Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-06-Speech-4-215"
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"en.20010906.11.4-215"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, every day we see horrifying images of new tragedies which desolate the world: people devastated, children dying from hunger and disease, refugees without refuge, immigrants wandering the world looking for an opportunity to live…
There are tragedies, however, which persist while nobody talks about them, which get worse and fester although they do not make the headlines.
One of those cases filed away in our selective first-world memory is the situation in Central America and the dramatic effects of the drought which has been devastating it for more than three months. This is a tragedy which is unfolding in a region, as has been said, which is already weakened by constant natural disasters, quite apart from political disasters, and which has a social and economic structure lacking the least resources for resisting them.
El Salvador has declared a state of emergency and Guatemala just yesterday declared a state of public disaster, in a truly desperate attempt to combat hunger. The drought has destroyed the majority of the crops in the region and hunger is now affecting millions of people, as previous speakers have said. All of this in an area where an extremely high percentage of inhabitants live in poverty or extreme poverty.
The United Nations world food programme raised the alarm very recently, telling us that if the current situation continues, it will only be able to meet the needs of half of the affected citizens for barely three months.
I therefore draw your attention in particular to the recommendation contained in section 4 which, in relation to that in section 3, seeks to direct our decisions in the field of development aid towards the objective of combating the structural problems. Only in that way, by investing in sustainable development in the most sensitive areas of the world, will we be able to prevent and alleviate as far as possible the effects of natural disasters, because we will have invested our aid and our resources in the structuring and strengthening of the population and we will have made them stronger so that they can endure the consequences of phenomena which not even we, in the first world, can prevent.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for Europe to be able to give out fishing rods, to show people how to fish, rather than to hand out fish."@en1
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