Plenary focus - February

The POS EI is a programme for outermost regions. It was set up in 1991 to support agriculture in French overseas departments and the outermost regions of Portugal and Spain. POS EI plays a key role in supporting and developing farming in these regions. Revised by MEPs it will now have three objectives: one aiming to secure the long-term future and development of crop diversification, a second aiming to strengthen the competitiveness of traditional agricultural activities, and a third aiming to compensate additional costs related to the extreme remoteness of these regions.

The European Parliament is expected to present its opinion on the Annual Growth Survey 2013 proposed by the Commission. The policy coordination between Member States must support investment policies promoting sustainable growth and employment, as the only route toward sustainable fiscal consolidation . To tackle the deepening recession, the eurozone needs a real commitment among Member States to reduce the macroeconomic imbalances, by increasing the domestic demand in all economies, especially in the surplus ones, and a differentiated and backloaded path fordeficit and debt reduction.

There is a wide consensus when characterising the results of the current Common Fisheries Policy (CFP): the current CFP is disastrous – from an environmental, social and economic point of view. The Commission proposal persists with a centralised management of the CFP, ignoring the huge diversity among countries and insisting on a sweeping definition of ‘overcapacity’, without specifying in detail or on the basis of quantified indications where the overcapacity exists. Moreover, the problems and specificities of small-scale fisheries are not duly taken into account.