Aimed at taking stock of the results of ten years of Euromed Partnership and at re-launching it, the Barcelona Summit 2005 established a Five-Years Action Plan involving 4 major working areas.
Within the Chapter “Sustainable Socio-Economic Development and Reform” it is envisaged to “Design and implement a road map, for the creation of a Free Trade Area by 2010”. This Euro- Mediterranean Free Trade Area (EMFTA) will become the world’s biggest free trade area from
Scandinavia to Morocco and from Island to Syria involving 600-800 million consumers and all
kinds of goods by 2010.
This objective was already set in the Barcelona Declaration (November 1995) with the purpose of improving not only the trade relations between the EU and the Mediterranean states, but also to
improve the so-called South-South relations in an attempt to favour and boost the harmonic development of the entire southern Mediterranean region.
This is the future economic framework, the crucial opportunity and challenge that even the media and
audiovisual industry must face. Finally, an important and concrete contribution of COPEAM: thanks to the shared action of COPEAM, RAI (Italy) and ENTV (Algeria), the Italian delegation to the EUROMED Summit, supported by the Algerian and Spanish delegations, presented successfully an amendment to the Chapter “Education and Socio-Cultural Exchanges” of the EU Action Plan that, in the spirit of the 1995 Declaration of Barcelona, recognizing the role of the media in the intercultural
dialogue, commits the EU into supporting the realisation of multi-cultural and multi-languages satellite channels and portals.