Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-29-Speech-5-051"
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"en.19991029.4.5-051"2
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"Mr President, yesterday we were urged to approve the renewal of the EU agreement with Morocco to give Spain and Portugal fishing rights in Moroccan waters. Today we are being asked to review a similar agreement with Angola.
In my brief but eventful career as an MEP, and particularly after yesterday, I have noted a willingness of this Assembly which dares to call itself a “parliament” to act as a rubber stamp for the Commission and again I sense that this is our role. But if this Assembly is to begin to behave as a proper review body with any teeth it must begin to ask some fundamental questions about the whole principle behind these agreements.
Such evidence as we have about their operation indicates that these have been responsible for conservation disasters of the first magnitude. Effectively, an example of colonialist exploitation of the peoples of the Third World which should shame everyone in our supposedly civilised one.
In the past seven years the taxpayers of the European Union have paid out EUR 1.4 billion to the governments and elsewhere and, even in the neutral words of the Commission, it is difficult to trace where the money goes. Yet all this is to fund Spanish and Portuguese fishermen, giving them a licence to pillage Third World waters, often in flagrant disregard of the basic principles of fisheries conservation. We know from Morocco what despair this has aroused among local fishermen as they see immense damage being done to their fish stocks, simply to provide European markets with sardines and other common species on which their own livelihoods depend. The horror of what is happening down the west coast of Africa was illustrated a few years ago by Namibia. In the end it said it had had enough, so devastating was the impact of Spanish fishing there.
It is about time that we in this House said that we have had enough of it all. The result of these policies has been a conservation disaster. In fact the whole thing, it seems to me, is an insane catastrophe."@en1
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