Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-04-20-Speech-2-244"
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"en.20040420.9.2-244"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner Schreyer, you said that the medium-term financial plans also determined our policies for the next few years, and indeed they do. In the realm of agriculture, unless the worst comes to the worst, we shall obtain codecision, and our system of financial planning has a substantial agricultural component. We in the European Parliament want to be involved; we have no wish to accept the implication in the draft constitution that all power over money matters tends to rest with the Council, and we shall play our active role here. You also said that expenditure on agriculture would fall, while expenditure on sustainable business activity would rise. That is all very well, but if you consider the second pillar, to which rural development belongs, there is no real increase once you take account of the fact that there will soon be 25 and then 27 Member States. This needs to be rectified, particularly since the proposals formulated in the agricultural domain did not provide for capping.
The third point is that we want to be more heavily involved in research. In the framework programme for research and development, only five of the individual programmes relate to agriculture. There is therefore a need to focus more sharply on the economic development of agriculture in rural areas.
Allow me to conclude by returning to the discussion that took place on gross national income and to the contributions on that issue. I see little sense in the letter proposing a limit of one per cent. The proposal that the Commission has now made is an offer – let me just call it that, although I would personally have preferred a rather more sharply defined line to follow. We must, of course, succeed in narrowing the wide gulf between authorisations and disbursements by means of better policy – and this is naturally a matter for Parliament too.
One final thought: you have formed a reserve for a Growth Adjustment Fund, but there is no provision for a specific reserve to deal with crises in areas such as foreign policy or the environment. This, I believe, is something that ought to be rectified."@en1
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