Mr President, the Group of the welcomes the creation of a new regional fisheries organisation to govern the South-East Atlantic, namely the South-East Atlantic Fisheries Organisation (SEAFO), and also the Community participation in this organisation. As stated by Mrs McKenna, who I warmly congratulate on her report, the body will organise and manage an area in which the Community fleet fishes and in which we also have fisheries relations with the coastal countries. As part of SEAFO, the Community will be able to contribute to research and to the adoption of measures to conserve stocks, applying high levels of responsible management to fishing, as laid down in the International Law of the Sea. I would encourage the Commission and the Council to ensure that the Community participates in all the existing regional fisheries organisations and in those to be formed in future, in the interests of the Community fisheries sector, as the European Parliament requested of them in its resolution on the Green Paper. I would like to point to two problems: the first arises from the fact that RFOs do not have a weighted voting system, so the Community is therefore disadvantaged by only having a single vote, like a micro-State that is a contracting party; and the second is the long deadlines for the transposal into Community law of the binding agreements for the Community, adopted within these regional organisations. The administrative procedures need to be improved. I should also like to ask the Commission to thoroughly prepare its position before attending meetings of the SEAFO and the other RFOs, by consulting the sector. This requires good communication and relations between the Commission and the industry. I must not miss this opportunity to express my concern over an idea put forward by the Commission in its proposal for the reform of the common fisheries policy where it indicates, with regard to RFOs, that the Community should only intervene in cases of real interest to the Community fisheries sector. What does the Commission mean by real interest? I think this self-imposed restriction is particularly damaging to the principles of responsible fishing recommended by the Community, which the latter should advocate in all fora, in accordance with Article 174 of the Treaty, which states that the Community policy in this field will contribute to “promoting measures at international level to deal with regional or worldwide environmental problems”. I believe that the Community’s presence and leadership in the RFOs are necessary both in order to safeguard the sustainability of resources in European and non-European waters equally – as stated by the Commission itself – and in order to ensure that due account is taken of the interests of nations that practise distant-water fishing, in the same way that account is taken of the interests of coastal States. The Group of the therefore asks the Commission, within the SEAFO and the other RFOs, to coordinate Community policies as a whole, and vice versa, for the Commission also to coordinate all its policies to defend the interests of the Community fleet worldwide, because only in this way will European fishermen be adequately protected. The Commission department dedicated to RFOs must therefore be given sufficient financial and human resources to be able to carry out these duties successfully.

Political group: PSE