Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-11-14-Speech-2-165"
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"en.20001114.6.2-165"2
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"Mr President, tomorrow and the following day the Euro-Mediterranean Conference is to be held in Marseilles, attended by all the countries that signed the Barcelona Declaration, and I think that we can congratulate ourselves on this. It will be a success that will show that the Barcelona process, which began on the back of the Oslo agreements, has reached a sufficient level of maturity and solidity to prevent it from being caught up in the difficulties of the Middle East process. Moreover, by continuing it can make the best possible contribution, a secondary but significant contribution, to the resumption of dialogue in the Middle East.
However, in all the evaluations that are now being made of five years of the Barcelona process, many people think that we can be satisfied simply that the process is continuing, due to the fact that there have been ministerial meetings attended by representatives from Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Syria and Lebanon, etc. And this is, perhaps, a sad consolation. The evaluation is now a contrasting one and, of course, the strategic development of Euro-Mediterranean policy cannot depend on a temporary evaluation. It is continuity over time that can provide results, and positive results will be ultimately measured by the development of the countries of the southern Mediterranean. Those countries come up against a great deal of problems finding a place for their development and economic integration in the context of globalisation and we must do everything in our power to help restore balance to a situation characterised by gulfs between North and South.
If current tendencies continue we can be pessimistic about the future. Today a European is statistically twice as rich as someone from the Maghreb, and in twenty years’ time he will be twenty times as rich, if we do not manage to turn the situation around. In this respect, the proposal that the Commission has made for a new impetus is a positive one, and we fully agree with the two priorities that Mr Patten has set out in his speeches and repeated here this afternoon. We need to speed up the processes of the association agreements. Above all, we need to avoid having to make an evaluation of the application of MEDA in five years’ time that leads us to conclude that only 26% have been used.
However, this is not enough. We probably need to open up a more medium-term perspective and I can only list the three areas that I feel are essential in that respect: The first is European projects to structure a regional area in the southern countries. The second is an essential policy dealing with the human aspect of managing migration flows. The third is discussion and the quest for progress and consensus in developing a common agricultural policy in the Mediterranean, without which we will probably not be able to achieve a positive outcome in the medium term."@en1
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