Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-19-Speech-2-282"
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"en.20070619.41.2-282"2
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"Mr President, I was quite touched by what the previous speaker said. I therefore find it rather difficult to talk, but I shall try to stick to what I intended to say.
When I was at school, I learned that people in Africa were starving because they had cut down the trees in the places where they lived so that nothing could grow there any longer. In a way they had, then, more or less brought the situation on themselves. Now, there is more and more to indicate that it is in actual fact we in the rich world who, through our life-style and our substantial emissions of carbon dioxide and other climate-affecting gases, have caused climate change in sub-Saharan Africa, as a result of which the inhabitants of that region are unable to provide themselves with enough food and water. This undeniably makes us see world poverty in a different perspective. Our responsibility for eradicating poverty is that much greater if it is we ourselves who have caused it.
Mrs Kinnock has a special section on climate change in her report, emphasising our responsibility for ensuring that our carbon dioxide emissions do not affect the poorest people on earth. If we are to manage to do this, we need both drastically to reduce our emissions of climate-affecting gases and to support developing countries so that they might cope successfully with the huge adjustment that the world has to make.
What is at issue is everything from dealing with, for example, raised water levels to ensuring that developing countries that are able to produce renewable energy have the opportunity to do so and thus also have the opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty.
If the world is to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, we must concentrate more on these considerations and give higher priority to them. Nor, if we seriously want to reduce mortality due, for example, to HIV, AIDS and unsafe pregnancies, should we allow religious notions to stand in the way of people’s freedom of choice and their ability to protect themselves against life-threatening diseases and unwanted pregnancies. Reproductive rights, information concerning legal abortion and access to contraception are, and remain, necessary features of our work designed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. All other considerations are merely prejudices, and I am amazed to hear them expressed in this House. We should be more enlightened than that."@en1
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