Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-01-16-Speech-4-050"
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"en.20030116.2.4-050"2
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"Mr President, can I first of all join my colleagues in offering my sincere congratulations to Hugues Martin for his excellent report on aquaculture. This was, as other speakers have noted, an own–initiative report by the Fisheries Committee, and Mr Martin has put an enormous amount of work and effort into producing recommendations which will be welcomed by both consumers and producers alike.
Mr Martin's report has come at a crucial time in the fisheries sector. Aquaculture is now expanding exponentially against a background of rising consumer demand for fish in Europe, and of course of collapsing fish stocks in the traditional marine fishery.
Marine aquaculture is a vitally important supplier of fish, molluscs and shellfish with a particular emphasis on farmed salmon, the quality of which is improving all the time. But there is also a burgeoning growth of the inland aquaculture industry which is enabling exciting progress to be made in the farming of cod, halibut, turbot and a host of other key species. The Fisheries Committee visited a fish farm at Rio Frio near Granada in Andalusia last November where they are even producing sturgeon and caviar. The complexity of this operation was quite extraordinary, but given that caviar is currently fetching about a third of the price of gold, one can readily understand why people are prepared to invest the necessary time and money to achieve these results.
So we have a vast and growing aquaculture sector in the EU providing a great many jobs, often in remote rural areas with fragile economies. It is an industry which, as Mr Martin points out, may be able to provide jobs to some of the marine fishermen who face the loss of their livelihoods during the current cod crisis.
But it is also an industry which requires, as Mr Ó Neachtain said earlier, to adhere to the strictest standards of compliance with best practice in the fields of the environment, welfare, health and food safety, particularly if consumer confidence in its products is to be increased. I believe Mr Martin sets out the parameters to achieve these objectives and I welcome his approach.
Mr Martin's recommendations that a lot more investment and effort should be put into research and development in the aquaculture sector are of fundamental importance, and I am delighted that the Commission endorsed that view this morning. As the rapporteur said himself in his introduction to this debate, this is a promising sector which, if handled properly, can cause great benefits to accrue to the EU in the future."@en1
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