Brussels, 20/09/2012 (Agence Europe) - The European Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions (CPMR) is ready to do battle to protect a meaningful budget for cohesion policy. It has sent the EU 27 an open letter appealing to them not to reduce funding for the 2014-2016 period.
On 12 September, the CPMR Political Bureau sent the EU 27 ambassadors of the permanent representations this letter in response to the fact that, “the budget for cohesion policy could even be reduced to 14%, according to the most recent discussions at the Council” (in reference to the Cypriot presidency summary document). The CPMR stated that it is “unable to understand this vast gap between the political discourse in favour of European growth and the reduced means made available to those responsible at national and regional levels for implementing the EUROPE 2020 strategy, which would then be doomed to failure”.
Initial budget. These regions state that it is up to “political leaders to seize the opportunity to set store on a budget that is both rigorous and ambitious, focusing on the future, on growth and on jobs, and not just to make short-term budgetary savings, which may weigh heavily on future generations in the long term”. The CPMR restates its support for the European Commission's initial budget proposal although this revised proposal “represents a reduction of €5.5 billion in the cohesion budget, equivalent to 1.5% of its initial budget if we exclude Croatia's entry into the European Union in July”. This initial proposal, however, remains the best of a number of bad scenarios and the CPMR therefore expects the EU27 to support it and declares that, “it is also incomprehensible that it should be Cohesion Policy that bears the brunt of the savings that a certain number of member states wish to make”.
Regions suffering from crisis. The letter to the ambassadors also indicates that regions categorised as developed or in transition cannot make do without European assistance because these regions are also suffering from the effects of the crisis and, “the impact of these cuts would be sharply disproportionate and would consequently be damaging for the principle of European solidarity to which we are firmly committed”. (MD/trans.fl)