Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-04-Speech-4-023"
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"en.20011004.2.4-023"2
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"Mr President, what happened on 11 September does not reduce the need for development aid. On the contrary. There is reason for calling upon all the EU countries to live up to their pledges in Gothenburg to increase their aid to the promised 0.7%. The EU is most certainly the world’s largest donor region, but that does not say as much about our own efforts as about the deficiencies of others. Even if we are not at present supposed to be criticising the United States but instead continuing to support them, it has to be said that the United States’ role in this context has not been particularly distinguished, to put it mildly. There is both their deficient contribution to the UN and the insufficient development aid they have provided. The issue of their contribution to the UN has now been sorted out, so we can hope that the issue of development aid will also be sorted out. Prevention is, of course, better than cure, and development aid is an effort at prevention. It is sad that it is so easy to get expenditure on military systems authorised and that it is so difficult to get expenditure on the preventative work of development aid authorised. We must be clear that, in our contemporary world with its TV channels, the very poorest people also know that there are very large inequalities in the world. In reality, it is amazing that they do not react more strongly than they in fact do. There is no doubt that the refugee ship we heard about this summer is only the first small portent of what is to come.
Following this introduction, I wish to turn to the rapporteur’s report and thank him for all the work he has put into this matter. Crisis conditions, to put it mildly, prevail in a long list of developing countries. A huge effort is therefore necessary when it comes to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Anyone who has been in any doubt as to whether this can simply be left to private companies can no longer, after the debate that has been conducted in recent years, be in any doubt that an effort is required, partly from the donor countries. We cannot leave this to the free market. It has actually been rather humiliating to discuss this matter, but that is why it is all the more gratifying that the EU has now done something in this area and, for example, totally untied the funds, which means that developing countries can buy wherever it is best and cheapest to do so. We must not only concentrate on medicine. We must, of course, also concentrate on restructuring. It is incredibly important that we should ensure that people are helped to help themselves and that we should see to it that systems are devised for which developing countries themselves can take responsibility and which they can, above all, manage, including when we are not there to support them. Both medicines and infrastructure are required in this matter, and I would urge us to continue to make a major effort to help developing countries to help themselves."@en1
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