Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-06-16-Speech-1-221"
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"en.20080616.27.1-221"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, let me begin by translating the title of my report. When we speak of ‘biological natural resources’, we are referring to timber and fish. Timber and fish are the key resources for the social and economic development of the West African region. It follows that we are also speaking of deforestation.
We all know how alarming this development is. Of the forestry that existed in West Africa fifty years ago, only about 13% is still standing today. This means that 87% of the land that was once afforested has already been cleared. We all know what impact this has on climatic trends and the desertification process.
We have equally alarming statistics on overfishing in that area of the Atlantic and the grave problems it is creating. We are all familiar, of course, with the images of overloaded canoes landing on the Canary Islands with cargos of migrants from West Africa. The connection between the trends I have described and the increased migration to the European Union from West Africa is obvious and incontrovertible and is also a subject of political debate, of course, within our societies.
The European Union is the main market for timber and fish. We ourselves say that we buy some 80% of these products. For this reason, it is prudent, and indeed essential, to review the coherence of our development policy, our fisheries policy and our policy on trade in timber in order to establish the extent to which they interact fruitfully or whether their aims may also be mutually obstructive in some respects.
In the case of both products there is a need to prevent illegal plundering and to establish sustainable resource management. In the case of both products there is a need to ensure that the needs of the local economy and local consumers take precedence over international trade. If we do not achieve these aims, any self-sustaining development will be undermined, and the success of any development cooperation will be put at risk. That is why it is so important to conduct this coherence review in order to ensure that the other policies we pursue do not impair and undermine our development policy.
We know the instruments with which we can improve the situation. We need better monitoring of fish stocks and forests and better surveillance of the timber and fishing industries. We also need the establishment of the appropriate infrastructure for research into stock development and for the control and surveillance of economic activities. We have known this for a long time, and indeed that is the political course we have been steering for some time too.
In this context we must focus our efforts chiefly on combating illegal logging, illegal fishing and trade in illegal products. We must do that locally in West Africa. To that end, we must support our partner countries in West Africa, which includes helping them to gain access to the EU market. We must develop our monitoring systems. One of the vital tasks in the realm of development policy is to redirect our efforts towards a sustainable conservationist approach to logging, forestry management and fishing.
Allow me to deal with one more point and refer to a conflict concerning the report. We stated in the report that we must improve the conditions for joint ventures between companies in the European Union and African partners and that we must provide for the protection of investments. I find that right and proper, and these are necessary measures, but we must ensure that they do not create excess capacities which undermine the pursuit of our other measures, such as those designed to combat overfishing.
It is absolutely imperative that we resolve this conflict of aims. For this reason we added this statement to the opinion of the Committee on Fisheries as an additional point. I am anxious that the procedural conflict about who is entitled to make additions to what and where and when such additions can be made should not obscure the substance of the addition. It is of prime importance, in my view, to uphold the principle that no new excess capacities should be created. As you know, there has been a motion to delete this point from the report, but we must not allow that to happen."@en1
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