Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-12-13-Speech-2-426"
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"en.20051213.64.2-426"2
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".
Madam President, I should like to say to the Commissioner that we are getting near Christmas and it is a time for giving and generosity, but I think she is getting the message here that EUR 40 million is not very generous at all. If my group supports the report tomorrow it will be with a heavy heart, as the rapporteur has said, because we feel that the EUR 80 million that the Committee on Development voted unanimously for was the minimum. Now we are going to halve that and put only EUR 40 million on the table. We are doing this to get a first reading deal and to ensure rapid disbursement.
It is a paltry sum and even more paltry when compared with the EUR 7 billion we managed to find to support our own producers and companies affected by sugar reform. Perhaps I would not mind so much if I really believed that the money would go to small farmers, but I am not sure that it will. Looking at evidence from the past, I do not believe it will.
In the last two years Tate [amp] Lyle sugar has had GBP 227 million from the CAP budget. Nestlé, in the UK alone, has had GBP 11 million, and even more in Belgium and Holland. I understand that KLM has had money because it put some runways on some former farming land. We need a lot more transparency about where the CAP funds go. French farmers at the moment are getting just 10% of the CAP subsidies. In Spain 18% of the top farmers received 76% of the funding in 2003. We must get away from the idea that it is our farmers versus the farmers in the developing world. As far as I can see, the little people everywhere are not getting very much at all from the CAP at the moment.
To return to the EUR 40 million, it can only be the beginning. I realise this is not your dossier, Commissioner, but I believe you said that there will be substantially more support in the future. If we are going to make poverty history we really must do much more than that in the future.
Many of the 18 protocol countries are not the poorest countries in the world, but they are not the richest either. In fact, they are pretty poor and many of them have just taken the first step on the way to development. I do not think this is the time to pull the rug from under their feet. They need time to adjust to sugar reform and they need money.
When we talk about money we should talk about new money from the EU budget. Let us not talk about taking some money off the development budget to give it to the sugar protocol countries; let us not rob the very poorest to give to the slightly less poor. The Commission President has talked a lot about Robin Hood in the last couple of weeks. Let us not play Robin Hood in reverse. Let us find new money to aid these countries. Let us remember that we have sugar reform and banana reform. These are very small island economies, small states, and they need our support.
I hope the Commissioner will take that message back to her colleagues."@en1
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