Brussels, 05/06/2001 (Agence Europe) - With the adoption on Thursday last of the report by Hans Blokland (EDD, Netherlands), the EP approved the communication by the European Commission (dated September 2000) on the integration of environmental issues in economic policy. It did, however, note a certain number of weak points concerning in particular: - the unilateral nature of the current concept of growth and development on which economic policy is based; - the increasingly marked interdependency of problems such as unemployment, poverty and energy and environmental issues.
The Parliament also deplores the lack of concrete measures taken by the EU to conform to its demands for integrating ecological questions in economic policy, as witnessed by the blocking (over the past ten years) at Council level of the Commission's proposals on energy and CO2 taxation. MEPs thus call on the Commission to present further proposals to reach a solution on this dossier. The Commission's position concerning the negative impact of subsidies in the field of energy and agriculture is considered insufficiently firm. The EP hopes that "all areas of European policy will be steeped in the concept of sustainable development". It also demands a systematic, European-scale approach, in order to measure progress made in this field, using "green accounting" techniques.