one-third over against what they were in 2003. Far from supporting structural change in agriculture, that amounts to a flagrant structural violation that would put the viability of many thousands of farms in rural areas at risk. It is generally agreed that what our farmers need is the security to plan ahead.
In the absence of any impact assessment on the part of either the Council or the Commission, we caused evaluations to be carried out, and these confirm, not only that there will be massive distortion of competition and illegal discrimination against the farmers concerned, but also that modulation does nothing to serve the objects of the Community in rural areas, but rather jeopardises them to a considerable degree.
To date, the Council has offered no response whatever to the legitimate concerns of Europe’s farmers, and there has as yet been no discussion of the potential consequences. This sort of behaviour is not at all what we are used to in the European Union and is also quite obviously inappropriate. Since, moreover, the transferred Community funds are not to be spent in accordance with a strategy laid down at Community level, we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation in which the renationalisation of agriculture policy is being paid for entirely from Community funds, particularly when one considers the way the Council is thinking ahead; I would ask you to take a look and see what happens at the next meeting on 14 November, this very week.
We all want to strengthen rural areas. We have put forward proposals for solutions to their financial problems that are worthy of discussion; the Böge report is just one of them. The Council, though, preferred not to give these proposals any closer attention, so let us not reach out a hand to help it after all that we have done already. If there has to be a paradigm shift in agriculture policy, then let that happen only after a transparent and open debate in which Parliament, too, can have a decisive part to play, for this proposal is wide of the mark – legally, in terms of its substance, and as policy – and solves none of the problems that rural areas have."@en1
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