Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-23-Speech-2-414"
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"en.20080923.40.2-414"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, timber is a valuable building material; it is healthy, practical, perhaps a bit lacking in fire resistance, but increasingly sought-after. In brief, it is a sought-after and attractive commodity, and often a country’s main export product. Tropical wood – that is, wood that is restricted to a narrow geographic band – is even more attractive and is the subject of trade that is often illegal and destructive to forests and to the entire ecosystem.
We are, then, faced with a dilemma: on the one hand we need timber, we have a need for building materials, while on the other hand we need to protect the tropical forests. If exploitation is no longer under good and rational control, this will end not only in environmental disaster, but also in demographic disaster. Without forests there will be no other vegetation, no animals and no people there. International agreements are needed, but an awareness of rational timber management probably takes priority here. If such rationality does not prevail, we will destroy an important element of the irreplaceable natural world. We will be destroyers instead of wise managers.
To sum up, then, I support the extension of the agreement (bearing in mind the possibility of continuing to improve it), which, albeit only partially, regulates free and just – or ‘fair’ – trade in such timber and may at the same time be a model for the exploitation of timber from other regions – from Siberia, Commissioner, about which we hear so little these days, from the Amazon, about which we hear a little more, and from other vulnerable regions of the world."@en1
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