Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-02-17-Speech-4-216"
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"en.20000217.11.4-216"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, before I explain to you the position of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities, I would like to share with you three basic factors which, in my opinion, determine the present and future of European tourism in an international environment.
In Europe today, the tourism market contributes 5.5% of the gross national product and occupies a rather significant proportion of the workforce, approximately 6%. Those figures are incomparably higher for some countries. To grasp the importance of tourism for some parts of Europe, it is worth pointing out that in my own country, Greece, a country that attracts tourists, over the past four decades, during which the farming population has clearly aged and the population is over-concentrated in the major urban centres, the only areas which have retained populations of low average age or to which young people have returned are ones where tourism has developed. It is therefore clear that besides being a matter of general economic interest for Europe, tourism is a priority for the economic and social participation of the European Union’s regions.
Another factor is that the world market is growing explosively. The forecast is for ten billion tourists in 2010, but unfortunately for Europe there is a reverse trend. Europe’s share of the increase is falling drastically each year to the benefit of Asia, the Far East and America. You see, the world tourism market is influenced every day and directly by the liberalisation of transport, its reduced cost, and competition from new centres of tourism outside Europe.
Furthermore, 90% of businesses active in tourism are small or medium-sized, the very enterprises which form the living cells of our social and economic tissue, which are called upon to tackle the new obstacles and respond positively to the challenges of this global development. As the rapporteur said, this becomes particularly important when tourism is appreciated as a unitary productive system because of its ability to absorb large quantities of agricultural and industrial products, services and transport and to create a significant amount of added value. Here, then, I want to point out that international competition is tough and, if we are to overcome it positively, we must together envision and share a long-term strategy.
We must take very serious note of the need to upgrade the human resources engaged in tourism, so that tourism will be able to respond to the new technological challenges of our age. Today, nobody can ignore the fact that new digital technologies and systems, with Internet at the sharp end, mobile telephones and digital television, are bringing about radical changes in tourism as a whole and its respective structures and operational models.
The introduction of these new technologies is not a threat, but a new opportunity for our tourism because it offers the potential to provide new and innovative tourism products and services, which our tourism needs for an ever-lengthening tourism season, so that it can attract new customers and offer new and alternative forms of tourism. The new technologies also make it possible to open new markets in traditionally undervalued, non tourist areas, which could develop to become centres of tourism and attract substantial investments. To this new labour market there must be a response in the programmes of tourism schools and training programmes for company staff, including programmes for training the unemployed and their re-introduction to work.
The Committee on Women’s Rights paid particular attention to the issue of education, because according to official figures women account for 53% of those engaged in tourism services, and in parallel, they form a majority among the working people most easily affected by social and economic change. We must not forget that people working in tourism, especially women, encounter particular problems such as seasonal work, the need to renew contracts from one year to the next, social protection, lack of interest in continuing education, and reduced possibilities for development. We therefore ask the European Commission for special measures and to adopt the principle of equal opportunities in all tourism programmes and programmes for company development."@en1
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