Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-15-Speech-4-019"
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"en.20070315.3.4-019"2
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"Mr President, so, we need another initiative do we? This time for island people. Actually, island people are by nature resourceful. They are all still there, but they need help where the EU has interfered.
Last year this Parliament approved the resumption of licences for EU fishing fleets to plunder the waters of Western Sahara. Unable to compete with the modern vessels of the EU, these people sought work elsewhere, and the Canary Islands began to experience the trauma of massive illegal immigration. Graphically displayed on TV, boatloads of West Africans were seen trying to make their way across the Atlantic, their misery compounded as dozens died when their inshore craft could not cope with the open sea. Once this EU-inspired exodus began, people from neighbouring countries followed suit, making it worse.
Malta faces the same problem of mass immigration. Of course it does: the EU’s high tariff barriers depress trade, with the poorer countries of northern and eastern Africa being hard hit, so off they go to try their luck in Europe using Malta as a staging post. Pouring aid into Malta is not the answer. It is the tariff barriers: bring those down, trade improves and most people in Africa will be able to make a living without moving home. If you persist with a closed shop of 27 EU countries when there is a whole world out there just waiting to engage in trade with Europe, then the problems of your own making will continue.
Do I see in the report that EU islands, especially in the outermost regions, might be used as sources of renewable energy? I suppose that means we intend to plant these ridiculous wind farms on them. Well, that is one way of driving the indigenous population away, and all for useless turbines producing insignificant amounts of power at unpredictable times, located on remote islands so as to ensure that much of their pitiful output is lost in transmission.
I notice that islands are said to be vulnerable to rising sea levels: another dimension of the hysterical, doom-laden warnings of the ‘global warmers’. It is not happening on the scale that has been claimed. And it is natural. It has happened before. The world experiences cycles of warming and cooling. In the Medieval warm period it was hotter than now, and for decades. There are enough records of these hotter events, such as certain crops growing where never before, but there are no records of islands disappearing beneath the waves.
It is about time we all calmed down and realised that minimal global warming is naturally occurring in a cycle that has no input from man. We should simply adapt as nature intended.
In conclusion, let us stop interfering. Leave successful islands alone. Where help is needed, for third world islands or otherwise, let trade be their aid. The EU’s protectionist attitude is no long-term help, it is just sticking plaster and that always peels off after a while."@en1
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