Text tabled : A6-0391/2005

  Marie-Arlette Carlotti (PSE), in writing. – (FR) We have to stop giving with one hand and taking away with the other!

This report tries to strike a balance between protecting the income of European farmers and that of farmers in the ACP countries. It thus provides for a smaller reduction in price, spread out over time, so that the ACP countries are better able to absorb the impact of reform, and a substantial increase in access to the European market for sugar from the least developed countries.

The Socialist Group in the European Parliament's two amendments also move in the right direction, by providing for the complete elimination of European export subsidies (by 2013 at the latest) and compensation for the restructuring of the sugar sector in the ACP countries, based on an estimated requirement of EUR 200 million a year.

Admittedly, I would have liked the EU to go further, by providing the funds for this restructuring immediately, instead of the miserly EUR 40 million that has been promised (we proposed twice that amount in the Committee on Development).

I would also have liked the 'everything but arms' initiative to enter into operation as of 2009 and the EU to make it impossible to export sugar at low prices under quota C.

We will continue the battle as part of the ongoing negotiations on the financial perspective.