To determine this issue, we examined evidence relating to interprovincial and trans-U.S. border cattle flows, source of origin procurement data for major Canadian packers, transportation costs, and pricing data in the pre- and post-BSE periods.

20. Asks the Commission to present a proposal for a revised regulation on rehabilitation and reconstruction in order to ensure rapid and flexible funding of such measures in the post-crisis phase, in its broadest sense, including security and good governance; feels that this revised regulation should contain flexible fast-track procedures for disbursement of funds and approval of projects and programmes that take into account the specific and difficult nature of reconstruction and rehabilitation projects and programmes; notes that these funds for rehabilitation and reconstruction should not be taken from the emergency aid budget alloca ...[+++]ted to ECHO; feels that funding from the reconstruction and rehabilitation line should be released through a trigger mechanism – that would come into operation once a crisis erupts – in order to ensure sufficient and rapid availability of funds;

20. Asks the Commission to present a proposal for a revised regulation on rehabilitation and reconstruction in order to ensure rapid and flexible funding of such measures in the post-crisis phase, in its broadest sense, including security and good governance; feels that this revised directive should contain flexible fast-track procedures for disbursement of funds and approval of projects and programmes that take into account the specific and difficult nature of reconstruction and rehabilitation projects and programmes; notes that these funds for rehabilitation and reconstruction should not be taken from the emergency aid budget allocat ...[+++]ed to ECHO; feels that funding from the reconstruction and rehabilitation line should be released through a trigger mechanism – that would come into operation once a crisis erupts – in order to ensure sufficient and rapid availability of funds;

- Development: post-conflict and crisis situations and peace building;

ECHO in close cooperation with other Commission services, should however retain the flexibility on a case by case basis to prolong its support where a hand-over in the post-emergency phase is not easily possible.

Mid-term review of the Lomé Convention We are not aiming to renegotiate the whole Convention, which runs until the year 2000. What we want to do is preserve an exemplary aid instrument but at the same time adapt it in tune with international developments since the signing of Lomé IV. Let me remind you of some of the key developments: - in politics - the fall of the Berlin Wall and efforts to find new geopolitical equilibria; - in the European Community the signing of the Treaty on European Union and the institutionalization of Community development policy; - on the economic front - the creation of new international trade structures against an unhappy backcloth of economic crisis ...[+++]; - in ideas - growing awareness of new forms of interdependence between North and South and challenges to traditional centralist and statist concepts of development cooperation.