Mr Romano Prodi

President of the European Commission

Rue de la Loi 200

1047 Brussels

CC:

Mr Pat Cox

President of the European Parliament

A Blue Hug for the New Water Culture

A Call from the European Parliament

Dear Mr Prodi,

On 7th December 2003 there was a new European mobilization: the Blue Hug of Brussels. A human chain, a symbolic civic act, supported by social, environmental, political, and trade union organizations. It called for a deep political and cultural change, in our European institutions as well as in our European people. A change in our way of valuing and managing the water of rivers, lakes, wetlands and aquifers, to promote awareness that this natural heritage is a public good whose sustainability must be granted. A change that Europe has to carry out in the old continent in a serious and consequent way, if it really wants to exercise the world leadership that it pretends in the field of sustainable development.

The Water Framework Directive, in force in the EU since the end of 2000, is an advanced legal framework that opens the way to the New Water Culture that the challenges of 21^st century sustainability demand. However, the wide margin left open to the governments for their interpretation of this transition threatens to affect the transposition period in which the aggressive policies of faits accomplis could threaten the objectives of the Directive itself.

In this respect, the accelerated process of approval and start-up of the Spanish National Hydrological Plan (SNHP), is an example that threatens to become a dangerous precedent. The development of this Plan, based on the old strategies of "special offer" supply receiving massive public subsidies, would mean serious social-environmental impacts, and at the same time it would question the respect of the Water Framework Directive. The new big dams which would cause a serious environmental and social impact, the great Ebro river transfers (which would break the Ebro Delta's sustainability, the Iberian Peninsula's second most important natural heritage site in bio-diversity) and other water transfers like the Jucar river one which is also related to the Ebro river transfer, these are the key pieces of this Plan. Published independent analyses show a general consensus in the scientific community denouncing the economic, social and environmental irrationality of these water transfers that vertebrate the Plan. According to the new economic criteria of the Framework Directive, those studies give more economical alternatives, based on demand management and on the reasonable use of new technologies of reuse and desalination which are available nowadays. Also, hundreds of thousands of written objections have been submitted by political, social, environmental and trade union organizations, during the legal process of this law, which show the irrationality of this project.

The outcome of this pro-transfer policy would be no other than to feed the unsustainable development spiral on the Mediterranean coast based on an uncontrolled growth of urban-tourist speculative businesses, very often illegal ones. Those plans, together with the reform of the Water Law - promoted by the Spanish government - open the unacceptable perspective of massive subsidies for amounts of water that will later be managed by speculative markets. A perverse prospect which seeks to subsidize private businesses along the Mediterranean coast with public money.

On the other hand, the less developed zones, in mountain regions as well in the Ebro river Delta environment, would be heading for environmental, social and economic degradation, breaking the principles of a so-called territorially balanced development that the Spanish Constitution lays down and the EU wants to promote.

In this context, it should be unacceptable that the Spanish government wants to subsidize these plans with European funds. If the European Commission were to accept this approach, not only would the first steps of the Framework Directive's introduction be sabotaged but a serious precedent would be set in the EU as a whole, whose consequences would be particularly serious in the Mediterranean area and in the future member countries.

In this perspective, just as massive civil mobilizations in Spain have risen above ideological and party colors, the SNHP problem must be understood as a European problem. The serious and successful enforcement of the new Water Framework Directive in Europe as a whole depends on this issue. Furthermore, today, more than ever (2003 was the International Water Year), the EU must set an example to the world with sustainable water policies, based on strategies of demand management and the conservation of water-based ecosystems.

For that reason, the undersigned Members of the European Parliament urge the European Commission to definitively deny European funds for the most aggressive social and environmental SNHP projects, paying special attention to the afore-mentioned Ebro River transfers. We also urge equally that the European Commission transmit the convenient Complaints, so that the European Court could act to guarantee the observance of European legislation.

Best regards,

Brussels, 4 March 2003

First signatories:

MPE BERGAZ Maria Luisa (GUE/NGL)

MPE van DAM Rijk (EDD)

MPE DAVIES Chris (ELDR)

MPE DE ROO Alexander (VERTS/ALE)

MPE TERRÓN i CUSÍ Anna (PSE)

MPE TURCO Maurizio (NI)