Mr President, this morning’s debate is very important. I therefore thank the Commission and the Council for having made a statement on the coherence of Community policies in relation to development, because this demonstrates a will to make policy in this area more effective. However, if we are simply carrying out a diagnosis of the incoherences in our policy, we will end up totally frustrated and, furthermore, the result will be negative. As with the systems of forces which are studied in basic physics, it makes no sense to implement policies which will cancel each other out. The result of this absurd game is not zero, but rather a minus number, as a consequence of the material, financial and human resources thrown away in a pointless enterprise. With regard to policy, this minus number is multiplied by the number of results which are not achieved each time one measure cancels out the intended effect of another. In today’s globalised world, this fact is all the more obvious. There are no boundaries for Community policies. I am therefore glad that the Commission and the Council are once again taking an interest in the coherence of Community policies, and that, together with complementarity between national and Community policies and coordination between the services of the Commission, they intend to shape the policy on cooperation in accordance with the development of the European Union. Both the Commission and the Portuguese Presidency of the Council state, in their respective working programmes, that they wish to give coherence to those policies which have a very important impact on the developing countries, but they do not specify concrete measures aimed at introducing this coherence. Both institutions identify the most important areas where this idea should be applied. For example, the Commission, in its long term guidelines, says that the objective of sustainable development must be based on a strong sense of solidarity, supported by a commercial policy which takes common interests into account. The Commission is addressing a very important area, that is, commercial policy. However, this Parliament wishes to add policies to aid development, agriculture, fisheries policy, immigration, our position in international financial institutions, the common foreign and security policy and aid for structural reform. The Council – and Mr Luis Amado has said this this morning – has spoken on different occasions of the need for coherence – the last time, it is true, being in November 1999, and also on other occasions, such as the Development Councils of May 1999 and June 1997 – but with no concrete results. Since the Development Council is in agreement with what he says – and this is very significant – there is little we can say, as some previous speakers have pointed out. However, as Parliament, we wish to propose – as others have said and as the resolution states – the creation of an inter-service working group consisting of the people responsible for all the policies mentioned and the establishment of a monitoring centre for the coherence of the different Community policies, which is capable of anticipating the effects of each policy on the developing countries and amongst themselves. What we really want, however, is to be realists and not hide away from the fact that the achievement of these objectives of coordination, complementarity and, the most complex one, which we are discussing at the moment, coherence, will require a more developed policy than the one we currently have in the European Union. Let us hope – and we do hope – to be guided by the winds of change created by the Intergovernmental Conference, the reform of the Commission – which will also affect the development services –, this new legislature and the prospects for enlargement, to perfect a more coherent political union. We therefore hope that the Commission, in the report it is going to present to us on global policy, will also address the question of coherence as an integral element in the efficient use of Community resources and the specific management of public interests.

Political group: PSE