Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-01-17-Speech-1-100-000"
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"en.20110117.14.1-100-000"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would like, at this early stage, to express my thanks to all my fellow Members for the work that we have carried out together on this issue, which has enabled all the political groups in this Parliament to reach a common position and has allowed them to table an oral question and to draw up a resolution to accompany the voluntary partnership agreements.
As I was saying just now, however, a number of questions and requests remain. Commissioner, are you ready to come, for example, every six months, or six months after the signing of an agreement, to update us on the implementation of the agreement? I ask because it is clear that the negotiation and the implementation of the agreement may be of a very different quality. We would therefore like you to come and tell us if the parties concerned, in particular, the members of civil society, continue to be involved in its implementation. In countries in which it is still not easy to complain, particularly when corruption exists, have complaint mechanisms been provided for – in particular, independent ones – so that these members of civil society can complain about poor implementation and report that they are no longer being listened to? In the same way, we would like you to regularly report on the impacts of the implementation of these agreements, so that you can tell us where we have got to with them, both in terms of the overall consistency of the Commission’s actions on forests, and in terms of their specific implementation on the issue of the legality of timber.
Lastly, a final point: you claim that there is no budget in these agreements. Yet we will obviously need budgets to support these policies, so can you clarify the budgetary issue in relation to these voluntary partnership agreements?
The subject is an important one. As you all know, the forest is receding. Every two seconds, across the world, the equivalent of a football pitch is destroyed; within a year, an area the size of Greece is deforested. Clearly, this is a tragic situation. It is tragic from the point of view of diversity: a few thousand plant and animal species are threatened, and the forests which are most affected – tropical forests – contain half of the world’s biodiversity. It is obviously tragic, too, from the point of view of climate change: deforestation is responsible for 20% of greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, deforestation puts some hundreds of millions of people in danger – people who either live in the forests or live off them.
Forest exploitation and the forestry industry are among the principal causes of deforestation, particularly in the area on which we are focusing today: the Congo basin. It is estimated that 20 to 40% of the timber felled and exchanged in the world is illegal timber. The issue that we are raising today is therefore obviously a crucial one.
These voluntary partnership agreements have been approved in the context of the approval procedure within the Committee on International Trade. Thanks to the Treaty of Lisbon, this procedure allows the European Parliament to express its view. At the same time, however, it can only say yes or no. Hence, this debate is extremely important because it allows us to go into more detail, and it allows you, Commissioner, as a representative of the Commission, to respond to the questions that Parliament is putting to you.
These agreements are important; they allow us to ensure the traceability of timber. They also put in place independent verification procedures, and supplement forest policies and governance in the countries concerned. Today, we are talking about the Republic of the Congo and Cameroon.
However, I would like to make an initial point before going into these agreements and Parliament’s questions: we really must differentiate between legal timber and sustainable timber. Obviously, we are dealing with the legality of timber here, but legal timber does not necessarily mean sustainable forest exploitation.
Therefore, the first general question that I would ask the Commission is: how will the Commission act to ensure overall consistency on the issue of forests – 2011 is the International Year of Forests – while taking account of what was said in Nagoya and what was decided in Cancún, in particular, on the REDD+ mechanism, and taking account too of the trade agreements that have been negotiated, which are sometimes responsible for deforestation through liberalising trade in timber?
Next, we are still waiting for an answer from the European Commission on the question of biofuels and indirect changes in land use. As you know, Parliament has asked you to integrate these issues into the criteria for evaluating the sustainability of biofuels.
More specifically, concerning the voluntary partnership agreements, there are many positive elements: we greatly appreciated the negotiation efforts and, in particular, the involvement of members of civil society in Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo. We know that it is not easy and, from this point of view, these voluntary partnership agreements seemed to be a success."@en1
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