Mr President, the European Parliament is offering the Commission the opportunity to correct the proposed regulation it delivered to Parliament and the Council. The intention of the report, approved by the Committee on Fisheries that we are discussing at the moment, is to correct the rigidity of this proposal, which is currently preventing progress being made in finding solutions to problems for the people affected by the non-renewal of the EC-Morocco fisheries agreement. From the time the agreement expired, on 30 November 1999, until the time it became clear that a new agreement would not be reached, owners of more than 400 vessels and some 4 300 fishermen were both hopeful and fearful at the time when negotiations between the Community and Morocco were being prolonged. It was not until 26 March 2001 that Commissioner Fischler announced that it had been impossible to reach a mutually beneficial agreement. From that moment, the Community set itself the objective of converting the affected fishing fleet. By presenting this proposed regulation, the Commission is conforming to the guidelines set by the Nice European Council of 7 December 2000. At that Summit, the European Council ordered the Commission to propose a specific action plan for the restructuring of this Community fleet. I must state clearly that this proposed regulation does not conform to the needs of the sector in question. Once again the Commission seems to be presenting proposals, the objective of which we do not understand, that do not amount to decisive action in support of a fleet and certain regions which are suffering a serious crisis. In fact, rather than helping to preserve most of the fleet and its economic activity, the Commission is presenting a rigid proposal which, if the Council approves it without the substantial amendments approved by the Committee on Fisheries, will have the effect of breaking up a fleet for which the ship owners and local authorities of those regions feel capable of finding alternatives. This proposal must therefore be amended in the way approved by the Committee on Fisheries, so that the actions proposed may have a beneficial effect on the sector in question. The Committee on Fisheries does not share the Commission’s breaking-up approach. The Commission could have focussed on the existing opportunities in alternative sectors, such as the processing industry, aquiculture and especially the promotion of fisheries products. In the same way, the proposal excludes sectors directly affected by the non-renewal of the agreement, such as the non-extractive fisheries industries. The land-based companies, during the long negotiation process, have suffered a series of economic setbacks that have led to employment rationalisations and redundancies, leading to considerable losses. Today they are faced with a future just as uncertain as that of the fleet they depend on. Faced with this breaking-up approach, the sector affected and the regional authorities have reached verbal agreements with companies and ship owners from various Maghreb countries to create mixed companies, and in this way, according to the estimates of the sector, in the small-scale sector, around a hundred vessels could be relocated with the help of this specific measure, if it were more flexible, thereby reducing to 26 those vessels destined for scrapping. This would maintain an economic activity which is vital to certain regions and ensure that those who want to continue being ship owners and fishermen are able to do so. The amendments contained in the Committee on Fisheries’ report, in summary, modify the proposed regulation in the following fashion: In addition to ship owners and fishermen, the land-based fisheries industry which was directly linked to the existence of this agreement are included, provided that their losses exceed 70%. The requirement that the people affected must have been subsidised for a period of at least nine consecutive months as a result of inactivity in order to benefit now from this specific measure is removed. This requirement leads to the exclusion of those people who, sometimes temporarily, found alternative work while waiting for a new fisheries agreement with Morocco to be reached. This is all the more serious if we bear in mind that these ship owners and fishermen had not been warned that, if they found an activity, they would be penalised when it came to conversion. The Committee on Fisheries has also rejected the requirement to return aid granted for modernisation. It is not right to apply penalties of a backdated nature in the case of aid which was not subject to these conditions at the time of being granted. The Commission’s proposal intends to increase public aid per ship owner by 20% in the case of scrapping or transfer to a third country. The Committee on Fisheries believes that fishermen must also benefit from this increase of 20%. We have also redistributed the sum allocated to this specific measure in such a way that the amount intended for scrapping is 30%, for the creation of mixed companies, 35%, and for socio-economic measures, also 35%. This would lead to better implementation of the specific measure. Lastly, I will mention the budgetary aspect. In accordance with the conclusions of the Nice European Council, the Commission proposes granting up to EUR 197 million for this specific measure. It proposes implementing the flexibility instrument in 2002 and allocating the appropriations corresponding to heading 2 of the financial perspectives. The saving resulting from the non-renewal of the agreement has been EUR 500 million. It is natural that the Community should also contribute to the cost of converting this fleet.

Political group: PSE