Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-09-21-Speech-2-722"
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"en.20100921.23.2-722"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the remote areas of the European Union, particularly the outermost regions (including the Azores, the region I represent here), mountain regions, islands and sparsely populated areas, suffer from natural and geographical handicaps that are difficult to overcome and have great social costs.
By way of example, I could mention difficulties of access, the high cost of basic public service provision, energy supplies, etc.
We should also remember that only 7% of people in the European Union live in cities and that 14 million Europeans live on islands.
A Union founded on and organised around values such as solidarity and social justice has a political and moral duty to foster the economic and social development of its remote areas. Indeed, that is the main
of the European cohesion policies: territorial cohesion and economic and social convergence.
Hence, the inclusion of territorial cohesion as a new objective for the Union merely reflects its natural process of evolution, and the economic and social convergence strategies are a requirement of its growth.
The EU decided to take this approach a long time ago and it has brought highly positive results in many regions, as they have moved from Objective 1 to Objective 2. In fact, even before these regions reach Objective 2, even while development levels in these remote areas of Europe remain below the European average and they lack proportional support, they still make an irreplaceable contribution to the wealth of European diversity, each with its own particular attributes.
These remote areas of the European Union have a duty to make maximum use of all the development instruments available to them, particularly by focusing on their own specific assets. It is the EU’s duty to ensure the effective integration and cohesion of all its areas; otherwise, its very project for growth will be discredited.
In this context, the Commission must take the lines of action put forward in this proposal into due consideration as a valuable contribution to the success of the European integration project that we all share."@en1
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