Mr President, first of all, I would like to congratulate you on the way you handled the debate this morning. You encountered a storm and weathered it without the help of the Commission. But Commissioner, I would also like, and I feel that this is essential, the institutions of the European Union to bear witness to the solidarity which unites the Member States, in particular in the event of exceptional disasters such as the storms of 26 December last which caused such unprecedented damage to a number of forest regions in France, Germany and Austria. There is an urgent need for us to begin using the instruments available to the Union to assist the affected regions and support the individuals and companies concerned. The need for our support is all the more pressing given that transportation, storage and forest exploitation cannot be delayed without serious consequences in terms of both the quality of the products and the restoration and protection of forest ecosystems. Thus, in the Alsace region alone, more than 6.5 million cubic metres of woodland has been devastated, which is essentially equivalent to one to three years’ harvests. Clearly, the influx of timber onto the market will send prices plummeting and so further damage the industry’s economic operators. Once again, the way that the sector is structured may facilitate the search for joint solutions between the upstream operators which manage forestry resources and the downstream operators which exploit them. The inter-trade system introduced in France can certainly play a major part in the search for, and development of, these joint solutions. Indeed, since they are designed not to protect the interests of any one section of the industry, they facilitate the protection of the industry as a whole, promote the timber sector and ensure respect for the great internal balances which make it possible to consolidate the whole. Although regional in scale, inter-trade bodies also have a local impact and are immediately efficacious in critical situations such as that of our forestry companies and the timber industry. We should therefore favour direct contacts with potential partners, even more so given that inter-trade bodies are also the consultative partners of local governments and national authorities with regard to defining forestry policies and hence with regard to the search for immediate solutions to crises. They are also able to identify bottlenecks in the implementation of safeguard programmes. This is why I ask you not to disregard direct consultation with the industry’s operators in your consultation mechanism. Moreover, regulations can be a constraint which varies according to the State in question, as is, notably, the case with regard to grain storage, in respect of the impermeability of the ground, the water sampling limits, which are set at 5% of the low water discharge in France and 30% in Germany and waste disposal monitoring. I therefore feel that exceptional measures should also be implemented. The scale of the disaster shows that the aid pledged by the State or confirmed at local level will not be sufficient to cover the damage reported. It is therefore essential to be able to draw on the Structural Funds to finance special measures for forests and the timber industry in the case of disasters in objective 2 or former objective 5b areas. The same applies to rural development measures and other, more specific, economic or environmental programmes, in parallel with actions for using up workable timber, which represents about 50% of the windfall. It would also be desirable to promote incentive measures for using the poorer quality wood for energy production. However, the urgency of the situation calls for flexible, simplified procedures to financially supplement the provisions already introduced by the Member States I therefore call upon the Commission to seek consensus with the industry as a whole and the Member States concerned in order to find effective, immediate solutions, for the greater the consensus, the more effective the solutions will be.

Political group: PPE-DE