12-13 June Committee of the Regions

Date: 20/06/1996

COMMISSION President Jacques Santer's plan for a 'confidence pact' to help reduce European unemployment received overwhelming support from the Committee of the Regions (CoR), which noted that it was precisely the Union's least developed regions which bore the heaviest unemployment burden. Representatives stressed the need for better coordination between the Union, member states, regions and local authorities to achieve optimum use of available resources. They also called for various cities and regions to establish pilot projects, and mandated the CoR's relevant committees to come up with concrete measures to support the confidence pact by the time of the next plenary meeting on 18 and 19 September.

SPORT should be given a higher priority within the Union and a specific year should be designated as early as possible as the European Year of Sport, according to the CoR. The plenary session rejected the idea of including a special article in the revised EU treaty defining Union competence for sport, but agreed a number of areas where more could be done. It suggested sport should be given partial priority in youth exchange programmes and proposed increasing its role in various twinning activities. The Committee called for member states to step up cooperation on security arrangements at sports events and raised the possibility of a new programme designed to encourage media reporting of positive sporting role models.

LOOKING ahead to a common transport policy for the Union until the end of the century, the Committee insisted that citizens' interests must be considered paramount. Warning that “public acceptance of transport systems is an important precondition for long-term mobility in Europe”, the CoR argued that local areas and regions should be given greater scope for influencing transport planning. The Committee is pressing for new measures to reduce the environmental damage caused by an ever-increasing volume of road traffic, advocating greater use of public transport and the transfer of all long-distance shipments from road to rail and inland waterways.

AGRICULTURE Commissioner Franz Fischler told the CoR that reform of the Common Agriculture Policy was inevitable - with or without EU enlargement - and that the liberalisation of food markets in the Union would continue. “The hard work begun in 1992 must go on. Agricultural reform must be initiated in those areas that have so far been left untouched, simplified where it is too complicated and deepened where it has been too superficial. In the future, we cannot rely on price support instruments alone to guarantee dynamic agricultural production,” he warned.