Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-12-13-Speech-4-115"
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"en.20011213.8.4-115"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the bee is a symbol of hard work and, in this respect, Mrs Lulling is the queen bee of the European Parliament in the truest sense of the word, because it is she who, for over a decade, has forced us not with carrots and sticks, but with honey and bee stings, by which I mean with sound arguments, to keep on debating this question, a question which many people tend to underestimate because, unlike me, they were not fortunate enough, back at the beginning of the 1980s, to meet the biggest group of visitors ever to visit this House in Strasbourg – a group of Bavarian beekeepers invited by the late Heinrich Aigner, who also fought long and hard for this cause. Several hundred Bavarian beekeepers came to the European Parliament, which just goes to show how committed these people are to their cause, which is also our cause.
Beekeepers are not a large group of voters, they are people who look after bees which, as Mrs Lulling has already said, ensure that a balance is constantly restored to our ecosystem, at least to a certain extent. A cold winter is just beginning, but when it is over we know that spring will arrive, that the bees will again fly off to provide their pollination services and we shall again enjoy a blooming landscape. But there is a danger that one day winter will come and no such spring will follow because there will be no bees or too few bees to provide this ecological function. Many people believe that the EU is a country which flows with milk and honey.
With milk we have tried to get the quotas into order. With bees, we have a self-supply rate of just below 50% in the European Union. Anyone who really wants to see a country which flows with milk and honey should fly to Argentina, as I did this summer. Argentina could supply the European Union with most or many of the products that we need, but in these times of global political crisis, we are aware of two new elements. First, we are aware of the need for quality following the BSE crisis and, secondly, we are aware of the need to be able to obtain healthy food from our own soil following the crisis on 11 September. I think that a functioning European farming industry and a functioning European ecosystem need suitable support for our beekeepers, which is why I ask the House to throw its full weight behind the Lulling report."@en1
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