Mr President, Commissioner, I would like to begin by thanking our rapporteur, Mr Mulder, for his outstanding success in bringing together the interests of the committee and also in taking up the matters which are necessary for the conciliation procedure ahead and resisting the temptation to rewrite all the guidelines we wrote earlier this year. This is a report that is very cogent, very concentrated and which we very much support and welcome. The procedure which we shall now be entering in the next three weeks with the Council and the Commission will continue to exist for a short time. We hope, however, that it will soon be a thing of the past. If the distinction between compulsory and non-compulsory expenditure were no longer made – and there is much in the Convention to suggest it will not be – then something Parliament has been advocating for many years would actually become reality and we would no longer need this advance mediation. That would be a good development and I hope we shall see it. Now to the individual points. So far as agriculture is concerned, a number of matters are raised here. I want to concentrate on a number of questions. First, the move to increase support for rural areas provided that there is a stronger focus on those areas in the new Member States than we had in the EU of the 15; we expressly welcome this. In view of the current debates – in Poland in particular, where ministers have resigned because they are evidently missing the opportunity to actually create the structures there that will allow the money to be used properly – I believe that all states must understand that no money can flow if the relevant structures are not in place. That must be made abundantly clear, and we shall be watching to see that the money is used according to the rules. All we can do is urge that the foundations be laid for it here. So far as insurance against eventualities such as disasters in agriculture is concerned, we are willing to look very closely at the survey and the expert report. Some Member States already have voluntary insurance for such contingencies. They would of course be penalised if the European taxpayer were to be called upon to cover these things elsewhere. We will examine this without prejudice and we are willing to act, but we will of course not go blundering blindly into anything either, because we have to know what the long-term consequences might be. So far as fisheries are concerned, I heard very clearly what Mrs Langenhagen had to say and we have always been prepared to support fisheries and the scrapping of ships where necessary. We are not, however, going to write any blank cheques, and we are not going to give a few million euros away in advance for a programme that has not been finally evaluated and on which the Council has not taken a position. We will do the same as we have done with other programmes in the past, such as scrapping in Portugal and Spain. In those cases, we wanted to have the full programme first and we said we would evaluate it and would then say how much would be made available for it. We will proceed no differently in this connection than we did with the Portuguese and the Spanish, even though we are now looking at other regions of Europe. We are in favour of increases on the common foreign and security policy. I would point out once again, however, that cooperation in peacekeeping is more than just peace enforcement as provided for in the Petersberg tasks of common foreign and security policy; it is also conflict prevention, and we do not support the envisaged reduction in appropriations. In this matter, we want to continue as before. Prevention is better than having to use military means to clear up afterwards. Finally, let me say something about the question of payment. The N+2 rule was introduced by us all and there was a point to it. Wanting to check whether it is right at this stage, before it has really come into play for the first time, is quite out of order. This N+2 rule must be applied, and those who fail to spend their money accordingly must know that there are consequences. Showing them a way out at this early stage would amount to killing the N+2 rule and we will not go along with that.

Political group: PSE