Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-10-10-Speech-3-217"
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"en.20071010.22.3-217"2
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"Mr President, I also right away wish to congratulate the rapporteur, Mr Chatzimarkakis, on this report. We might well ask, of course, what sort of a report could be expected of a rapporteur who has the common sense of a German, the heart of a Greek, and even a bit of the Finnish landscape in his soul. We might say in such a case that the report might turn out to be rather good in many respects, and that happens to be true with this one. My congratulations once again.
It is true that, when we speak of agriculture and the system for financing it, it is very important that we stress the importance of transparency. Transparency is the basis of everything. Of course, another factor that has to go hand in hand with transparency, with regard to financing programmes, is fairness. In my few years here in the European Parliament, however, I have come to see that fairness, if anything, is a relative concept, and that the way we perceive it varies. In any case, I hope that increased transparency will also boost the confidence of the public in our decision-making system and in the notion that we here want to make the right kind of decisions on the financing of agriculture as much as in any other area.
I would nevertheless like to mention my concern about agriculture in a broader context. In mentioning fairness, I hope that in future we will pay attention not just to transparency but also to fairness.
Now, with the Commissioner present, it is very important to ensure that the small Member States also get treated properly. In the future too we could make sure that any sort of national self-sufficiency can be preserved. We in Finland have some serious examples of this, with the decision on sugar taken very recently by the European Union and the decisions on agricultural payments too. They do not treat the small and the big Member States in the same way, and in this respect I hope there will be greater attention paid to fairness in future, now that this matter of transparency has been sorted out in the context of Mr Chatzimarkakis’s report.
We must ensure that the European Union and our decision-making system are open and something which our citizens can trust in and which they feel they can support in the future."@en1
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