Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-06-14-Speech-3-146"
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"en.20000614.6.3-146"2
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".
As Member for a tobacco-producing region, I would like to express my reservations about the proposal for a ‘tobacco’ directive. Nobody questions the validity of its aims: smoking kills 500 000 people per year in the European Union alone. We must therefore fight vigorously against smoking, just as we must fight unremittingly against drug addiction, alcoholism and all dangerous addictions, whether they are of natural or chemical origin.
In this respect, we can only share this report’s proposals, which seek more effectively to warn, make aware and inform consumers of the risks to which they are exposing themselves through excessive tobacco consumption. Let us even go beyond labelling or limiting toxic substances by making better use than we currently do of the special fund established under the common organisation of the market for tobacco and to which producers pay contributions in order to fund the research and development of less harmful varieties. On the other hand, however, let us be careful not to destabilise too suddenly, without allowing time to convert, a farming sector that involves 135 000 producers and employs 400 000 seasonal workers, in often very vulnerable agricultural regions.
In this case, there are a few basic principles which I feel must guide our action: we must act fairly against all factors likely to cause addiction, such as advertising and excessive consumption of dangerous pharmacological substances – funded, moreover, from the social security system –and we must ensure that restrictions on tobacco production within the Union are accompanied by the monitoring and restriction of imports so that their effects on consumption are not cancelled out. We must give tobacco growers an adequate timescale in which to adapt their production to the new standards for tar content and we must reject any restriction on subsidies for tobacco production unless we replace them with aid as an incentive for conversion.
In other words, we must ensure that it is not only European Union producers – who supply only 25% of the raw tobacco consumed in Europe – who, without compensation or an adequate timescale, bear the costs of a regulation which is undeniably praiseworthy, but which is too sketchy in the form that has been proposed to us."@en1
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"Savary (PSE ),"1
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