Today's Date:

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It’s a symbolic moment to welcome here Professor Wangari Maathai, the first lady in Africa to be honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize and whose commitment to the environment and sustainable development is universally acknowledged. Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve long believed there to be a very close link between, on the one hand peace, development, democracy and fighting poverty, and on the other – what is often at the heart of poverty, at the heart of many injustices – the environment.

At the Foreign Ministry, we too want to go beyond words and speeches and make the environment, the conservation of natural resources, areas, one of the priorities of our development policy and ensure that right from its initial stages any cooperation and development project takes on board the need for sensitivity and the conservation of natural resources and areas.

UNEO/DEVELOPMENT FINANCING/FOUR-COUNTRY INITIATIVE

As you know – as he said yesterday and in Johannesburg – this is an important personal priority of the Head of State. So this is why France is committed to it and actively participating in conferences like the one today in Paris and others, for instance on the Niger Basin and the Brazzaville Conference on Forests where you will be in a few days' time. At President Chirac's request, I’m also engaged in the battle to transform the United Nations Environment Programme, whose headquarters are in Nairobi, into a World Environment Organization (UNEO), and above all, there is the battle we are conducting with President Lula, President Lagos, and Prime Minister Zapatero in the context of the globalized economy to release significant permanent resources to fight for development and against poverty. It's a battle we have begun at the United Nations, which has been joined by nearly 110 countries and for which we again saw the urgent need in the wake of the tsunami and the incredible reconstruction and development needs.

(...) We’re going to have a meeting with all those taking part in this Paris Conference to hold a dialogue, which I was keen to do, with fifty or so parliamentarians and some other leading figures (...). I believe it’s very important too for this battle not to be confined to ministers and leading figures in civil society, but also to include the parliamentarians who pass legislation, approve budgets and who have to be made aware of their joint responsibility in the response to all these ecological challenges.

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ROMANIA/DANUBE DELTA

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THE MINISTER – I might also add, on the subject of Romania, who is soon going to be a member of the European Union, that the management of the whole of the Danube will obviously be a critically important issue for Europe, warranting the European Union’s commitment of regional policy funds and action to protect the environment, combining the efforts of all the countries through which the Danube flows, as we’re doing in other cases of major European rivers. It’s also one of the reasons for being European!./.