Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-22-Speech-2-074"
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"en.20050222.6.2-074"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, before I do anything else I should like to offer my warm thanks to all of the Members of this House who have shown great interest in this important subject. I shall first thank the shadow rapporteurs, Mr Trakatellis, Mrs Corbey, Mr Staes, Mrs de Brún. I should also like to thank, of course, all of the Members who provided invaluable help while I was drawing up this report. I appreciate their help.
In conclusion, I hope that the Commission proves to be ambitious in implementing this Action Plan for the next six years. I have no doubt, Mr Dimas, that you will work in tandem with your colleague, Mr Kyprianou, in order to ensure the necessary complementarity between the Action Plan and the European Public Health Programme. You can, of course, rely on our support in Parliament to obtain the appropriate financing to meet the challenges that I have just spoken about, under the seventh research framework programme and in chapter four of the financial perspectives.
Furthermore, I hope that you are predisposed towards your services drawing up a green paper on pollution inside buildings, from crèches to homes and schools, which remains the poor relation of environmental legislation. All of which is to say that Europe must learn the lessons from the scandals of smoking and asbestos, to name but two. Europe is involved in a race against time, and against all forms of pollution. Commissioner, we have a duty, both the Commission and Parliament, to ensure that the health of the citizens – all of the citizens – takes precedence over other considerations.
The debate in all of the political groups has been heated and, I would say, in keeping with the challenges and expectations. 89% of European citizens have said that they are extremely concerned about the impact of the environment on their health, and with good reason. The figures are revealing and I shall just mention a few of them: one sixth of child deaths and diseases in Europe can be attributed to environmental causes; the incidence of respiratory allergic diseases has doubled over the last 20 years, today affecting one in seven children; almost 10% of workers are exposed to carcinogenic substances; 14% of couples seek help because of difficulty in conceiving. I could cite more figures and examples, and, indeed, the Members of this House have not hesitated to do this during the course of the debates.
The Commission responded to these figures in June 2003 by launching the SCALE environment and health strategy, which stands for Science, Children, Awareness, Legal instruments, Evaluation. This initiative gave rise to much hope, which was well summed up by Commissioner Wallström’s statement during the debate in plenary in March of last year. She said, and I quote, ‘there are certain areas where we cannot risk waiting until our knowledge is complete, but need to act according to the precautionary principle, and we shall do so’.
This European strategy ought to act as a launch pad for the Action Plan before us, for which I am the rapporteur, but this is not this case. This action plan, as far as I am concerned, does not live up to its name. It would be more accurately described as a programme to assess the overall impact of the environment on health. It does, of course, raise a wide range of interesting points which are worth mentioning and I would highlight the following: raising awareness of the risks run by the citizens, training experts in health and the environment – of whom there are far too few – and the introduction of biomonitoring at European level. I feel that there are many interesting initiatives, but these do not dispel the sense of incompleteness that came through when I read the Commission’s communication.
It strikes me that an approach that takes the paradigm for the 21st century as absolute scientific evidence goes against the precautionary principle. The 52 European environment and health ministers who gathered in Budapest last June for a conference on the theme of ‘A future for our children’ took this on board when they placed emphasis on the delicate yet necessary balance between more research and the urgent need to take preventative action to protect people’s health. We should endeavour to strike that balance here.
This is why we made exposure to dangerous chemical substances one of the priorities of this report. More specifically, in paragraph 6, we call for the precautionary principle to be applied to a range of substances that are damaging to health, particularly certain heavy metals, such as mercury and cadmium, six products from the phthalate family used in PVC plastics and four insecticides suspected of being
endocrine disruptors and at the root of serious malformations.
Reinforcing this European plan is also a matter of drawing inspiration from the ambitious actions already put in place by the Member States, and achieving success. I mention these in points 23 and 28 of the resolution.
I am also delighted that Members of this House support the approach that I have taken aimed at placing children at the heart of this Action Plan, including the request that the Commission should carry out an epidemiological study on children, from birth to 18 years of age.
A further crucial aspect is the fight against passive smoking. The Commission has taken this consideration on board, and this is something that we welcome. It is seeking to designate environmental tobacco smoke a class 1 carcinogen. Let us be clear on this issue: as far as I am concerned, the message that we send out to the public, covered in point 20 of the resolution, must not be watered down in any way. Tobacco smoke kills both smokers and non-smokers. In Belgium alone, 2 000 people a year die from the effects of passive smoking, which is as high as the number of victims of road accidents."@en1
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