Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-05-03-Speech-3-061"
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"en.20000503.4.3-061"2
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"We have voted against the Maat report which concerns subsidies for the EU’s school milk programme.
In many schools around Europe, milk is provided free of charge to the pupils in order to meet their need for different forms of nutrition. We are wholeheartedly in favour of children and young people being offered milk, and even food, in school, as they are in Sweden. However, we do not think that it should be the job of the European Union to subsidise school milk. In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, school milk subsidies should be reduced to zero. We therefore view the Commission’s proposal concerning cofinancing as a step in the right direction.
Since the 1950s, Swedish schools have provided pupils with milk and school dinners. They have been able to do this without subsidies from the EU. Sweden’s membership of the EU means that Sweden, too, was informed about the common school milk programme and, today, Sweden consumes approximately one tenth of the common budget for school milk. For some years now, Sweden has been providing full cream milk instead of semi-skimmed milk, simply in order to meet the requirements for milk subsidies. This clearly highlights the drawback of the system, as well as the fact that many countries which presently make use of the subsidies really have no requirement for additional resources.
We believe that export and production subsidies under the common agricultural policy must be abolished. Agriculture ought to be placed on an equal footing with other branches of the food industry and compete in a free market. Europe is now facing a series of challenges requiring more money to be invested. The money which is, at present, being spent on agricultural policy, ought instead to be invested in the reconstruction of Kosovo, the enlargement of the Union to include Central and Eastern Europe and aid to the Third World."@en1
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