Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-12-13-Speech-4-114"
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"en.20011213.8.4-114"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen. This Parliament first raised the alarm about the threat to European beekeeping in 1985. The resolutions which we passed in 1992, 1995 and 1997 – mainly unanimously – contain specific, reasonable, affordable and legally tenable proposals for direct aid to save the European beekeeping industry which, the rosy Commission statistics notwithstanding, is in a state of real crisis.
Our primary concern is not to increase the self-supply rate for quality honey from our beekeepers, which is currently just below 50%. No. What we are concerned with is guaranteeing that the 80 000 wild and cultivated plants across the European Union will be pollinated. This is currently under threat as a result of the worrying decline in the number of beekeepers, more than half of whom are over 60 years old, and really has reached crisis point in certain regions. It is truly amazing that, despite the patience and determination of the spokesmen of all the groups in this Chamber since 1985, we have not managed to bring the Commission to its senses and make it realise that its half-hearted policy based on the wishy-washy 1997 regulation urgently needs to be improved if we are to avert the threat to the balance of the European ecosystem from the beekeeping crisis.
It is incomprehensible, nay irritating in the extreme, that the Commission persists in doing nothing, despite its report on the unsatisfactory implementation of the inadequate measures based on the half-hearted 1997 regulation and despite its acknowledgement that European beekeeping has to contend with increasing difficulties. With all due respect, Commissioner, we can no longer accept this absurd obduracy. The Commission needs to come to its senses.
You understand that, Mr Fischler.
The bases needed in order to introduce the direct aid now which we have lobbied for since 1992 are there for us in the Treaty. In my report we have again made specific, affordable short- and medium-term proposals, which there is too little time to go into, but the Commission can read. So what we want to hear today is that it is prepared to get moving on the basis of our proposals, which are supported by all beekeepers in the Community, from north to south, and we mean in the right direction. Mr Fischler saw for himself on Tuesday, when beekeepers from the majority of Member States visited the House with their produce, which attracted a great deal of interest, that some stands were cleaned out before the beekeepers had time to offer their products to the invited guests.
I should also like to thank the honourable Members who attended the meeting with over 60 beekeepers and who, like my colleagues in the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, fully support the demands contained in my report. We need more generous Community cofinancing than the current 50%, because many Member States are too mean to raise the 50% for programmes to improve the conditions under which honey is produced and marketed on the basis of the 1997 regulation, depriving their beekeepers of even the few hungry euros earmarked for their country.
We need both the immediate measures called for in the report and medium-term direct aid pending the mid-term view of Agenda 2000, especially premiums to compensate for loss of income because there is no Community preference in this sector. I am almost proud of having managed, together with my colleagues in the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development and the Committee on Budgets, to get appropriations for programmes to improve the conditions under which honey is produced and marketed raised from EUR 14 to 16.5 million for 2002. That is the only compulsory expense in the agricultural budget to which this has happened. But that cannot distract us from the fact that the Commission's bee policy is still underdeveloped. All it needs is the political will on the part of the Commission and the Council to give us a sum which the EU takes less than five hours a year to spend, not to mention the EUR 2 billion embezzled from the budget. This political will is all that is needed to allow us, together with the beekeepers, to protect beekeeping in Europe and to prevent us from running blindly into the wall of an ecological catastrophe in the medium term."@en1
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"Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum."1
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