Mr President, on behalf of my colleagues Ripoll and Pérez Álvarez, who have worked on this report – but who are not able to be here – I would like to congratulate the rapporteur, Mrs Peijs, on her marvellous report, in particular because it deals with a problem which is important for very real and practical reasons. Furthermore, I wish to say that there are two things which I am regretting right now: firstly, that I am not able to hear the opinion of our friend Mr Fatuzzo on how short sea shipping affects the interests of European pensioners, and secondly, that so few Members are present because, considering the egotistical interests of this House, it is probable that one day they will regret not having found out about the issue of short sea shipping, because they will perhaps have to use it one day to travel to and from Strasbourg. Turning to the background to the issue, I must tell Mrs Peijs that we have followed with great interest the developments and actions which in recent years, especially on the basis of the creation of the forum for the maritime industries, have been taking place in the European Union with a view to promoting short sea shipping as an alternative to land transport. Both the Commission’s report and the rapporteur’s report illustrate the different comparative advantages of each type of transport, of which, in the case of sea transport, I would like to highlight the fact that the infrastructures are less saturated, the fact that they are less expensive, they consume less energy and therefore emit fewer pollutants into the atmosphere and they improve communications with the outermost regions of the European Union. We consider – and I think we all agree on this – that the transfer of charges from land to sea transport should be taken as a priority objective of the European Union’s transport policy. I would like to highlight the fact that in the last two years there have been a series of actions which have had positive effects on short sea shipping. This has made it possible, as the Commission’s report points out, for intra-Community sea transport activity to increase by 23% between 1990 and 1997. Nevertheless, this is a relatively modest increase – of only 3% cumulatively per year – and this is less comparatively than the increase over the same period in land transport, which has been 26%. Consequently, rather than bringing the relative positions of sea transport and road transport closer together, the difference between them has continued to increase. All of this indicates therefore that we not only need more vigorous quantitative measures but that we probably need a different qualitative focus. Mrs Peijs’s report seems to us to be very balanced, but we would like to draw your attention to one of the key objectives for the promotion of short sea shipping: the simultaneous reduction of the time and direct cost involved in port operations for ships which provide this type of service. In many cases, the port services – both with regard to the ship and the goods – are faced with no effective competition or with very limited competition and this means that there is often abuse of dominant positions, such as the imposition of obligatory services which are not necessary or are not even used, for example, piloting, towing, mooring and port handling, as well as the payment of very high tariffs. What is certainly the case is that, apart from very few exceptions, transoceanic services do not have to face competition from roads and, in most cases, air transport does not offer any practical competition to them. For all these reasons, we believe that, if the intention is to promote short sea shipping in a realistic and effective way, it is essential to reorganise the current provision of port services, by improving their efficiency and reducing their costs. We should also bear in mind what this means for the economies of the areas in which there is a ship-building industry. This means a revitalisation of the whole area, as is well known by the people who live in those cities, in those regions, in which the ship-building industry is a very active element in the local economy.

Political group: PPE-DE