Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-06-12-Speech-1-121"
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"en.20060612.18.1-121"2
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"Mr President, groundwater has been a central issue for the environmental movement right since the movement began in the 1970s. We warned that both industry and agriculture were endangering this precious resource. ‘Prophets of doom’ they shouted at us, ‘it will take at least 30 years’. Well, thank you very much indeed. In many places things went much quicker than that, but in some Member States we have, however, been able to keep the groundwater clean and to avoid having the dubious permits sought by all those who, instead of clean water, talked of healthy water with an in-built allowance for what humans and animals can tolerate.
The attacks on our clean water continue. We have had a more or less serviceable Groundwater Directive, which allowed the Member States to preserve the requirement for clean water. Then we got a really good Water Framework Directive – a directive that has been a credit to the EU. What happens, however? The agriculture lobby is now attempting to demolish the Water Framework Directive by the ugly tactic of weakening it wherever possible, as we see with the proposal for the new Groundwater Directive. Fortunately, the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety was able to repair the demolition work. It is now absolutely critical that its emendations be adopted.
The European Environmental Bureau (EEB) has pointed out that 87% of European agricultural land is more polluted than the current guidelines recommend. In May, the EEB sent us a letter containing a powerful recommendation to support the reinstatement proposal on which we will be voting on Wednesday. At issue, in particular, are Amendment 22, part 1 and Amendments 24, 26 and 38, all of which are aimed at clarifying the regulations, and also Amendments 36, 42 and 43, which remove the absurd exemptions from the directive applying to agriculture – exemptions that would be an outright disgrace in terms both of the groundwater and of the reputation of the EU. If these amendments are not adopted, the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance will never be able to support proposals that undermine what we already have."@en1
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