Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-07-03-Speech-4-136"
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".
First of all, I wish to thank Mrs Kratsa-Tsagaropoulou for having taken the initiative with this report, and I would also like to express my gratitude to Mr Graefe zu Baringdorf, the draftsman of the opinion of the Committee on Agriculture on this report.
Nor can the Commission accept the request to create a unit responsible for equal opportunities in the Directorate-General for Agriculture. This Directorate-General has already conducted a highly detailed study of the issue of equality, and consequently we do not see any need to go further.
Lastly, I wish to look at Parliament’s request for a revision of Directive 86/613/EEC on the application of the principle of equal treatment between men and women engaged in an activity, including agriculture. The Commission is of the opinion that such a revision is unnecessary, since many aspects of this Directive, especially those concerning employment and working conditions, are already regulated in the recent Directive 2002/73/EC amending Directive 76/207/EEC, and, given that these recent amendments also apply to self-employed workers pursuant to Paragraph 1(3), we do not feel there is any need to go further.
Furthermore, applying the category of self-employed worker to spouses provides, in principle, adequate coverage for social security schemes, without discriminating on the grounds of gender since the applicable legislation would in this case be Directive 79/7/EEC, on the progressive implementation of the principle of equal treatment for men and women in matters of social security, which would enable us to address such situations.
These are the observations I wish to make on this initiative, and I thank you very much for having undertaken this task.
The committee has welcomed this report, with the content of which it largely agrees. This is an own-initiative report and raises a set of issues that will help to place women nearer the centre of the Union’s common agricultural and rural development policies. The report pursues the same approach taken by the Agriculture Council in its conclusions of May 2002 on gender equality in the CAP and in rural development policy.
That document focuses on the need to consolidate the second pillar of the CAP and the Commission fully shares this opinion. In fact, in our proposals for CAP reform, which were approved in Luxembourg last week, additional funds have already been set aside for rural development as of 2005.
Before making a detailed study of some of the points, I should like to recall that Regulation (EEC) No 1257/99 on rural development aid already allows Member States to include specific measures for women in their rural development programmes, such as investment in farm holdings run by women, aid to integrate young women farmers, training, the marketing and processing of farm products, aid for artesanal activity, rural tourism and other things.
Some Member States have already funded measures specifically targeting women or have integrated the principle of equal opportunities in their programmes for rural development, for example, including gender as a selection criterion for allocating Union funds. For this reason, some of the measures that the report calls on the Commission to take, such as item 6, for example, should be requested by the Member States that are already in a position to implement them.
The Commission agrees fully with some of the requests made in the report. I shall now address these. First of all, in its procedures for approving relevant projects under the Structural Funds, Parliament asks the Commission to ensure that due attention is paid to the need to give women in farming a more relevant role to play. From the beginning, in the 2000-2006 Structural Funds programming period, the Commission recommended that the principle of equal opportunities should be integrated into the Structural Funds and, more recently, the Commission published a Communication that includes recommendations to Member States such as awarding extra points in the selection criteria to projects that contribute to gender equality or to the application of specialist knowledge in this area in the funds’ management.
The interim evaluation of the Structural Funds, due to take place at the end of this year, will take account of these developments. The Commission also agrees with the European Parliament’s insistence on the importance of the Leader initiative – items 12, 13 and 25 of its report – in promoting the role of women in rural areas. The Member States are already obliged to reveal in their annual reports the number of local action groups in which women are part of the decision-making body, the number of women who benefit from Leader funds and the budget that is allocated to these projects. The interim evaluation of Leader, which will be presented at the end of this year, will also give us a better understanding of how these initiatives are working.
Furthermore, the Commission intends, in line with the proposal you make in item 24, to ensure that one of the tasks of the future European observatory, Leader, is to compile and disseminate best practice on integrating and involving farmers in rural development.
The Commission agrees with Parliament on the need to create incentives to encourage women’s participation in farm production and to promote a balanced representation of women farmers in the various decision-making bodies. There are, however, some points your report makes with which the Commission cannot agree. The report wants the Commission to attach priority to ensuring that resources obtained through the modulation of direct aid are reallocated to programmes that incorporate measures to benefit the social groups most in need, such as women in rural areas. Nevertheless, as you know, it falls to the Member States to decide on the future reallocation of resources."@en1
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