Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-06-13-Speech-2-109"
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"en.20000613.10.2-109"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would first like to express my heartfelt thanks to Mr Maaten for his report, particularly for the way it focuses on the protection of public health but also for the way it deals with the issues affecting tobacco growers and producers.
At last, we have an institutional, comprehensive text on tobacco products which will ensure that, in the future, we work together with the other institutions towards regulating tobacco products at world-wide level. Until such legislation to regulate tobacco products is introduced, we will have to ensure that we keep a balance in responding to the challenge facing us, for, on the one hand, we must provide for improved consumer information and more intense awareness-raising to dissuade consumers from smoking tobacco, and, on the other, we have to safeguard the rights of producers and growers.
We cannot, therefore, include the idea of eliminating production subsidies even as an aim in the recitals. In fact, this approach does not take into consideration the fact that the problem cannot be resolved by terminating our own production, for that would just prompt the citizens to use tobacco produced outside the Union. Rather, we need to raise awareness and adopt global directives, directives with world-wide scope. It is only in this context that there would be any point in providing incentives to our tobacco growers to change the type of crop they grow.
Moreover, we cannot disregard the concerns which weaken the solution adopted in the area of production for export. The directive governing the matter, which is the product of a partly successful compromise, has a clear, acceptable moral basis. Indeed, it is immoral to produce for consumption by others that which we retain to be too harmful for our own consumption, but one wonders: will the health of tobacco consumers from outside the Union genuinely benefit from this decision, or will they just smoke non-European tobacco?
Do we not therefore risk penalising our industry, which would have to convert entire sections of production for export, without achieving an appreciable result in terms of health? In conclusion, the moral principle is acceptable but the solution is unsatisfactory."@en1
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