Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-23-Speech-2-410"
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"en.20080923.40.2-410"2
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"Mr President, let me start by thanking all of my colleagues in the Committee on International Trade and in the Committee on Legal Affairs for their excellent cooperation on my report on the International Tropical Timber Agreement (ITTA) 2006. The wide political consensus we found is very reassuring, given the extreme importance of the issue of forests, timber and trade.
You may note that almost a year has elapsed between the referral of this agreement to Parliament and this debate this evening. That definitely does not represent any underestimate on the part of the Committee on International Trade as to the importance of this issue; rather it stems from our view that the agreement requires parliamentary assent rather than simple consultation, not least because we have some strong and specific views on the agreement which we believe should be taken into account.
The chairman of the Trade Committee, Mr Markov, will explain further the detailed procedural efforts we made to get a greater role for Parliament on this file and he will also, I am sure, outline the very disappointing response we had from the Council in terms of delay and ultimate refusal.
I said that Parliament has some strong and specific views on the agreement. Without doubt it does represent an improvement on the older ITTA agreement of 20 years ago which, although it was billed as an agreement promoting both trade and sustainability, is in reality very much about trade and not very much about sustainability. Maybe that explains why one of the key signatories to the agreement, Indonesia, has irrevocably lost about three quarters of its forests and why half of all logging in regions like the Amazon, the Congo Basin, South-East Asia, is still done illegally.
So, while the new agreement is an improvement on the former one, and we therefore offer support to the Community’s ratification of it, this should be understood as very much a reluctant endorsement of an unsatisfactory agreement. ITTA 2006 falls well short of what is required to address the problem of the loss of tropical forests. For example, it still defines as its objective the promotion of the expansion of international trade, before moving on to speak in just a few words about sustainability. Again, if you look at the voting structure of the organisation behind the agreement, it gives more votes to producer countries that export more timber, and awards more votes to import-heavy consumer countries. In other words, for all the rhetoric about sustainability, the system is still designed to give greatest influence to those who trade the most.
So our report calls on the Commission to begin already to prepare for the next round of ITTA negotiations to secure a greatly improved successor agreement. Parliament’s assent to any future agreement will depend on a radical change in the underlying objectives of the agreement towards the protection and sustainable management of tropical forests, with trade in tropical timber taking place only to the extent that it is consistent with that objective. That means that the Commission should propose appropriate financing mechanisms for countries that are willing to limit their timber exports, as well as proposing a major reorganisation of the ITTA voting system.
But we also have another demand to make of the Commission, and that is to do with the long-awaited legislative proposal on further measures to combat illegal logging. We absolutely have to see this without delay. It was under preparation at the start of the year, it was supposed to have been voted on by the Commission in May and has been repeatedly delayed due, we understand, to industry pressure. This is despite numerous expressions of wide political support from Parliament for the proposal. The last information we have is that the proposal is to be voted by the college of Commissioners on 15 October – I would be grateful for any confirmation of that – and I would call very strongly on our Commissioners to take their responsibilities very seriously, because this issue of deforestation is a massively important one; it is one that concerns the whole Parliament. I look forward to a very strong and optimistic response from the Commission today."@en1
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