Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-06-11-Speech-2-334"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20020611.14.2-334"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I turn first to you, Mr President, to express my regret that you have not been able to take the floor, because in your capacity as Vice-President, you have always strongly supported the idea of the European Research Area, but I imagine that you will continue to do so. I should firstly like to thank Mr Caudron once again for having ensured that the Sixth Framework Programme was put to the vote during the May part-session, which has made it possible – as you rightly said – to keep to a timetable that is in the interests of the entire scientific community, as well as European industry, and to adopt this framework programme, the specific programmes and the rules for participation within the allotted time. Once again I should like – on behalf of the scientific community, essentially – to thank Parliament and all those who have made it possible for us to achieve something that you have rightly described as very positive, that is to adopt these rules in due time, so that we can prepare for 1 January 2003 in the best possible conditions.
I should like to say to Mr Liese, who tabled an amendment in plenary, that in my view, where palliative care is concerned, it is quite clear that this point can be taken into account in what we call the coordination of European policies, and in the support for research into diseases, which must in any case be approached holistically. There will not therefore be any problem with incorporating this idea that you expounded in plenary.
On the other hand, I can assure you that the Commission will not be able to accept any of the amendments on life sciences that have just been tabled in plenary if they compromise the balance that we all worked together to achieve between genomics and non-genomics research in the Sixth Framework Programme.
As far as the other thematic priorities are concerned, overall the Commission can accept all of the amendments, apart, however, from those which go into too much detail on the specific programmes, such as on food safety and quality. These are details and issues that do not fall within the scope of the specific programmes as described in the Sixth Framework Programme.
Turning now to an amendment that has just been tabled in the plenary, by Mr van Velzen I think, on space and satellites, we need to engage in a process of reflection and carry out research, but this must also be done in collaboration with the European Space Agency, which is moreover responsible for implementing space policy. Although I have sympathy for the substance of your proposal, we will have to adjust the wording to find a way to make collaboration possible.
Generally speaking, I can safely say that the entire contents of Mr van Velzen’s report are an accurate reflection of the wishes that we have all expressed, even though some points are obviously too detailed for us to take on board as they stand, but we are certainly on the same wavelength, a fact that I can only welcome.
The same obviously goes for Mrs Zorba’s amendments. They are all acceptable and have even introduced an extra dimension into the reflection process by establishing a link with the notion of multidisciplinarity and by putting greater emphasis on researcher mobility. I also agree, Mrs Zorba, with the comments just made by your neighbour, Mrs Zrihen, on the notion of Europe, because Europe’s wealth lies mainly in its human resources – in its researchers – and we must capitalise on them by strengthening the link between the research process and the so-called Bologna process, so that we can establish a Europe of knowledge. This was, moreover, stated at the Barcelona Summit. Europe’s greatest challenge will be to maintain high-quality human resources, and I will be coming back to this when I address science and society and attracting young people into careers in research.
There is also, as you said, support for the creation of the European Higher Education Area. I think that this idea of science and education has a bearing on our debate on the rules for participation, which is obviously important, but we also think that we need to ensure complementarity with contrasting and similar actions within the thematic priorities.
Turning now to Mr Purvis, who addressed a drafting problem in the text of an amendment tabled in plenary, which seeks to clarify the eligibility criteria for experienced researchers, I should like to say that we intended our text to mean four years of experience or a doctorate. The original wording is therefore unsatisfactory. We are now proposing a much simpler text, which reads, four years of experience or a doctorate, and is therefore along the same lines as the amendment that you are tabling in plenary. This is the crucial point, and I think that you were right to stress the fact that where we wrote ‘including’, this was not perhaps sufficiently clear and that it was therefore better to replace ‘including’ with ‘or’, which is much simpler. There you have a very precise answer to an amendment that is going to be put to the vote in plenary.
On the other hand, Mrs Zorba, we find it difficult to accept the amendment setting a fixed budget for international fellowships, because I think that fixing amounts in advance introduces a degree of inflexibility that is not entirely appropriate. We can assure you, however, that we will monitor the individual fellowships in the spirit of your amendment, because obviously they are one of the entry points into the framework programme. But we do not agree that we should start classifying all mobility actions in an excessively rigid way, because this would end up being damaging.
However, where your amendments on science and society are concerned, we fully agree with those which call for greater involvement of the general public and the stakeholders – such as patients’ organisations and environmental associations – in the science and society debate, and those which underline the important role played by teachers and the media in developing a better understanding of science. Nevertheless, we do not think that it would be appropriate to mention issues relating to science and society explicitly in the thematic priorities, because this is an area that cuts across the thematic priorities and covers science and society as a whole. We would therefore be downgrading it if we were to include it solely in the thematic priorities. Having said that, these are details compared with the general thinking behind your proposal.
Today, however, it is the specific programmes that are at issue, and thus another important stage in the process, and here I should like to thank very warmly the rapporteurs for the five specific programmes, Mr van Velzen, Mrs Zorba, Mr Alyssandrakis, Mr Piétrasanta and Mr Schwaiger, for the quality of their work.
Next, and this is an important point, I note that Parliament has ensured that greater priority is given to ‘science and society’. We have to recognise that this is actually the first time that this subject has been addressed explicitly in a framework programme, and you have increased its budget, which is a good decision in my view.
Turning now to Mr Alyssandrakis's report and the additional comments made by Mrs Matikainen, I believe, Mr Alyssandrakis, that all of your amendments serve to clarify the Commission proposal. The Commission is willing to accept all of them, subject to some minor drafting changes, although this will not affect the general thinking behind them. This applies, for example, to all of the amendments concerning radiation protection, which is of course a major issue.
On nuclear fusion, we can take on board the majority of the amendments that advocate funding for the activities concerned, but we have to make it very clear that the ITER project is a new initiative. I believe that you and Mrs Matikainen are saying more or less the same thing, but the ITER project really does have to be seen as a next step and it is therefore essential that it also be included in the specific programme because it is one of the projects on which the future of nuclear fusion depends. This does not mean that basic research and research in general should not be pursued in areas other than implementing ITER, as you rightly stressed, for example on JET and other types of tokamak, such as the stellarator. But our objective has to be to make ITER our next step. Moreover, substantial progress has been made in international negotiations on ITER in recent weeks: today we have a proposal for at least three sites, two, maybe three, in Europe – Mr Vidal-Quadras will understand what I am getting at because Spain is doing marvellous work in this field – and one site in Japan. Negotiations are progressing well here and that is significant.
The Commission fully recognises the importance of the management of radioactive waste. However, the amendments tabled tend to introduce deadlines that are too restrictive for the purposes of research. They cannot therefore be accepted in full, because we have to keep research into the management of radioactive waste fairly open-ended: there may not be just one solution, but several.
I turn now to Mr Piétrasanta’s report. We should like to thank you, Mr Piétrasanta, and through you the entire Parliament. We wish to thank you, as Mrs McNally mentioned, for taking such a keen interest in the Joint Research Centre and for ensuring that it is supported in the framework programme. It is very important for Parliament to realise that in the Joint Research Centre the European Union has an instrument at its disposal that can help to make certain political objectives a reality. It will be useful in helping us to establish the European Research Area by creating common bases of knowledge and measurements and also, as you stressed Mr Piétrasanta, by fostering links with national centres. This is an interesting point and you did well to highlight it.
While we are on the subject, I should like to inform you that the Commission intends to make a statement for the Council Minutes indicating that it welcomes Parliament’s intention to set up an ad-hoc group of Members, a kind of monitoring committee, to act as an interface with the Joint Research Centre. I think this idea was already in the Avignon report, but you were right to take it up again. From an institutional point of view, we will see that we make a statement to the Council and have it noted in the Minutes. This is a good idea and it enjoys parliamentary support.
We consider the amendments to be acceptable, including those that emphasise the priority that must be given to environmental issues, in particular the protection of ecosystems and food safety. You will be aware that the Joint Research Centre is considered to have some of the best expertise in Europe on traceability, for example of GMOs. It will therefore be an important tool in the run-up, in particular, to enlargement, when the Centre is opened up to new members: I will return to this point when I address Mr Schwaiger’s report.
Mr Schwaiger, I should like to say how timely your amendments are; this comes as no surprise given that you are very familiar with the issues and that you insisted on visiting the JRC. We do not have any problems with them; quite the opposite. We think that your report puts forward additional arguments in favour of integrating the Joint Research Centre into European networks, and in particular networks of excellence, and we agree with the principles that you mentioned, both on ethics and openness.
I should like to make it clear, however, that the same goes for research into both efforts to harmonise nuclear safety criteria and the nuclear fuel cycle, which is vital. Here, recent events show that the nuclear fuel cycle needs to be subjected to ever more stringent controls, and the agreement on disarmament that has just been concluded by Russia and the United States assumes that Europe will also play a part in this discussion. I met officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna who asked us to pool some of our expertise with theirs, precisely so as to gain a better understanding of these dissemination issues. Your comment, Mr Schwaiger, could not therefore have been more pertinent and is highly topical. This therefore needs to be taken into account when considering the general issue of dispersion and non-dissemination, and Europe needs to make its contribution to the joint effort. Mrs De Palacio and I also support the technical aspects of your proposal. As you emphasised, the safety of some nuclear power stations, including those in Lithuania, gives huge cause for concern and the JRC has a degree of expertise and a training capability here that could be exploited.
There you have it: I think that I have now dealt with all of the reports and I should like, by way of a conclusion, to respond to some of the interventions made in the debate. I have already said to Mr Purvis that on the issue of the Marie Curie fellowships we will correct the text along the lines that you suggested. I would stress that you were right to say how important ‘science and society’ is for young people. How can we encourage young people to study science, a point also made by Mrs McNally? This is where we need the actions to converge. As you know, we have drafted a ‘science and society’ action plan. We will have to consider how to implement it and we can do so together.
I should also like to thank the other members of the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy, who may not have been rapporteurs but have taken part in this work and made useful contributions. I should also, for the benefit of Mr Graefe zu Baringdorf, who issued an opinion on behalf of the Committee on Agriculture but who has now left the Chamber, like to make it clear that there was never any question of defining research on a sector-by-sector basis. We did not champion a particular sector – we focused on research – but we are not by any means indifferent to agriculture and it is evident in many areas. Very special attention is paid to it in an area that he did not mention, in the context of support to Community policies, where agriculture will play a very important role. Moreover, the multifunctionality of agriculture is included in its own right, as are aspects of sustainable rural development and support for biodiversity, which shows clearly that we are not concerned about genomics alone, but also about biodiversity, as a natural process, which may be of interest in many respects.
Mr Liese mentioned biofuels: his proposal is highly relevant and we can support his amendment. Besides, it is along the same lines as Mrs De Palacio's directive on the same issue. As I have already said, we can support the ideas on palliative care that you mentioned in the debate. Mr Souchet has left I think, but his question on nuclear energy is clearly a general one.
In conclusion, I should like to address some more general issues related to the economy. Today, in adopting the framework programme and the specific programmes, I think that we have shown how essential research and innovation are to achieving the Lisbon objective of becoming the most dynamic economy in the world. With this in mind, I think that the July part-session, as Mrs Quisthoudt-Rowohl and the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy proposed yesterday, will obviously be very significant, because it is then that we will be in a position to make the Sixth Framework Programme a reality as part of the European Research Area.
In this respect, I can tell you that the response to the calls for expressions of interest – a new initiative that we have just launched for the first time and that we issued to the scientific community and industry – has been startlingly successful, and has even been rather difficult to manage because we have received more than 15 000 expressions of interest. This shows that the European research community and the European Research Area are gathering momentum. The problem is that we risk being the victim of our own success and running into management difficulties. But 15 000 expressions of interest is quite something!
Success on this scale reflects the efforts we have all made – that you have made – to provide information and raise awareness. I think that this work has been very worthwhile because it points to the emergence of an awareness of and willingness to foster research and innovation in Europe. You are right about this and I should like to respond to a number of the points made about research and innovation, by Mrs Plooij-van Gorsel, who stressed the issue of the link between research and innovation, and by Mr Rübig, who mentioned the problem of small and medium-sized enterprises. It is clear that we need to move into the implementation phase, and that we have to achieve our target of 15%, which is not always easy because doing so relies on providing information and raising awareness. In the implementation phase we will have to pay particular attention to the practical measures we can take to reach this objective. For an SME the difficulty lies in the costs and in saying this I am responding to Mrs Langenhagen's comment: I think that you are right to highlight this issue of guarantees for small and medium-sized enterprises.
When it comes to implementation, we are trying to ensure that the guarantees no longer constitute an additional source of fear or present additional difficulties for small and medium-sized enterprises. So much then for the issue of implementation, based on the rules for participation, of what we will call the admissible costs. This is what we have in mind at the moment, but the debate is ongoing because, as you know better than anybody, we are talking about public money and we cannot commit it any old how. The debate is underway though, and I hope to have the opportunity to discuss it with the Committee on Budgets and, of course, the Court of Auditors. In this way our proposal will be able to cater for this difficulty, while ensuring that we do not run any unacceptable risks.
Mr Mantovani, you also mentioned SMEs. This is an objective that we all share and I think it is important for us to launch an information campaign and reflect on the modalities. If you wish, I would be quite happy to have a meeting with you about this issue, to listen to your proposals and consider how we might best implement the SME strand; in any case they will benefit from over EUR 2 billion under the next framework programme, which is a very significant sum. We must also ensure, as you said, Mr Rübig, that our work complements that of the European Investment Bank, which is prepared to deploy additional resources in this area.
In conclusion, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I think that we are going to try to create some momentum, given that in Barcelona we agreed on the objective of 3% of GDP. I should like to thank Mr van Velzen for having underlined once more that the future of Europe is at stake here, that we need to boost research and innovation in Europe, and that we need to do this together; this is what Parliament wanted. I remember that when the idea of the European Research Area was first floated, you insisted on the objective of 3% of GDP. We are going to achieve this, thanks to you, thanks to the scientific community, and thanks to the desire to make research and innovation a priority at European level. I should like to thank you in any case for your work and I hope that we will all have played our part in moving things forward.
One very positive point is that the specific programmes have turned out to be absolutely consistent with the framework programme, which, as you know, has been finally approved by the Council and has now been officially in force since 3 June. In any case, the framework programme is only a basis. I note that the rapporteurs have done some very high-quality work and that even now the Commission can definitely accept a very large proportion of the amendments in their present form, in terms of both their principle and content.
I should like, furthermore, to echo Mr van Velzen’s praise of the initiative that has been taken – which qualifies as historic – to table en bloc the amendments adopted en bloc at the May part-session, which, if adopted, will be incorporated into the text as described in the statements issued by the Commission and the Council when the framework programme was adopted. We have therefore complied fully with the agreement that we concluded and I think that this is an interesting and new element from an institutional and methodological point of view. As Mr Caudron rightly stressed, clearly when we work in a spirit of mutual trust in this field we are able to make progress more rapidly, and I too wished to underline this myself once more.
Some of the amendments are useful clarifications and provide more detailed descriptions of the scientific content of the framework programme; of course, they must be taken into consideration. Sometimes, however, I have to say that the proposals go into too much detail and, although we can accept them in principle, in some cases it would be more appropriate to include these suggestions in the work programmes.
I now turn to the individual reports. Mr van Velzen’s report, which is very wide-ranging and covers the first and third aspects of the European Research Area, that is integrating and strengthening the European Research Area, is clearly very comprehensive and we can confirm even now that all of his amendments are to a very large extent acceptable. We can accept all of the amendments concerning the process of implementing the framework programme, as Mr Caudron also stressed: the transition from the fifth to the Sixth Framework Programme, the budgetary proposals, of course, which have been included, and the need for a flexible transition, where we have accepted your proposed form of wording. I believe that here Parliament is making an important contribution to a Commission position which – we have to admit – was rather too isolationist; Parliament has shown wisdom and understanding on this issue of the transition from one framework programme to another.
We will of course also have to ensure that the programme is implemented in an integrated way, and we will be sending Parliament some information in this regard, in particular on drawing up the work programmes. I hope that we will be able to continue to work together in the implementation phase, that we will be able to keep you informed on a regular basis about the various aspects and that you will obviously let us have your views and thoughts on any problems that may arise. We all agree that it will be necessary to evaluate the contribution made by the framework programme to establishing the European Research Area, and I would remind you that there will be an evaluation of the new instruments after two years. All of this is work that we can do together.
As far as the priority of genomics and biotechnology for health is concerned, the Commission will of course take on board all of the amendments relating to research into cancer, of whatever form: genetic, clinical and others. In particular, as you also mentioned, translational research is a very important aspect, as are, of course, strategies for prevention. In the same way, we will not forget diabetes and the new opportunities opening up here, as Mr van Velzen has just stressed."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples