4. Welcomes, in this context, the launch of the EU-Tunisia Task Force, the first task force established in conjunction with a southern Mediterranean country with a view to ensuring better coordination of EU and international support for the country’s transition; welcomes the fact that Parliament was involved in the first meeting; asks the VP/HR and the Commission to continue to involve Parliament in this and future initiatives; welcomes the creation within Parliament of a monitoring group on the Southern Mediterranean to monitor the EU’s response to the crises in the Mediterranean countries;

8. Points out that many Mediterranean countries have expressed the wish to preserve their trade preferences vis-à-vis the Community market; considers that maintaining this preferential and asymmetric system is incompatible with a general liberalisation of the agriculture sector; emphasises, furthermore, that it is in the mutual interest of all Mediterranean countries to preserve certain tools with which to manage supply on their respective markets; calls accordingly on the Commission and the representatives of the SEMC to seek in the course of the multilateral trade negotiations being conducted within the World Trade Organisation (WTO ...[+++]) any possible means (including the classification of milk, fruit and vegetables as sensitive products) of limiting market imbalances and also any possible asymmetry and distortion of competition between the agricultural markets in the SEMC and those in the EU which might cause farmers in either group of countries to suffer loss;

In Barcelona, the vital contribution of civil society to the development of partnerships was recognised for the first time in a text to which the European Union and 15 countries of the southern Mediterranean subscribed.

We want to capitalise on this experience and so the Commission has proposed a bank. However, the major shareholders in the bank will be the European Investment Bank, the Commission, the share-holding countries and, most importantly, the countries of the southern Mediterranean.

Some point to the possibilities of siting this agricultural production in the countries south of the Mediterranean, contributing to local development and reducing immigration pressure on the EUs Mediterranean Member States.

Tempus III was further amended in 2002 [8] extending the programme to the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries covered by the MEDA programme, in the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership which emerged following the 1995 Barcelona Declaration.