Mr President, the European Parliament is debating today what should have been a simple revision of the common agricultural policy, as laid down in Agenda 2000, approved by the Fifteen in March 1999. However, the debate has a much greater scope as a result of the aspirations of the European Commission, which has wished to impose, without taking account of the will of the Member States and the European Parliament, an in-depth reform of the common agricultural policy, perhaps the greatest in its history. Furthermore, it has proposed providing itself with prerogatives which do not correspond to it at budgetary level. This week, Parliament, on the one hand, should show responsibility towards those Community farmers whose investments require a minimum of stability. And on the other, it should also try to preserve its powers. I have been draftsperson of the opinion of the Committee on Budgets on this reform, which has given me the opportunity to observe certain accounting contradictions in the European Commission’s proposal. For example, the Commission proposed a modification of the common organisation of the market in the milk sector – which is no more than a reform of the reform already adopted in Agenda 2000 for this product – and the costs of which will rise to EUR 1 500 million in 2013, a figure which coincides in that year with the budgetary deficit which the Commission estimates in its financial record sheet. Fortunately, in the debates held in Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development the majority of political groups have demonstrated that they are against this reform, the high cost of which is not justified in any way because the provisions adopted in Agenda 2000 have not yet entered into force. Furthermore, I would like to stress that the decision we adopt today in relation to the reform of the CAP will have repercussions beyond the current financial perspectives, and it is therefore appropriate to take the necessary precautions to prevent a reduction of Parliament’s budgetary powers. Any decision which profoundly modifies the common agricultural policy halfway through Agenda 2000 should be revised within the framework of the next financial perspectives, with the aim of preventing the rash adoption of measures which commit us beyond 2006. In my opinion, it does not make sense, for example, to establish today, definitively and with closed percentages, funds which will be transferred to category 1 B as from 2006, when we have not taken a decision on the non-obligatory expenses in the agricultural budget for the next financial programming period. All this would do would be to create dissatisfaction today amongst European farmers, cutting subsidies and not telling them what that money will be used for and how it will be used. I recognise that the text has been improved in the parliamentary debate, but not sufficiently so. The important thing is that this text does not guarantee balanced development of European agriculture and livestock breeding, and neither does it guarantee a territorial balance amongst the European rural areas. And this Parliament should not send unnecessary and discouraging messages to European farmers.

Political group: PPE-DE