Mr President, I would like to start by thanking all my fellow Members from the various Parliamentary groups who have made a substantial contribution to the preparatory work for this report to express Parliament’s position on the Commission’s Communication on ECHO’s activities, on emergency aid and on humanitarian activities. The committee’s unanimity regarding the report is evidence of highly profitable cooperation, and I hope that this will be reflected in the final vote in the Chamber tomorrow. A discussion on ECHO, or humanitarian aid, will include mention of the worst tragedies and the greatest contradictions of our time. It will touch on war, natural disasters and the damage to the world’s ecology system, on the continued tragic ethnic conflicts and civil and military wars, on the basic injustice underlying the North/South relationship and the suffering, in particular, of the most vulnerable peoples; of women, children and the elderly. And the truth is that the forecast for the next few years does not indicate an improvement in this situation. I merely refer to a number of newspaper articles which have appeared during recent months on issues such as the fact that a totally unexpected part of the North Pole has shown signs of melting, the water poisoning in Bangladesh which is endangering safety, health and hygiene conditions for 25 million people, or the drought in many parts of Africa. We must therefore be responsible and realistic, and, even more than in the past, we must plan action for the future to prevent natural disasters and to respond to the consequences of the tragedies often – almost always – caused by man. These planning operations require an improvement in coordination at international level between the European Union and all the other parties involved in humanitarian aid, and greater cooperation within the European Union between the Commission and the instruments available to the Member States, in order to avoid the repetition of the frequent past cases – referred to in the Commission document and confirmed by the assessments – of duplication and repetition of action and, thus, wastage of energy and resources. In this context, I find it unacceptable – and both my report and Parliament’s position are clear on this point – that ECHO should be reduced to a source of funding for initial relief operations and nothing else. We need to act in a wider perspective. The objective of ECHO and of European Union activities must be, firstly, to increase preventive action and then, secondly, to link emergency and initial relief actions to the operations intended to re-establish minimum living conditions in places affected by natural disasters and wars, thereby providing humanitarian aid during the stage following provision of emergency aid. The sums in question may well be limited, in terms of more general budgets, but we are talking about EUR 2 500 million which have been allocated over the last four years by the European Commission to non-governmental organisations (56%), United Nations agencies (25%), the Red Cross (11%) and other direct operations carried out by ECHO or specialised Member States agencies. There we are. In my opinion, the Commission’s analysis compels us to act to further strengthen ECHO and to avoid the prevalence of certain positions present within the Council, which is divided over these issues. Certain people in the Council are of the opinion that ECHO’s activities should be reduced, but I take the completely opposite view. One very last point, Mr President: ECHO cannot be treated as an ATM service where international agencies or non-governmental organisations withdraw money and do not even tell the beneficiaries where the funding came from. The European public and the beneficiaries should be told about this remarkable work by ECHO. This is why we have proposed – and I hope that Commissioner Patten, who is not listening to me at the moment, will take this proposal on board with due consideration – that an information campaign be mounted to inform the public of our countries how our money is being spent and how our resources are being used, and we propose that this information campaign should not, of course, be financed out of ECHO funds but out of the ad hoc funds.

Political group: PSE