Debate contributions by Arash SAEIDI

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the eighth replenishment of the Global Fund to Fight HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which will finance the 2026-2028 cycle, will be announced at the G20 meeting in South Africa. While HIV is nearing an epidemic recovery, U.S. cuts have already caused thousands of deaths. In 2022, the European Commission ranked seventh among donors, increasing its contribution to €715 million. By 2025, the goal is to mobilize a total of $18 billion. Every dollar less is life-saving drugs, prevention tools, endangered health systems. A reduction of only 15% would result in nearly 4 million deaths and an additional 66 million infections. Europe would obviously be affected. The Commission's commitment for 2023-2025 had been financed through the Neighbourhood Development and International Cooperation Instrument, Now threatened by budget cuts, this raises questions about the European Union's ambition to combat these diseases. So, Commissioner, can you guarantee that the Commission will increase its contribution to at least EUR 800 million to compensate for the disengagements, including from European states, and maintain the global ambition against these pandemics?

Madam President, Commissioner, you will always find me at your side when it comes to defending an ambitious budget for the common agricultural policy, public support that applies to both pillars of the CAP – income and sustainable development – in order to guarantee a dignified income for our farmers and ensure our food sovereignty. However, this support must stop feeding injustice. Today, 80% of aid goes to 20% of farms. This model favours endless expansion, indebtedness and intensification. He pushes to the end those who work the earth. We therefore want an end to per-hectare support and a fair CAP. Public money should no longer reward size, but, as you said, active farmers. We want a strict cap on aid, targeted support for small and medium-sized farms, agrarian reform to allow new farmers to settle and a credit union to lift those who want to change their model out of debt. We also ask for guaranteed floor prices. Finally, we do not want the CAP to be used as an adjustment variable for potentially deadly free trade agreements for our agriculture, such as the one involving Mercosur. Strict standards cannot be advocated here and meat from deforestation, battery farming and social and chemical dumping cannot be imported. Commissioner, we want resources for a fair and virtuous CAP.

Madam President, Chani, Noya, Carmela, Mansour, Niloufar, Mahsa, Abbad, Ahmad and so many thousands of other innocent civilian victims that I mourn all, regardless of their nationality, regardless of the identity of their executioners. Whether they died in Israel at the hands of terrorists, murdered during a food distribution in Gaza, repressed by the regime in Tehran by fighting for their freedom, or, still in Tehran, under the bombs of an aggressor state that never aimed to free anyone, their lives, Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, are all worth their lives. They all deserve our empathy and indignation. Commissioner, I solemnly address you. Human rights are universal. Sometimes to invoke them to better bury them when the executioner thinks he is our friend is to show hypocrisy and, probably, already complicity.

Madam President, Commissioner, I would first like to underline the constructive work we are doing, together with the colleagues who have gone before me, to find, as Andrey Novakov said, the right balance between passenger rights and the health of the aviation sector, and therefore to underline the work we are doing with Andrey Novakov, Mr Ricci, Mr Marzà Ibáñez and Mr Oetjen. I say this, because it is not common, but there is really a constructive atmosphere in this working group and our will is indeed to improve passenger rights. I'll give you just one example, it's this story of extra fees. It is not normal that, sometimes, when you fly on certain airlines, you will be charged additional fees that have been incurred because you forgot to check in online, you arrive at the airport and check in at the airport your baggage that exceeds 3 cm or you did not see that it was not included in the ticket price – which everyone thinks is normal. That is why we do not want to let go of this story of ticket prices, because one day you will arrive on the plane and you will be told: Ah, you have shoes, it's going to be 20 euros extra. I pull by the hair that doesn't stay with me, but that's why we insist: there is no economic justification for making margins of 20 times on ticket billing, otherwise without any transparency since you have attracted passengers by displaying a very low price and then the surcharges you have applied to them make twice or three times the price of the ticket. I just give you a number to finish, Madam President: Last year, airlines generated €10 billion in ticket prices at a cost 20 times lower than the €10 billion. That is why we need to regulate this sector.

Mr President, Commissioner, I am pleased to hear your willingness, which I believe to be sincere, to ensure that sales prices exceed production costs, to prevent the importation of products made with pesticides banned in the European Union and, above all, to introduce effective controls to ensure that our rules are applied. You will always find us in support to go in this direction. However, is this the will of the whole College of Commissioners? At the very least, I see a blatant contradiction between what you have said and the signing of an agreement with Mercosur, when - and this is unfortunately just one example - studies show that Brazil is very difficult to make effective controls on its agricultural products. You want to protect farmers from unfair competition, but the Commission is opening the doors of the European Union to chemical and social dumping. So my question is simple: How will you respond to this contradiction, Commissioner?

Mr President, Commissioner, Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, our farmers are exhausted. Every day they fight against increasingly severe climatic hazards, undergo increasingly volatile market variations and see their income subject to the interests of increasingly greedy speculators. As if that were not enough, the President of the Commission decided to leave one fine morning, secretly, behind the backs of farmers, the peoples of Europe and this Parliament, to sign, despite the reluctance of several Member States, a free trade agreement with Mercosur, and thus flood our markets with products grown under conditions that we would never accept here. Who can believe for a moment that it will improve the working conditions and well-being of farmers and agricultural workers by imposing unacceptable economic, social and chemical dumping on them? Not even the Commission, in fact, since, for many months, it concealed from us what this agreement contained. Ladies and gentlemen, I therefore solemnly call on you to block this free trade agreement with Mercosur with all your might. We owe it to those who feed us.

Mr President, in the Budapest Declaration of 8 November last, the Heads of State of the European Union called for collective efforts, at Union and Member State level, in the agricultural sector and in particular to provide farmers with a stable and predictable framework. Following the deadly floods in Valencia, on 6 November the European Investment Bank adopted a €3 billion programme to support agriculture and agro-industry in Europe, the largest the Bank has ever provided to this sector. The Commission also presented to Parliament's Committee on Agriculture last week its proposal to allow Member States to provide targeted cash-flow support, via EAFRD funds, to farmers, foresters and SMEs affected by natural disasters from 1 January 2013 onwards.er January 2024. Unfortunately, these amounts arrive too late and do not allow farmers to feed us in a stable and predictable environment. It is our responsibility to help farmers upstream of natural disasters, enabling them to produce sustainably and being properly remunerated. Rather than remedying shortcomings a posteriori and always acting too late – unpredictably, moreover – I want climate change and fair remuneration for our farmers to be at the heart of the negotiations on the next CAP.

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the European Commission is not defending an ambitious railway policy, but a dogma. For years, it has promoted liberalisation and competition to the detriment of the public service, users and the environment. For what result? We now have only an underinvested network of limited rail capacity. Rail freight continues to decline, the trains of everyday life are abandoned. Where is the big ambition for rail? Only 18% of goods travel by rail in Europe, well below the announced targets. The Commission has not been able to impose a strong modal shift policy due to a lack of investment and willingness. Worse, it now aims to drive mega-trucks when we should do everything to reduce CO emissions.2 giving priority to rail. Rail’s share of passenger transport is just under 6%. European interconnections are a disaster. Rather than betting on competition, we must encourage cooperation between incumbents. To develop rail, we must break with this blind market logic, from which even our British friends have returned. We need massive public investment, real harmonisation of infrastructure and determined support for the sector. Rail is a common good. It is one of the main levers we can use to reduce our footprint, not just any commodity.

Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, our farmers are angry because climate change is here and they are the first victims of it by suffering floods, droughts and epizootic diseases. They are angry because they are being crushed by agribusiness and crisis profiteers who have been fed up with soaring prices on the back of their work. They are angry because you export our jobs and import pesticides with free trade agreements. In the face of this anger, the Commission's response was not up to par. What our farmers need is not an abandonment of our environmental and social standards, it is the end of unfair competition imported by your free trade treaties. We want to take advantage of the CAP reform to break with this short-lived system. We must redirect aid so that it is primarily for the benefit of farms that create jobs and are environmentally friendly, with particular attention to the smallest and the newest. Because we cannot demand without accompanying, we must finance this transition to a more sustainable agricultural model and protect ourselves from competition that does not respect our environmental and social standards. Finally, in order for the work of our farmers to be rewarded at its fair value, we must guarantee them floor prices. We welcome the intentions of this report, which expresses an awareness of the future of our agriculture. But to the President of the Commission, I want to ask the following question: Are you ready to break with decades of disastrous agricultural policy so that the follow-up given to this report is not just a make-up of "business as usual"?