Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-01-17-Speech-1-102-000"
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"en.20110117.14.1-102-000"2
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"Madam President, let me begin by thanking Yannick Jadot for his exemplary cooperation with his shadows. We all worked extremely well on this report and I am delighted – as he has said – that we managed to reach a broad consensus.
The agreements with Congo and Cameroon, taken together with Ghana, means that some of Africa’s most vulnerable forests are now covered by Voluntary Partnership Agreements. The existence of these agreements, as the two previous speakers have said, is to be warmly welcomed. They provide a mechanism for tackling the massive illegal trade in timber. They provide an opportunity for the better management of a vital natural resource and, hopefully, they will bring greater transparency and help us tackle corruption in the forest sector, which, unfortunately in Africa, is endemic at the moment.
But, while welcoming these agreements, I nevertheless share with the rapporteur a number of concerns. I would just like to express three this evening.
First and foremost, the danger – it is not the intention, but there is a danger – of agreeing such a framework is that it is seen as providing a framework for large-scale exploitation of our forests, leading to the opposite of the purpose of the agreement, namely, further degradation and further deforestation, thus contributing to the very destruction of the global environment we are trying to avoid. What we want is an agreement that contributes to the conservation and sustainable management of our biodiversity resources. I agree with the rapporteur that this means that the Commission has to constantly monitor the situation and report back regularly on how the agreement is progressing.
Secondly, indigenous people, who are so often the victims of environmental exploitation, should benefit from this agreement. The promise in the Voluntary Partnership Agreement by the Congolese Government to promote a law ensuring that the rights of indigenous people are promoted and respected must be delivered upon. Again, I urge the Commission, in their contact with the government, to continually press for the delivery of this promise until it is there on the statute book in the Congo.
Thirdly, we must ensure – and I agree with Catherine Bearder who mentioned this – that appropriate funds are available to properly implement this agreement. No matter how good an agreement is on paper, without the resources to carry it out, it is a meaningless piece of paper. As has been indicated, there are no financial packages attached to the agreement itself. It is up to us – both the Commission to propose, and Parliament and Council to put into the budget appropriate budgetary facilities – to make this agreement work. That means we need to have money to verify the legality of timber coming into the European Union, we need money to train, equip and give the technical expertise to those operating in the African countries we have VPAs with, and we also need resources to carry out the monitoring that I have already mentioned.
So we need to make sure, in the coming months, that we deliver the financial framework to make a success of these agreements. I repeat that these are good agreements but, like all agreements, they will depend on the goodwill and vigilance of individuals – the non-government organisations, the Member States, the Congolese and Cameroon governments – to deliver on their promises to make sure these agreements work in practice. They should lead to better management of our forests and better management of vital global resources but, if wrongly handled, they could take us in the opposite direction. We look to the Commission to keep a beady eye on the progress that is being made."@en1
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