Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-23-Speech-2-208"
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"en.20011023.8.2-208"2
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"Mr President, I should like to thank the draftsman and express my support for Mr Seppänen’s report. In certain parts of the immediate surroundings of the European Union, the environmental problems are genuinely alarming, especially when it comes to the water in the Baltic. EU countries are naturally affected just as much by these problems as large parts of Russia, Poland, Kaliningrad etc. To obtain clear water in the Baltic, it is crucial for us to cooperate across borders.
I, myself, live in an administrative district on the Baltic, Norrköping, where one of the greatest problems we have when it comes to water quality is that we still receive so much untreated waste from the candidate countries and from Russia. This is a very big problem for the EU Member States too. We know, for example, that untreated waste water from 3-4 million people in the St Petersburg region is still being released and that the situation around Kaliningrad is much the same. Such conditions affect us all.
In order to develop this region and to get to grips with the major problems, especially at a specifically environmental level, we have created the Northern Dimension, covering a very large area from Iceland in the west to Russia in the east. Restoring the balance in the Baltic is a measure to which exceptional priority should be given.
The matter is urgent, and that is why I am pleased that the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy has also expressed its wishes. For myself, coming as I do from the Committee on Budgets, it is also a question of presenting the financial aspects of this proposal. From the Committee on Budgets, we should like to sound a warning note in this House. The guarantee reserve that exists to cover possible credit losses is seriously stretched, both this year and next year. The scope for this loan to Russia is really created simply through our not successfully implementing other commitments. We have had to postpone other promised projects. Otherwise, we should not have managed to grant this loan within the framework that had been set. If we are neither to renege on our promises in the future nor to give up our new ambitions, the Council and the Commission will therefore have to review the guarantee reserve ceiling relatively soon.
The situation is slightly reminiscent of the discussion we had in the budget debate earlier about the fact that the Council is happy to issue promises but then does not arrange satisfactory financing. I should therefore like to ask Mr Solbes Mira what the Commission’s plans are when it comes to tabling proposals concerning the future of the guarantee reserve. I assume the Commissioner agrees that there is a lot of pressure upon the ceiling for this reserve."@en1
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