Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-11-12-Speech-1-137"
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"en.20071112.20.1-137"2
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"Thank you, Madam President, and thank you also to Commissioner Dimas for his decisive support for this directive.
We would like to welcome the Commission’s proposal, as of course it aims to protect the soil and preserve its capacity to continue to carry out its environmental, economic, social and cultural functions, all of which are of course essential to human activity.
Moreover, as the Commissioner rightly said, it proposes flexible rules, which are ambitious in their objectives and not excessively prescriptive in their content. Within a common framework, a minimum common denominator, the Member States are going to define their own level of intervention, enabling more efficient use of administrative capacity at national level.
Despite the exaggerated resistance to this directive from some sectors, it is evident that soil is a vital resource that is essentially non-renewable, which is suffering under growing environmental pressure for which human activity has significant responsibility.
According to the reports that have been discussed here, it has been calculated that the cost of soil degradation is approximately EUR 40 000 million per year, a cost that is borne by society in the form of damage to infrastructure, increases in the cost of healthcare and many other factors.
This directive is of course based on the precautionary and preventive action principles, and on the principle that environmental damage must be rectified at its origin and that the polluter pays.
This legislation will mitigate the cross-border effects of soil degradation, which do also exist, and it will help to ensure equal conditions in the internal market.
I would like to highlight this aspect, because the different obligations that economic operators may impose, in line with different national soil protection legislation, could distort competition.
To conclude, the soil protection directive is a step forward that will enable competition with greater transparency and will protect areas of common interest such as water, food safety and human health."@en1
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