Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-04-20-Speech-2-122"
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"en.20100420.5.2-122"2
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"Mr President, with your permission, I shall leave a bit of time for Mr Piebalgs to take on some of the long-term reconstruction questions.
This is not in my area but I have to pick it up as a former World Bank employee. I certainly agree with you that what the World Bank is proposing about this coordination in the multi-donor trust fund, but also as an institutional project management approach, is something that we need to take to heart and follow.
This has been very useful and very encouraging for us. Before I turn to the questions, let me join Mr Guerrero Salom in expressing sympathy to the families of the four Spanish soldiers who died, and also all those who lost their lives during the disaster and now in the recovery efforts in Haiti.
I would like to start with the bigger policy issue, on the EU improving its response capabilities. I was very pleased to see my colleague, Commissioner Barnier, in the room because of the effort he has put into this topic. On 26 April, we will have a chance in the Development Committee to discuss in more detail the work programme, which includes, for 2010, strengthening the response capacity and a communication on this topic.
I can assure you that this is a very high priority for our team. We will work very closely with Member States and with Parliament to come up with a solution that improves our capacity to respond to disasters, and there is a very simple logic behind it. At a time when the intensity and frequency of disasters are increasing and the budgets of our countries are going to be tight for years to come, there is no other way but to strengthen European coordination and to build an asset base that can be deployed effectively in terms of impact, cost and results. I can tell you that tomorrow, we are going to our first country visit on this topic. This is going to be a very high priority for our team in the coming months.
Let me turn to four questions that have been posed.
The first is on the question of combining a response to immediate priorities with long-term reconstruction and our staying power. This is really important because if we move too quickly to reconstruction, away from support for people in need, we risk a very serious tragedy. We had to deal with this in the issue of food delivery where the government of Haiti suggested that we shift away from food provision to only cash-for-work and food-for-work, which is highly desirable but cannot be done everywhere at the same time. This is something we are watching very closely.
Broadly, on the issue of food security, our new policy in the European Union is very progressive because it emphasises all other things equally, encouraging local purchase of food for humanitarian aid whenever it is possible to get it locally. We have made this topic subject to a discussion in a morning session in New York where we invited NGOs, Haitian as well as international NGOs, and I was very proud that it was the European NGOs that put these issues of agricultural security for Haiti and high agricultural return in productivity for the discussion in Haiti.
I want to address the issue of shelter. It is not at all a trivial issue because people actually do not want to move from where they are now. They do not want to move for a variety of reasons. One, even if their houses are safe, they are afraid to go back because of the trauma they experienced. Two, because they moved as whole neighbourhoods and they are scared of losing the social fabric that keeps them together, so it is not just bad policy or lack of desire; it is also the social phenomenon that follows a disaster of this nature that makes it not so easy to get people to move from flood-prone areas to safer ground. But we are addressing this as a priority.
Let me finish with the question of long-term sustainability. It is governance sustainability, it is also ecological sustainability. I had the dubious privilege to fly over Haiti and Chile, within a couple of weeks of each other. In Haiti, an ecologically destroyed island, of course it had implications for the scale of this destruction. In Chile, the government has implemented for decades a reafforestation programme stabilising the soil and, as a result, creating a better environment, which is obviously very helpful for people. We are thinking in the long term when we think of Chile."@en1
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