Marie-Hélène Aubert, on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group. – (FR) Mr President, Commissioner, as you have recalled, this structural crisis is both deep and enduring. It therefore calls for solutions that will also endure, not just for the fisheries industry but for all the sectors concerned.

It also has to be said that the current crisis is precisely the result of years of blindness to the reliance of the fisheries sector on fuel – and cheap fuel at that – and to the headlong rush to a kind of arms race, with ever more powerful vessels that can go out further and further and bring back ever greater quantities of fish. These are also some of the issues that we have to tackle.

The problem of expensive fuel oil is inseparable from all the other questions that affect the fisheries sector – management of fish stocks, pricing policies, world trade, the control of illegal fishing – and it is difficult to deal with this issue in isolation from the rest.

The subsidies and aid that the Commission is proposing to provide, and which appear to me to be going in the right direction, will only be acceptable – especially as far as the public is concerned – if they are dependent on an in-depth reorientation of fishery policies and fishery practices. For our part, we regret that the joint compromise resolution does not in fact lay down conditions for the aid and subsidies that can be granted for this reorientation and for the obligation to put an end to fleet overcapacity and to move towards a better management of the fishery stocks and better protection of the marine ecosystems. What is more, this is the very condition on which the economic and social viability of the fisheries depends. Finally, we would like to see the Member States assuming full responsibility of their own and ending the demagogic practice of promising money they do not have without putting forward any sustainable policies for the fisheries industry.