Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-02-13-Speech-2-249"
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"en.20070213.19.2-249"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, since 22 July 1993, the date of the first draft reforms of the wine sector, we have been told that we need to grub up our vines, with figures to support it.
In 1993, for example, we were told that consumption in 2000 would fall to 115 million hectolitres, but in fact it was 127 million – the Commission was out by 12 million. We are also told that there is overproduction, but where? On the global market in potable alcohol. there was a shortage of 9 million hectolitres in 2002 and 11 million in 2003. And we know full well that the time has come for wine producers in China, in particular, where Chairman Mao said 'let the people drink wine'.
So what is lurking behind these reforms on free plantation, the addition of sugar, distillation, infusions of wood chippings, imports of grape must and, of course, grubbing up? In reality, the Commission is pursuing two aims with this grubbing up of 400 000 hectares, the most violent episode in the global history of wine, because we have to go back to the Emperor Domitian in 92 to find an equivalent: first of all, abandoning our exports of wine to the southern hemisphere by 2015, in exchange for its services market; and secondly for the pensioners of northern Europe to settle gradually in southern Europe. Europe therefore needs a land reserve, and that reserve can be found in the 400 000 hectares that will be grubbed up and replaced by houses – four million houses on four billion square metres, with a turnover of a thousand billion euro.
It is this, this land grabbing, that is the true tragedy, because wine is not just a common market organisation: it is more than agriculture, and even more than culture, despite the painters, the 275 poets of wine, and the structures of the 5 000 wine-producing villages of Europe – wine is the interface with the divine. At the wedding in Cana, Jesus' first miracle was to turn water not into whisky and coke, or into Nokia mobile phones, but into wine. Abandoning that, therefore, is not like abandoning New Zealand's sheep or Brazil's chickens – it is abandoning Europe's identity.
That, Commissioner, is why you must hold fast to wine, which the Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges called the deep patriarchal river that flows through the history of the world."@en1
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