Brussels, 28/02/2001 (Agence Europe) - The German Social Democrat Jutta Haug, in calling, on Wednesday afternoon, on the European Parliament in favour of a "yes" from the plenary, Thursday morning, to the supplementary and amending budget number 1 to the EU 2001 budget (mainly needed following the costs incurred by the "mad Cow" crisis), asserts that she understood, at the same time, the parliamentarians who want to reject this supplementary budget. This does not concern, here, a financial crisis, but a crisis in our common agricultural policy, reiterated the parliamentarian, while feeling that it is bloody difficult to defend this policy, which is based upon mechanisms dating back to the time when there where no agricultural surpluses characteristic of the recent years. Such a system is no longer defendable on the social level, since it benefits the large more than the small, she added.
The EPP group will follow its rapporteur, because the situation is serious and we must act quickly, asserted the CDU member Reiner Boge, hoping that there will be no supplementary budget in the supplementary budget. If we do not overcome this crisis, in two years half the beef farmers will have disappeared, he asserted, while feeling that the responsibility for the situation must be assumed at the Head of government level itself (in fact BSE risks playing a part in the European Council at the end of March in Stockholm…). If we approve this supplementary budget as it is, we will have used everything, and nothing will be left for the other "potential disasters", starting with foot and mouth disease, contradicted the Dutch Liberal Jan Mulder. My group, he said, in announcing an amendment in line with this, feels that we should rather say "yes" to an extension of the EUR 300 million leaving a reserve for the future. Several other MEPs felt that this crisis shows, beyond the financial difficulties, the need to change course: this is what German Heide Ruhle said, on behalf of the Greens, asserting that it is necessary to "change the CAP, change the budget and that it is necessary that the European Parliament have its word to say on obligatory spending" (agricultural spending). Francis Wurtz, President of the United Left/Nordic Greens Left Group, stressed the gap that separates the diagnosis made by the Commission itself on the foreseeable cost of the BSE crisis and the proposal for financing that is submitted. (He cited Mr Fischler who, one month ago, said that, in an optimistic scenario, the intervention purchases alone would have a budgetary cost by way of EUR 3 billion). At the same time, Mr Wurtz, though saying that his group was in favour of CAP reform, rose up against the idea of renationalising this policy. He exclaimed: "what a resounding effect the speeches on the future European federation would have on the gathering of the great European family" if, at the same time, the oldest common policy were to shatter". Florence Kuntz (Union for a Europe of Nations, France) went further, decreeing that this crisis marks a "failure" in European construction and should encourage the Member States to greater caution when it is a matter of undertaking new common policies.