Mr President, Commissioner, I should first like to call to mind with sorrow and not a little horror all those whose deaths were associated with the health crisis which so cruelly affected the older generation in our country, France, but also in other countries. I believe that they have to be our prime concern. I shall, however, be speaking mainly about the problems of forest fires. Every year, unfortunately, we are accustomed to expressing our sympathies: this was the case last year with the floods in central Europe and this year it is the same with the fires. We usually find the appropriate words and our sincerity is not in doubt, but very often we feel powerless to come up with an adequate response at European level. Moreover, for a long time words were all we had until, following debates that crossed all political divides and on your initiative, Commissioner – and I congratulate you on this – we are setting up this Solidarity Fund, which today meets a widely felt commitment, that is to ensure that the European Union is as close as possible to its people, in particular when they are in great distress. You have reported on how this new instrument is being used. I believe that it is doing a great deal of good. It is alleviating the effects of serious crises, but strangely, by a bizarre twist of history, we are in the process of reliving the same situation with forest fires. We used to have a specific policy, a specific instrument and a specific budget. This was mentioned by Mrs Ferrer and it is not old; it dates from 1992. It was a European regulation, directly accessible to all foresters or public authorities that owned forests, enabling them to invest as a preventive measure – because as you said, Commissioner, prevention is better than cure – in specialised fire-fighting equipment: firebreaks, water supply points, access tracks and so on. In fact we saw fit to abolish this regulation at the beginning of the year. The regulation had a budget of EUR 52 million from 1992 to 1997 and EUR 77 million from 1997 to 2002. Today another regulation is being proposed to us which serves an entirely different purpose and which does not mention or budget for protecting forests against fire, and that is 'Forest Focus', with a budget of EUR 41 million. If we were to continue down this road, the conclusion people would draw would be that in 2003, a catastrophic year in terms of fire, the European Union took the decision to abandon its policy of forest-fire protection. I believe that we should spare ourselves the public ridicule and the public rejection. Commissioner, there are quite a number of us here, on all of the benches, who consider that EUR 60 million is a high price to pay to damage Europe's image if, on the day when a disaster of this magnitude were unfolding, we were to abandon a tool which is a preventative tool, which works, which people are happy with, and which foresters the length and breadth of Europe are calling for. I would therefore ask you to repeat the strange acrobatics that we performed on the Solidarity Fund in the face of very strong opposition. It took the floods in Germany for people finally to recognise the need for a Solidarity Fund. It will perhaps have taken the tragic fires in Portugal for us to return, as I hope we will, to this regulation on protecting forests against fire, which has done us good service and which to abandon would, it seems to me today, send out a very bad signal.

Political group: PSE