Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-05-17-Speech-1-186"
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"Mr President, Policy Coherence for Development means not giving with one hand and taking away with the other. It makes no sense, for example, to provide funding to support agriculture in developing countries if, at the same time, we destroy the local markets through direct or indirect export subsidies.
Similarly, we may be continuing with great efforts to promote health provision yet, at the same time, we are preventing the trade in generic medicines or pushing up the prices of medicines to prohibitive levels by extending patent protection. Agrofuels may possibly reduce CO
emissions in the EU a little, but result in deforestation and land grabbing in developing countries, thereby leading to more climate change – which is precisely what we wanted to avoid, not to mention the displacement of indigenous populations and the loss of biodiversity and farm land for growing food. At the moment, we – that is, the EU
are not particularly coherent.
The EU has long recognised in theory that political measures must not be contradictory. Policy Coherence for Development is laid down in the Treaty of Lisbon. Article 208 states: ‘The Union shall take account of the objectives of development cooperation in the policies that it implements which are likely to affect developing countries.’ Let us be judged by this requirement.
This year, we are reviewing the progress made towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals. It is obvious that we will not be able to keep our promises unless our policies are coherent. We – all of us that adopt and transpose legislation – need to be aware of this responsibility. Before we decide on a measure, we need to assess the consequences, so that we can recognise the negative effects that European legislation may have on developing countries. We need expertise in the Council, the Commission and in Parliament that can recognise incoherent aspects. The Commission’s work programme on policy coherence is a good step in this direction. It is now a matter of how this plan is implemented.
Policy Coherence for Development means giving greater consideration to the interests of local people in our reform of fisheries policy and not allowing these interests to be subsumed by the interests of European fisheries concerns. It means that we must dry up streams of money that flow from developing countries into tax havens. It means that we cannot adopt ACTA if there remains a suspicion that this agreement could disrupt the supply of medicines or technologies in developing countries. So far, the Commission has not been able to eliminate this suspicion. Policy coherence also means that development policy must remain a strong, independent policy area in the creation of the European External Action Service and that the field of competence of the Commissioner for Development must be expanded, not restricted. It also includes allowing municipalities to take fair trade, for example, into consideration as a procurement criterion, as proposed by Mrs Rühle.
In many cases, we Members of Parliament need to keep a close eye on the Commission and the Council to ensure that policies are coherent. In many cases, however, it is up to us – the Members of Parliament – to provide coherence for development. We need the committees to be more joined up and we need a permanent rapporteur.
The report – which was unanimously adopted by the Committee on Development – contains many good proposals and takes us a good step forward. I would like to thank all the shadow rapporteurs, the ombudsman and all the NGOs for their cooperation and assistance, and I hope that our joint report will be able to be adopted in plenary tomorrow."@en1
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