Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-09-Speech-2-375"
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"en.20040309.14.2-375"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner Fischler, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, ladies and gentlemen, I was the co-rapporteur for the tobacco part of this important report on the reform of the common organisation of the markets in certain Mediterranean goods. As you know, the aim of the European Commission, which it stated explicitly, is to end the production of tobacco in Europe. This is the first case of forced elimination of a product with historic roots in our continent and which, moreover, is not experiencing a market failure.
I would like to point out here the main and most obvious consequences in the event that the Commission’s proposal is approved. The consumption of tobacco products would not fall and there would be no beneficial effect on the fight against smoking which we all support. There would be no beneficial effect on Member States’ tax takings, which in the European Union total between EUR 15 and 65 million a year just in terms of final consumption taxes on tobacco products. There would be a significant worsening of the European Union’s trade balance following increased imports and reduced exports, with a deficit of more than EUR 800 million a year, equivalent to current Community spending on aid for tobacco producers. Four hundred and ninety thousand people would lose their jobs, in terms of workers in the industry and 10 000 holding owners who, leaving aside the temporary receipt of a payment decoupled from production, would in any case lose their jobs as the lack of economically viable agricultural alternatives in tobacco-producing areas has been amply demonstrated; there would therefore be multitudes of newly unemployed people in the European regions which already have the highest unemployment rates of the current 15 Member States of the Union, and the same would happen in the tobacco-producing regions of the ten new acceding countries, also in view of the fact that over 50% of workers in the European processing industry are women. Other consequences would be: the closure of hundreds of European companies involved in the primary processing industry and ancillary activities
whose existence depends on local availability of the agricultural raw material, with a consequent massive decrease in the taxes paid by the companies and their employees and an even more severe deficit in terms of social security contributions; vast rural areas of the poorest regions of Europe would turn to desert, considering that 80% of European tobacco is grown in Objective 1 areas; there would be a general impoverishment of local systems where the production and processing of tobacco is highly concentrated, which in many cases forms the backbone on which a complex economic and social system is grounded and which currently provides the populations with dignified living conditions.
For the reasons and arguments briefly set out so far, clearly approval of the Commission proposal would, apart from anything else, run counter to the aims of the CAP laid down by Article 33 of the Treaty, which deliberately is not cited as the legal basis of the proposed reform.
I would conclude with an appeal to all my fellow MEPs, in particular those Members from the central and northern European regions since, as we know, tobacco is only produced in certain very specific areas of southern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of families in the European Union, whose future depends on ..."@en1
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