Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-21-Speech-1-113"
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"en.20070521.17.1-113"2
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".
Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, we have come to the end of a particularly long journey, and, in order to conclude this conciliation on the financial instrument for the environment (Life+), I should like first of all to thank my fellow shadow rapporteurs: Mrs Gutiérrez-Cortines, Mrs Ries and Mrs Lienemann. I believe that, without them, the conciliation could not have been brought to a successful conclusion because, I must point out, if we have obtained entirely positive results, it is because we defended a strong position within the European Parliament and because, together, we stood up, I would say, to the Commission and to the Council on several points.
I should like also to thank Parliament's services and the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety. I am grateful also to the Commission and to Commissioner Dimas, in particular. I wish him a speedy recovery. I know that he cannot be with us this evening, but I thank him, as well as his services, for having helped us to carry this conciliation through to a successful conclusion. I should like, finally, to thank the Council, even though it is not present this evening. I believe that we can thank Mr Gabriel and the Council representatives who helped make a success of the conciliation because I recall that, on the evening of the conciliation, we had the impression at times that facing us were ministers for the budget rather than ministers for the environment. Indeed, as MEPs, we were defending a solid budget for the ministers of the environment, while they were giving the impression that they did not really want it. To conclude the list of thanks, I should like to thank Mrs Kratsa-Tsagaropoulou, who chaired Parliament's delegation at the conciliation, together with the chairman of our Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, Mr Ouzký.
With your permission, I shall remind you of one or two things. We are at the stage of third reading and, therefore, of conciliation. I would remind you that the work on this Life+ report began at the same time as the examination of the financial perspective, since we felt that a Life+ budget – which comes under the financial package for the environment for the next seven years – could not be established outside the financial perspective. That is why we forced the committee responsible for the financial perspective and Mr Böge in particular, since we felt that the environment budget for the next seven years was nothing but a meagre budget and that it needed to be increased. We wanted to increase it to the figure mooted by the Commission. Thus, by integrating, for example, the management of Natura 2000, we should have increased the Life+ budget by EUR 21 billion. We knew full well that that was an absolutely enormous sum and that the resources did not allow it, but we had banked on that strategy in order to show that, in actual fact, there was no budgetary heading specifically devoted to Natura 2000 in the EU budget. That was our strategy at first reading, and it won us virtually unanimous support.
Yet, of course, at the stage of the common position, we were not really heard. The rapporteur for the budget, Mr Böge, did us a good turn by agreeing to grant EUR 100 million. One hundred million euros for Life+ is a derisory sum given the needs that we have, given the needs that we make so much of when faced with our fellow citizens: the fight against climate change, the fight against the loss of biodiversity, the decontamination of our soil, the purification of our rivers, the fight to save our groundwater, and so on. I shall stop there.
The fact remains that those EUR 100 million were of course welcome, because we take everything that there is to take, but to our great surprise – and this is what made us angry – of the EUR 100 million that had been allocated to us, EUR 50 million had disappeared, had been allocated to the general budget. That made us very angry, but what made us angrier still was the fact that the sharing out of budget-related management activities was totally unacceptable to us, as the European Parliament.
We believed, and still believe, that environmental protection must be managed at European level: this is a policy that is a positive point for the European Parliament, a positive policy, with which our fellow citizens identify. This policy therefore needed to remain at European level, and the strategy implemented by the Council and the Commission at second reading allocated 80% of the management of the budget to the Member States. We were unable to accept this kind of re-nationalisation of European policies.
That is why our aim was to ensure that the Council agreed to keep the management of the environment budget in the hands of the Commission. I believe that we have been truly successful since, during conciliation, the Council did in fact agree to several things: that the management of the EU budget be centralised, that is to say, that it be managed at European level; that the Commission double its resources for the management of the environment, that is to say, that there be an increase from 1% to 2%; that 50% of the budget be allocated to biodiversity and to environmental protection; and, finally, that it be possible for the 2007 budget to be applied this year and for NGOs to obtain financial resources starting this year.
I therefore believe that we have done some very good work, Madam President, and, once again, I am grateful to everyone, to the Council and to the Commission, for having been able to conclude this conciliation, and for having done so, I might add, along the lines proposed by Parliament, for the good of our fellow citizens, because we are here to represent our fellow citizens."@en1
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