Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-03-Speech-2-205"
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"en.20030603.6.2-205"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, I shall begin by expressing my deep disappointment with this reform of the common agricultural policy and I wish to challenge your conscience, Commissioner, with the injustices and the discrimination that your policy is perpetrating against farmers and also with regard to the way in which you are protecting desertification and damaging the credibility of the Union itself.
Let us look at the injustices: you are responsible, Commissioner, for around seven million farmers in the Community. Only three-and-a-half million are entitled to direct aid – only three-and-a-half million. Of these three-and-a-half million farmers, 52% receive only 4.5% of the aid. Is this or is this not a profound injustice? In my own country, one hundred farmers – the one hundred largest – receive more than 60% of farmers in my country do. I challenge your conscience with this injustice.
Next, Commissioner, your policy is discriminatory! Two areas of production, cereals and bovines, which between them account for 21% of Community production, receive 60% of aid; I repeat, 21% of production receives 60% of all aid. I call that discriminatory, Commissioner! It is all the more discriminatory because these two areas of production are those most responsible for desertification. By not opposing this policy, Commissioner, you have contributed to the enormous increase in unemployment throughout the Union, because the only winner is something that causes unemployment and not the areas of production that actually employ people.
The third issue concerns the damage done to our credibility, because the institutions have a duty to protect the weakest. Commissioner, I have probably been involved in politics as long as you have, and the basic duty of the institutions is certainly to protect the weakest members of society and yet you have put yourself in the position of protecting only the strongest. Why have you abandoned the ceiling, Commissioner? Even the United States, which has companies that are two hundred times larger, has a ceiling of EUR 350 000, and you, who initially had a ceiling in place, abandoned it, concluding that it was excessive because it should not exceed EUR 100 000. You and this Parliament will go down in history as being profoundly unfair and discriminatory and for having damaged the credibility of the political process.
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