Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-04-06-Speech-4-016"
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"en.20060406.4.4-016"2
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"Mr President, I thank Mr Cornillet for his excellent and wide-ranging report, which covered all the points raised in the debate this morning.
Anyone looking at our Joint Parliamentary Assembly over a number of years, as I certainly have for around 12 years, has seen a very heartening increase in confidence, maturity and, indeed, in engaging on issues related to trade and to political dialogue, to which we attach great importance.
Someone said that everything in Africa was terrible and things were not improving. I do not think that we can make that case. There are limitations, but we are there, working behind the Cotonou Partnership Agreement with parliamentarians in a unique way. There is no other North-South parliamentary assembly such as ours that has this opportunity to press on governance, democracy and human rights, and that is what we do.
On the EDF, briefly, we are concerned and we had a debate at the part-session in Brussels a few weeks ago. Many of us are concerned about the situation of the overseas countries and territories in relation to the EDF. We are concerned that allowance has not been made for the entry of East Timor into the ACP-EU relationship, and we have a number of other concerns. We are always puzzled about the 3% or 4% administration costs. I do not know why the Commission needs to put money in to pay itself for the job it is doing. I find that rather odd.
Let me turn briefly to sugar, with which the Commissioner has been directly involved. At the weekend I am going to Africa – Swaziland – and Mauritius to look again at the issues related to sugar there. The Commissioner must be aware that the figures we now have on the budget line, going from EUR 130 million up to EUR 170 million by 2013, are far short of what the Commissioner and others had promised, which was EUR 190 million. My own government talked about EUR 230 million. They are going to get EUR 1.1 billion at the end of 2013 and it is back-loaded. How can that be sensible? We urge the Commissioner to look at this and to try to make this more workable. Stop this back-loading and increase the amounts on the budget line for these countries.
The issue is not just about employment in sugar, as the Commissioner must know – because we made enough fuss about it in Europe – but also about the other developments that depend on and grow around that source of employment. Thousands and thousands of livelihoods are at stake in those 18 Sugar Protocol countries. You can rely on us in the Joint Parliamentary Assembly to keep raising this issue.
We have work in progress. Our committees are working well and I think that we can fairly say that the Joint Parliamentary Assembly can only grow in strength in future years. We will continue to fight on EDF, trade and other concerns and priorities that we share with our fellow Joint Parliamentary Assembly parliamentarians."@en1
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