Mr President, the two reports that I am presenting affect seven regulations, the reform of which we are debating, and which refer to the outermost regions of the European Union, that is, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion and Guyana, part of France, the Azores and Madeira, part of Portugal; and the Canary Islands, part of Spain. Distance, internal dispersion and climate have been significant obstacles to their development. Distance and transport costs for imports and exports, and the small size of these territories have prevented them from attracting and benefiting from significant investment. Declaring its duty of Community solidarity in responding to the needs of these outermost regions, between 1989 and 1991 the European Community adopted some other action programmes due to their remote and island nature, called the POSEIs. The aim was to promote sustainable development and strengthen job-creating production sectors. This was done using the Structural Funds and by favourably adjusting common policies, particularly the CAP. Special aid was thus established for particular local products and the supply of raw materials was improved through specific supply arrangements included in the respective POSEIs. The favourable measures established by the Community have been combined with very significant efforts on the part of the Member States directly concerned: France, Portugal and Spain, and by the regional and local administrations. Considerable progress has therefore been made, but despite this, there are still inadequacies, which is why we need to maintain the measures, even improving the mechanisms to seek even more positive results. In any case, in order to continue to make progress in integrating these regions into the European area and in order to deal with phenomena that have appeared recently with the growing process of globalisation, we need to have a sounder legal basis and strengthen the regulations that have been operating up until now. We have been working on this for months, also relying on the fact that in Amsterdam, the recognition of the specific nature of the outermost regions and the commitment to support them in order to overcome their problems was introduced into the Treaties in Article 299. The reform plan that was presented to us was moving in the right direction, but it fell short in its proposals. For example, it did not propose the essential change to the legal basis in order to refer to the new text of the Treaties that I have just mentioned, but it was certainly a good starting point for our Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development to work on. The committee had better cooperation from the Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism and the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, the latter in order to bring about the change in the legal basis. We also listened to the authorities and social sectors of the territories that we are dealing with and we thus arrived at a series of amendments that were debated and adopted in the committee proceedings. As well as the amendment on updating the legal basis, there are amendments that respond to joint demands from the different regions and others that are specific to each of them. Among the joint ones it is worth mentioning the possibility of these regions being able to export products produced with raw materials introduced to the islands under the SSAs with rights to refunds, the need to increase support for the livestock breeding sector and to boost agricultural and food SMEs. The amendments on specific sensitive products from each region concern tomatoes in the Canary Islands, livestock, milk products and the sugar industry in the Azores and the wicker industry in Madeira, and support for rice in some of the French territories. With these amendments we are expressing our will to overcome once and for all the problems of our outermost regions. They are not about subsidising economic and social backwardness in these territories, but about acting decisively to permanently overcome this backwardness and thus to offer those who live there living conditions and prospects for the future that are comparable to those of the rest of the citizens of the European Union. Besides, the costs of the improvements that we are proposing are certainly insignificant in the context of the budgetary proportions that the Union deals with. I will finish by thanking the officials of our Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development for their dedication and professional attitude, and also by expressing my thanks to the Commission and the Council, who have supported us by showing interest and understanding. If, as I hope, Parliament adopts what the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development is submitting for its opinion, it will be the Council of the Union that will have the responsibility of not disappointing our expectations, which are in fact those of the people of the Canary Islands, Madeira, the Azores, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and Guyana. Please bear in mind that it is in measures such as this that the confidence of citizens in the activity of the European Union is at stake, as is, in short, the credibility of our project.

Political group: PSE