Mr President, the Commission's recent proposals on the reform of the CAP do not simply recommend a mid-term, corrective review, but give the coup de grace to small and medium-sized farming, reducing the quality and competitiveness of agricultural produce and destroying the environment. With harsh, forcible measures, which none of the reports we are debating revokes; rather they gild their destructive logic with anodyne amendments on individual issues, Community farming is being brought into line with conditions on the so-called globalised market and farmers are being turned on Mr Fischler's 'because I say so' from producers into businessmen, as he is wont to say; in other words they are prey to the laws of the market, importers and multinationals in the foodstuffs industry. Decoupling subsidies from production and paying direct income support, modulation with the gradual reduction and degression of support over and above EUR 5 000 per holding and making aid conditional on strict compliance with environmental standards, so-called cross compliance, are turning the already disastrous CAP into a mechanism for wiping out farmers, with radical changes to the productive map of the countryside. Mr Cunha's analgesic proposals such as, for example, the partial decoupling method, in other words making decoupling gradual rather than universal, with fewer products in the first year instead of all products, revoke none of the above and, on a medium-term basis, they will have the same catastrophic results on the rural economy. The objective of the reform of the CAP is to save resources from agriculture for other policies – EMU, CFSP and others – and to orientate farming to the market on terms of unadulterated competition, with no social, development or environmental criteria, as required by the mechanisms of the WHO and pressure from the USA. The reference to environmental protection, which is repeated throughout, is being used as an alibi to reduce agricultural production. A typical example of this hypocrisy is in the giving way to pressure from the USA for the release and use of genetically-modified organisms, with unforeseeable adverse repercussions on the environment and public health. The famous multifunctionality of agriculture, with resources being reallocated to the second pillar for supposed rural development, is nothing more than a very poor pretext to conceal the pursued objective of marginalising the rural world and changing its social and environmental role. The implementation of these proposals leaves no margin to develop the rural economy, leads to the forcible readjustment of holdings, the disappearance of small-scale cultivation, and an increase in tenant farmers both in the new Member States and in the existing Member States, increases the profits of the multinationals and reinforces and consolidates the plundering of developing countries and their peoples. Not only do Parliament's reports fail to get their act together and move away from the Commission's disastrous policy; on the contrary, they add fuel to its fire. As the farmers are fighting not to embellish but to overturn anti-farming reforms, we shall vote against these proposals. We take the farmers' side and support them in their proactive fight, which is the only way to secure their survival and protect the quality of products, the consumer and the environment.

Political group: GUE-NGL