Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-01-29-Speech-3-135"
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"en.20030129.7.3-135"2
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"Madam President, I would like to thank Mr Mulder for his report and all the work he has done on it. We must acknowledge that he is a person who understands the common agricultural policy in all its extremely complicated detail. Also, his comments here this evening were thoughtful and informative.
We have come a long way, as Mr Mulder knows, from the days when 80% of the budget of the European Union was spent on agriculture. Most of that money was spent on market support in the form of export refunds and storage, which mainly created opportunities for immense schemes of fraud and deception. We have moved a long way from that and, while Mr Casaca rightly points out the risks involved in policing export refunds, we are today spending only around four or five per cent – approximately EUR two billion – on export refunds, and we welcome that development.
I think that the reforms already carried out and the reforms proposed by Mr Fischler will make it easier, even if we have some political difficulty with them, to police spending and ensure that the money we allocate to the common agricultural policy goes to the people who are entitled to it.
Mr Mulder makes the point in his report that the people who commit offences should have to pay for them. It should not be an indirect subsidy paid because, in cases of over-production of milk, fines are paid by the Member State rather than by the individuals who over-produced; this amounts to indirect subsidisation. We had a worse situation in the past, when mismanagement of large companies resulted in the fact that, in the clearance of accounts procedures, major corrections were being made against the Member States which were not passed on to the food processors and the people who were involved in the abuses in the first place. Again, this was unfair to the taxpayers and constituted bad administration.
I think that, whilst the exercise of creating the integrated control system has been an immense project, it will prove its worth in the European Union in ensuring that the money we vote for agriculture goes to the right people and that we can account for all of it.
I have to admit that extending that to the applicant countries seems to me, in view of the length of time we have spent getting to where we are in the present Union, to be a daunting task, but I am convinced that the Commission is working towards it. I do not expect it to run smoothly, but I think that, if we apply the lessons we have learnt, and if we insist on the proper statistics being established in the first place before the money is released, then we will achieve a successful enlargement and will be able to help the rural areas without the loss of too much taxpayers' money."@en1
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