Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-04-19-Speech-1-222"
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"en.20100419.24.1-222"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, in this report, we are concerned with a communication from the Commission regarding agriculture in areas with natural handicaps.
In summary, I would like to say – and I believe that the report also reflects this opinion – that the current communication from the Commission still requires further refinement and that, before it is implemented, it needs to be given very careful consideration, because it will have far-reaching consequences for the farmers affected.
Finally, I would like to offer my sincere thanks to my fellow Members here in Parliament and also to the Commission staff who, over the last few months, have helped to put together this report.
Specifically, it is about delimiting disadvantaged areas and, in particular, about finding new ways of delimiting them. They are currently defined on the basis of mainly or exclusively national criteria. There are over 100 of these criteria, and they are completely different in the different Member States of our Union.
This does not ensure uniformity, a state of affairs that the Court of Auditors has criticised on a number of occasions. In its communication, the Commission is now proposing a new way of delimiting these areas using eight different criteria, which are intended to lead to a complete re-definition of these areas.
Parliament does not know what impact these criteria will have because the area simulations that the Commission asked for from the Member States were not available when we were working on this report, nor did we get to look at these simulations.
I would like to summarise what we are now proposing in this report. We think that, in principle, a uniform method of delimitation is sensible and possibly also necessary to ensure uniformity within the European Union. We also believe that the compensatory allowance – which you could say is the most important result of this delimiting process, as this is primarily carried out so that these areas can receive compensatory payments – is an extremely important element of agricultural policy and, above all, makes agriculture possible where it would otherwise be very difficult, in other words, in disadvantaged areas, especially in mountainous areas.
However, we are unable to carry out an assessment of the quality of these criteria, that is to say, whether or not these criteria now work, because we currently have no access to any area simulations. There are nonetheless very specific doubts as to whether the proposed criteria will be sufficiently precise.
It also still needs to be clarified whether the criteria that the Commission is now proposing should actually be dealt with in this way, in other words separately, criterion by criterion, or whether, under certain circumstances, an accumulation of these criteria needs to be taken into account. The handicap is often associated with several factors at the same time and it seems perfectly sensible to us to consider whether it would not be absolutely essential to take an accumulation of these criteria into account.
We also need to consider whether the principle of subsidiarity should be taken into account in this regard, in other words, whether, in this case too, it would be necessary for us to draw up a rough framework using the new criteria and then give the Member States and the regions the opportunity to fine tune it.
Finally, I believe that it is essential to also consider having transitional periods. This delimitation will result in some areas being removed from the delimited areas and these areas need a sufficiently long transitional period."@en1
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