Mr President, this directive on the marketing of forest reproductive material is really based on the merger of two earlier directives.

Amendment No 10: according to the proposed amendment, an official certificate of origin should accompany each consignment of forest reproductive material during marketing.

The Commission feels that the proposed amendment is too broadly based and introduces the possibility for Member States to unilaterally prohibit the marketing of forest reproductive material.

The present proposal aims to update the current legislation on the marketing of forest reproductive material to take account of the accession of new Member States since 1975, the internal market and scientific advances.

Monitoring should be confined to forest undertakings and should not, as the report provides, apply to all undertakings, as these requirements would then affect undertakings which produce no forest reproductive material at all.

Moreover, this text has also been adopted in the forest directive on the use of forest reproductive material and we feel that this text urgently needs to be adopted in this directive as well.

It is therefore only logical that we make provision for genetically modified feedingstuff additives in this case, just as we have in regulations already passed in other areas, such as forest reproductive material, to mention just one example.

The text of the directive coincides on the basic aspects of objective, number of categories, definitions of basic materials and so on with the world' s other main system of marketing forest reproductive material, namely the OECD.

Mr President, I am very pleased about this new proposal concerning forest reproductive material because it offers new opportunities or, rather, gives the old opportunities a new lease of life, above all with a view to there being several categories of material.

If you collect or produce forest reproductive material that you intend to market or use in forest reproductive material production, you must be licensed by the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, Forest Service, Northern Ireland.

The final decision has been delayed because some Member States have asked for more time to consider the provisions on genetically modified organisms, despite the fact that these provisions are no different from Community legislation in force and are equivalent to those recently adopted in accordance with the Community directives on the marketing of seed and forest reproductive material.