SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, March 16 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Canary Islands Coalition (CC) has verified this Thursday “once again, the inaction” of the Government of the Canary Islands to ensure that the high-level summit between the governments of Spain and Portugal held in Lanzarote addresses issues of “high importance” for the regions outermost regions such as the Canary Islands.
The Secretary General and candidate for the Presidency, Fernando Clavijo, criticizes that in this summit of two countries with outermost regions (OR), also held in one of them, the leadership of the OR “has been conspicuous by its absence and the Government of the Canary Islands He has taken it without further ado.”
“Neither of the two governments brought to the meeting issues of great importance for the outermost regions in the European Union,” says Fernando Clavijo in a note, such as the management and sustainability of their public maritime and air transport systems in periods of high cost overruns such as the current one or, looking to the future, how the implementation of tax measures such as the green tax will be adjusted to the ORs.
For the Canary Islands Coalition, the “total absence” at the summit held this week in Lanzarote of specific content focused on the policies that Spain and Portugal, as well as the European Union itself, develop in their outermost regions shows, according to Fernando Clavijo, ” not only the political abandonment by the two state governments towards their remote regions, but also, in our case, the absolute resignation of the Government of the Canary Islands to not work on the inclusion of a quota of RUP content”.
“With situations like this,” says Fernando Clavijo, “it is proven once again that neither of the two OR countries see their outermost regions as an opportunity in the mid-Atlantic for the development of initiatives related, for example, to the fight against climate change”.
Along these lines, he insists that “once again, high-level representatives in the EU are incapable of having a more supportive perspective with the ORs and looking straight at territories far from the continent as an opportunity and not as a problem”.
For this reason, Clavijo considers it “more than necessary” to focus on the advantages of the outermost regions to meet strategic challenges such as economic diversification, transport and tourism, the promotion of youth employment, the introduction of renewable energies, education, formation and relations with Africa.
“ABSOLUTE DISIDENCE”
In this scenario, he points out that the islands must play a fundamental role as the leading region of the European ORs to improve the fit of policies adapted to the territory in these areas far from the continent, the archipelagos of Madeira and Azores, in the Portuguese case, and the Canary Islands. .
“For this reason, the absolute negligence of the Canarian Government is not understood, with a president of the Canary Islands at the helm whose ability to influence the Lanzarote summit was a posed for the photo, without achieving a firm commitment from Spain and Portugal to defend before the EU the exceptions that are necessary in community policies applied in the ORs”, he details.
Fernando Clavijo also stresses that none of these issues of a strategic nature for the ORs as a whole, and by extension for the Canary Islands, was addressed at the Spanish-Portuguese summit held in Lanzarote.
From the high-level meeting, in which President Pedro Sánchez was accompanied by his three vice presidents and seven ministers, a joint declaration and eleven bilateral agreements were signed on issues such as infrastructure, digitization or higher education.
“In none of these agreements is the specific situation of the ORs such as the Canary Islands addressed; there was also no interest in paying attention to the needs and opportunities that we have as remote regions. And all with the complicit consent of the Government of the Canary Islands”, sums up Clavijo as balance the summit held in Lanzarote.
