Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-18-Speech-3-020"
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"en.20021218.3.3-020"2
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"Madam President, honour where honour is due. Mr Fogh Rasmussen has managed much better than the euro. The Danish Prime Minister and the Danish ambassador to the EU deserve praise for concluding the negotiations on time, but the result forebodes disaster. Never before have so many rich countries been so miserly towards so few. Most Polish farmers will be net contributors to the EU. They will pay more in contributions to the EU than they receive. On the other hand, the better-off farmers will see a considerable increase in their capital, which future farmers will have to pay interest on. One hectare of agricultural land costs 30 times as much in the Netherlands as in Poland. If Polish and Dutch farmers are given the same right to buy land from each other, one can hardly call this equality. There should now be a radical revision of agricultural systems so that we avoid a situation arising in which financial gain is made from rising agricultural prices, leading to a new need for subsidies and a million Polish farmers being condemned to a life of unemployment in the city.
The budgetary funds and the Structural Funds are also in need of revision. Subsidies to the rich countries must be eliminated. Give the new countries free membership instead of theoretical Structural Fund subsidies, which they cannot receive on account of our bureaucratic procedures and the co-financing requirement. Let us cut EU law down drastically from its 85 000 pages. Let us only require compliance with our standards in the applicant countries when they are exporting to us. Let us give them longer transitional periods, more leeway, greater freedom. Let us allow far greater flexibility than the negotiations have settled on.
I am
criticising Mr Fogh Rasmussen for the result. He could not have done very much better with the mandate he was given, but he should now say, in his capacity as Danish Prime Minister, that enlargement will not end well unless there are radical reforms. In an EU that has 25 countries and more on the way, it is not possible to legislate as if it were a state. The EU should now focus on the cross-border aspects and let the parliaments of the Member States adopt the bulk of the legislation. An enlarged EU can only function as a Europe of democracies and diversities. We had this in mind when we named our group."@en1
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