Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-09-05-Speech-2-092"
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"en.20000905.7.2-092"2
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"Mr President, first of all, I want to say thank you both to the French Presidency and to Commissioner Patten for their excellent contributions this morning. The priorities established deserve all our support.
Time permits only a couple of remarks on my part. I choose to concentrate on the deficiencies in the implementation of the Union’s development cooperation. Commissioner Patten deserves praise for the openness with which he describes and has described the problems. My own experience when, in a responsible post within the UN’s development programme, I sought cooperation with the Union at national level with a view to assembling and coordinating forces in different areas was that, as a rule, it did not work, either because almost every decision in the EU’s case needed to be taken in Brussels and also because of the lack of qualified staff within the area concerned. All this made cooperation with the EU difficult and incredibly time-consuming. The UN has its problems with bureaucracy and dilatoriness – I am the first to admit that – but, where development work and development cooperation are concerned, the EU was lagging far behind, in any case a few years ago.
The conclusion I draw is, first of all, that the Commission must radically decentralise the right of decision-making to national level. “Brussels”, with all its administrative levels, must relinquish a large degree of control.
Secondly, it is important to ensure that the Commission has an adequate number of qualified staff to carry out the operations about which decisions are being made.
I know, Commissioner Patten, that this is the direction your politics are taking right now. I would just emphasise that it is a matter of urgency. If there are no rapid improvements, I fear that the Commission’s support for development cooperation will gradually disappear. That would be a pity, given that well-developed multilateral cooperation has many advantages and that the Union needs such an instrument in order to be able to play a proactive role on the international stage."@en1
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