Speeches

Mr President, the ambitious Green Deal needs an ambitious environmental action programme, because indeed we have a problem. If you look at it from economic perspective, can you imagine running the European Monetary Union on a 300% deficit? That’s what we’re doing with the planet. And I think this is where we really need to act on a number of fields. I want to point out one in particular, and that is soils. And I would like to also emphasise that even here in the environmental action programme, in a legislative text, the Parliament calls for a binding legal framework for soils because it’s one of the elements that is missing, and I think this is something which we need for biodiversity, the climate, hazardous chemicals, for supporting our farmers. To be able to deliver on the action programme we also need sufficient resources of the Commission. And that’s something that is lacking, not only at the Commission, but also at the agencies. So we have the solid science and we have the capacity to not only make the rules, but to deliver and monitor them. So I hope that, not like today, tabling amendments for more resources, next year we will see a sufficiently resourced Commission to deliver on this action programme.