Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-12-17-Speech-5-024"
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"en.19991217.4.5-024"2
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"Mr President, I would first like to thank the rapporteur, Mrs Redondo Jiménez, for this report and her excellent display of cooperation as chair of the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development this autumn.
A viable system for statistics is an important basis for making good decisions. Statistics have to be comprehensive, reliable and consistent. The report quite clearly explains the legal basis of statistics, especially in Amendments Nos 2 and 3, which specify the Community’s share of the advance. Politically, the most important message is contained in Amendments Nos 4 and 5, which urges the practice of cross-tabulating subsidies received according to, inter alia, farm surface area. This information will be especially important when we consider the social side of agricultural subsidies. It would be difficult to support a subsidy scheme that channelled most of the aid to the large farms in the best agricultural regions. We have no data on this, but have to be content with the rumours that 80% of aid would go to 20% of farmers.
Amendment No 1 emphasised the importance of statistics in connection with enlargement towards the east. This is a very important consideration that still means much work for the EU and the applicant countries. The problems over statistics for the applicant countries will not be resolved through this report. Problems have continued since the land register began to function. Embarking on eastward enlargement without any information on its effect on the budget would be political suicide. It does not help much, though, if our current data on expenditure is based on mistaken or unreliable data.
The most important aspect of statistical data on the European farmer is the reference yield. When Finland became a Member, as a result of poor yield in previous years, we had to be satisfied with a figure that did not reflect the truth in normal years. These reference yields should be raised to a realistic level as soon as possible, or we should start to reconsider the whole basis of their use and the idea of a drop in the price of grain as compensation for hectarage aid. We cannot undertake to subsidise producers in regions of highest yield in Europe for years and years on account of price reductions that have sometimes taken place in the past. The most obvious answer would be to harmonise hectarage aid as closely as possible within the whole territory of the EU. Mr President, the ELDR group supports this report."@en1
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