Strasbourg, 07/07/2005 (Agence Europe) - With a view to consultation with Council, scheduled for 15 July, the European Parliament shows concern about the lack of any margin of manoeuvre in funding foreseen in the preliminary draft budget 2006 - especially now the Council is again contemplating a cut in funding at first reading (yesterday's EUROPE). The Gianni Pittella (PES, Italy) report on the EP delegation's mandate with a view to budgetary consultation procedure for 2006 was adopted on Wednesday in Strasbourg.
The EP stresses how difficult it is to successfully conclude the worksites engaged in the context of the current financial perspectives and recalls that the maximum amount likely to be financed by the flexibility instrument in 2006, without taking possible additional mobilisation in 2005 into account, is by way of EUR 320 million. The EP considers the Commission's “very modest” proposal, which represents 1.02% of Gross National Income (GNI) (i.e. EUR 1.19 billion less than funding proposed in the preliminary draft budget 2005), must be considered in accordance to real needs and implementation capacity. It is also worth noting that the Commission's proposal is well below the ceiling of 1.08% of current financial perspectives.
Agriculture: The EP is willing to agree to review the financial framework in order to allow funding from agricultural market spending and direct aid (modulation) to be allocated to rural development. It considers that the agricultural expenditure foreseen by the Commission is an “absolute minimum”.
Structural action: The Parliament considers that payment appropriations should reflect real needs and that the overall evaluation of the implementation of payment appropriations (to be made by the Commission by end July) should provide an opportunity to ensure that real needs are taken into account in their entirety. Also, MEPs consider that cohesion policy should related more to regions in order to avoid all risk of conflict between new and former Member States.
Internal policies: The EP considers the Commission's preliminary draft budget does not sufficiently reflect the political ambitions agreed from a budgetary point of view, mainly when it comes to the Lisbon Strategy. It demonstrates its intention to negotiate, with the Council in the context of codecision, the rise in budgets for the Socrates and Youth programmes.
External actions: On the subject of fishing, the EP notes the amount proposed for fisheries agreements and stresses that negotiations will begin in the near future for renewing agreements with Angola, Cape Verde, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Kiribati, Mauritania, Sao Tomé and Senegal, for which EUR 124 million have been placed in reserve. The EP does, however, have doubts about the grounds for the EUR 8 million budget earmarked for possibly concluding new agreements with Algeria, Croatia, Kenya, Libya and Morocco. MEPs recall that, for Morocco, the annual allocation was EUR 125 million between 1994 and 1999.
The EP underlines that the main programmes (Afghanistan, Iraq and, more recently, the Asian countries affected by the tidal wave disaster) could not be taken into account during adoption of the current financial perspectives. It trusts that the Council will undertake to accept the new priorities without bringing traditional policies into question. On the subject of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, the EP regrets there is no margin above thresholds for giving true impetus to these goals or for launching support action in the context of the sugar market reform.