Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-14-Speech-4-046"
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"en.20020314.4.4-046"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, Regulation No 1587/1998 introducing a scheme to compensate for the additional costs incurred in the marketing of certain fishery products from the Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands and the French departments of Guyana and Réunion as a result of those regions’ remoteness, like the regulations that preceded it, has proved to be a fisheries policy instrument of enormous and undeniable use in economic and social terms and even for safeguarding certain cultural values associated with fishing activities.
Nevertheless, pursuant to Article 6 of the same Regulation, the Commission should, by 1 June 2001 at the latest, have presented the European Parliament and the Council with the evaluation report on the measures adopted in the fisheries sector for the outermost regions, which, as we all know, should receive special aid, in accordance with the Treaty of Amsterdam, which granted them a special status. The Commission failed to fulfil that objective by not meeting the deadline set and by using as an excuse for this omission the need for a more detailed analysis using external consultants, against the backdrop of the global revision of the common fisheries policy on the basis of the Green Paper, which has already been opened to public debate.
The results of these studies determine when this report is to be presented, with the Commission proposing to delay its presentation until 1 June 2002, and, as a logical consequence, to extend the scheme in force by one year, until 31 December 2002, thereby guaranteeing the continuity and stability of the current scheme of compensation for additional costs. In short, there is nothing to worry about. This is just a pause for thought. I therefore proposed that the Committee on Fisheries deliver a favourable opinion together with some appropriate amendments to the regulation. First of all, the scheme of compensation for additional costs must clearly be permanent, with an end to time limits, because the disadvantages faced by the outermost regions as a consequence of their distance from consumer centres are not factors that time and progress will alleviate, being of a structural nature, unless we wish to see the total disappearance of the fisheries sector in these outermost regions one day.
I should like, in order to make these debates a little less formal, to use the powerful metaphor that José Saramago, winner of the Nobel prize for literature, worked into his novel ‘The Stone Raft’, in which he imagines a split occurring between the Iberian Peninsula and the European continent and the peninsula consequently drifting away from the continent. I do not think that anyone would dare, even ironically, to imagine that the outermost islands could, even at some point in the distant future, become close once again to the European continent, thereby rendering the current concept of remoteness redundant.
It is now, therefore, proposed that we maintain indefinitely the scheme of aid for the additional costs of marketing certain fishery products, maybe allowing them to be gradually adapted. The future regulation must, therefore, take account of this requirement. As far as I am concerned, there is no reason why it should not change at some point in the future to become a model of income support for the fishermen in the outermost regions based on the model that is being adopted and developed to support farmers. Whatever the case, Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, fishing activity in the Azores, which employs around 8 000 people and has a huge socio-economic impact on the Archipelago, the 1 500 fishermen of Madeira, the fisheries sector in the Canary Islands, which employs around 13 000 people, as well as the thousands of fishermen from French Guyana and Réunion, cannot be subjected to uncertainties or to the whims of fate. They need security and stability, all the more so because they have faced some tough challenges recently, with the failure of the agreement with Morocco, which dealt a cruel blow to fisheries in the Canary Islands. I therefore think it is crucial that we increase aid for fishing activities in the outermost regions and are even more generous than we are at the moment."@en1
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