Mr President, I must say that today's debate on the third cohesion report, for the fourth community support framework, is basically much easier than previous debates which we have held on the same matter in the European Parliament, and I think that one basic reason for this is the personal contribution to it by Commissioner Barnier, in the sense that he started the dialogue on the new 2007-2013 programming period very early, making it possible, thanks also to the assistance of the European Parliament and thanks to the fact that he also listened to the views of the European Parliament, to achieve a broad consensus on this very difficult issue. We therefore need to give him credit and to note, of course, that Commissioner Fischler, who is present here, and Commissioner Diamantopoulou helped him in this. I should also add that this endeavour was complicated by impending enlargement, with many new countries covered by the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund, and by the fact that the regional policy of the European Union basically needs to be reprogrammed from its foundations. I think that both the third cohesion report, as presented by the European Commission, and the position of the European Parliament clearly demonstrate the usefulness of this policy. I also think that the first message which needs to be made clear from this debate here is that the European Parliament and the European Commission are against any thoughts of renationalising this policy. This policy has European added value, it has visible results in the regions, especially in the regions which have problems, in the poorest regions, and it must continue. Another thing I should like to add is that this policy, especially with enlargement coming up, must be given material support from the point of view of funding, which is why Parliament is also reiterating once again its position that funding for it cannot be below 0.46% of gross national product. Consequently, we agree with the European Commission which, in all events, has adopted a European Parliament proposal on this. The European Parliament welcomes the fact that the lion's share from the point of view of funding is going to what has been known so far as Objective 1, the 'convergence objective' as it is to be known henceforth, and we consider that the problem created in areas which fall victim to statistics needs to be addressed effectively. These areas also need to be integrated into Objective 1 and to receive substantial financial coverage and, furthermore, we consider that the areas which fall victim to statistics – and here we disagree with the European Commission – should be integrated from the point of view of state aid into the provisions of Article 87, paragraph 3a of the Treaty. The European Parliament also considers that it is right to simplify the approach to Objective 2 and we also consider it right that the initiatives we have known so far – Equal, Leader and Urban – are being integrated into the basic programmes of the European Union and that the only Community initiative left, as a new Objective 3 if you will, is the Interreg initiative on cross-border cooperation, which we see as an addition to cooperation and development at European level. I should also like to say that particular importance is attached in our report to individual sectoral problems, such as the problems of rural areas, on which we accepted numerous proposals by the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, and of towns. As an MEP from Greece, I want to focus in particular on the problems created by permanent geographical structural disadvantages and refer to areas such as islands, mountain areas and, of course, the sparsely populated areas of northern Finland and Sweden. We consider that there should be special policies not only within the framework of regional policy, of cohesion policy, but also more generally in the other sectoral policies of the European Union. We welcome the European Commission's efforts to simply procedures with the principle of 'one fund per programme', but we shall wait to see the details and we want the role of the European Parliament from now on, especially as regards the drafting of the European Commission's strategic documents for the new programming period, to be substantial and for the European Parliament to have a right of codecision. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE