Madam President, when we look at the European agricultural policy, two things catch our eye. Firstly, it takes up almost half the budget – that is a widely known fact. Secondly we can state fairly generally that this policy is not held in particularly high esteem in Europe. I think that something needs to be done about this. Perhaps the proposals Mr Fischler made last week can improve things. I think that we must also ensure that the agricultural accounts are above suspicion. Now, agriculture is part of the European budget for which there is a special procedure for auditing the accounts – the clearance of accounts, as it is known. Every year, between EUR 600 million and EUR 800 million is claimed back from this budget of approximately EUR 45 billion. The big question is whether this is enough. Since 1996 we have had a new procedure that more or less involves closing the accounts annually and taking long-term decisions on the conformity of these accounts, in other words about the question as to whether this budget has been properly executed. In 1996 a conciliation body was set up to resolve any conflicts between the Commission and the Member States, and accreditation of the paying agencies responsible for execution and payments in the Member States was introduced. That is being left to the Member States. What experience have we had since 1996? Firstly, following in the footsteps of the Court of Auditors, we can draw the general conclusion that there is a mixed system that is relatively satisfactory – but that is as far as it goes. There is clearly room for improvement. What improvements do we want to see? We would like the decisions on discharge to be more clearly based on one specific financial year. At the moment these decisions still relate to different financial years, and that is ambiguous. In 1996 we also expected that everything would take place a lot more quickly, but that has clearly not been the case. With regard to the conciliation body, we had hoped that there would be fewer cases before the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, but that has also not been the case. If a specific paying agency keeps making mistakes, the Commission should, in my opinion, have the opportunity to withhold payments for a couple of months until it is satisfied that the paying agency is functioning properly. The Commission might say that this does not tally with the system of proportionality and that the penalty is much too great. We are certainly not arguing for all payments of agricultural subsidies to a specific country to be suspended, however; what we are saying is that if things continuously go wrong in a certain sector, the Commission must be able to stop paying the money into the Member State’s account until the situation improves. The control of agricultural subsidies is particularly important in view of the enlargement of the European Union. The system that will soon be used for making payments is the IACS system. We can see from the reports from the Court of Auditors that this system is not yet operational in any of the current Member States. We hope, as does the Commission, that it will be operational in a few months’ time. We also note that Greece still does not meet the conditions despite having been a member for so many years. It is therefore all the more urgent that the Commission propose a firm approach to this matter and thus also refuse to pay the money if these things are not put right. We also think that it is a shortcoming that there is still no discharge arrangement for an increasingly more important part of the European budget, namely rural development, as there is for the 1 A part of the budget. Now I would like to touch on another of this Parliament’s pet subjects: we would like to know from one year to the next which points can be said to have been improved. We are familiar with the DAS methodology and could envisage getting indicators about the size of the percentage error in the dairy sector or the tobacco sector, for example. This is something that Parliament has been wanting for some time. We would then be able to check from one year to the next how much improvement there has been. This evening the Council is conspicuous by its absence, which is highly regrettable given the importance of this subject. We would like to see the adoption of Parliament’s proposal of about a year ago, to the effect that the period of time allowed for corrections should be extended from 24 to 36 months. In conclusion – again in the context of enlargement – we think that it is high time the Commission created ways of controlling agricultural subsidies better by paying them in advance so that we can avoid errors instead of having to correct them afterwards.

Political group: ELDR