Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-04-08-Speech-2-020"
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"en.20030408.1.2-020"2
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"Mr President, I am not just being polite when I say that my special thanks are due to the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance and to all the rapporteurs. Unlike Mr Seppänen, I believe this committee has done its work very thoroughly and that in the past, too, it has tried to uncover every problem in good time.
Even before Mrs Andreassen made the headlines, we on the committee had a hearing about the book-keeping system and we had discussions about it with the Commission’s Internal Audit Service and with the Court of Auditors.
I would also like to particularly stress that the various rapporteurs, especially Mr Casaca, have taken a lot of trouble to check all the details this year and have written a very critical report, one that does not shrink from naming the problems, but which also makes clear that the Commission is making efforts to solve them. For that reason, our group will also be supporting the discharge recommendation. Unlike some of the EU’s opponents, we do not believe that this discharge recommendation is a whitewash; it is based on a thorough examination and a critical assessment of the situation.
We are also in favour of postponing discharge for the Committee on the Regions because it has still not satisfactorily resolved the repeated problems with expense accounts, to which a solution must at last be found. We are, though, particularly concerned about Sapard, which is a very important programme intended to prepare the candidate countries for future aid in the agricultural sector, and, sadly, only 9% of it was implemented in 2001. The tremendous cash flow difficulties with the Sapard programme are no accident. The programme was supposed to prepare agriculture and rural areas for accession, both through measures to modernise farms and rural industries and by creating the necessary infrastructure and providing adequate information about rural development.
It was also supposed to bring about the rural population’s active involvement in the design and planning of that development, which we in the Member States are already financing through the ‘second pillar’ and the Leader programme. Unfortunately, it did not work out like that. During accession negotiations, the Commission gave clear priority to implementation of the
. It used Sapard as a sort of training programme for the candidate countries’ administrations and as a test balloon for implementation of the
. The administrative cost of the programme became enormous and delayed the accreditation of the agencies for far too long. In the case of Slovenia, for example, building the administration for Sapard has cost more money than is ever made available for the country itself.
So instead of making people in the rural areas of the candidate countries feel eager to get going and creating partnership between government and NGOs, expectations almost everywhere have been bitterly disappointed, and the negative experiences with Sapard have unfortunately benefited those agitating against EU accession.
The Commission has now announced that it will hold a conference about the future of Sapard and Leader in the new Member States this spring and possibly amend the Sapard Regulations. We think that is urgently necessary and we support it.
I would like to conclude by making one further point. I think the Commission has some courageous officials, by whom I definitely do not mean Mrs Andreassen, but courageous officials who put the question of Eurostat on the agenda and have sought to solve this problem through internal channels. I hope that Parliament and the Commission will in future appreciate, praise and support such courageous work more than the untruthful headlines of Europhobes, the untruthful headlines of Mrs Andreassen, who is allowing herself to be used primarily by opponents of the EU."@en1
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