Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-25-Speech-4-040"
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"en.20020425.3.4-040"2
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".
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, the final results of the Monterrey Conference are encouraging and give cause for renewed optimism about September's world summit in Johannesburg on sustainable development. Monterrey's success is founded, among other things, on the innovative form that the conference took, which enabled the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organisation to take an active part as partners on an equal footing. It was the first time the European Community had been accorded the status of a full participant at a UN conference. What had originally been meant to be a conventional United Nations event became a meeting on a significantly broader scale, and one that, it is to be hoped, will promote future coordination of its principal participants and cooperation between them.
Let me conclude by referring to the role played in this process by the Commission, which had, even before the Council met in Laeken, put the case in the political arena for the Member States to substantially build up their ODAs. The Development Council of 8 November last year took an initial step in that direction by entrusting the Commission with the task of examining these issues more closely. This process then led to the Barcelona European Council resolution in which the Member States agreed for the first time to consult with each other on their development budgets and above all to give the Commission a coordinating role. It is my belief that these results speak for themselves.
The conference was also innovative in form in the sense that the Final Document – known as the Monterrey Consensus – had already been agreed on in New York in January. And, as no negotiations as such took place, the participants in the conference concentrated on round table discussions alongside the events and also at bilateral meetings, rather than only on sessions spent discussing wording and drafting the Final Document. This made it possible to focus debate on potential concrete commitments, bilateral initiatives and tangible contributions. In addition, the conference built upon the so far unique global consensus achieved at the Millennium Summit on objectives, policy and indicators in the development field.
The essential challenge for the Conference on Financing for Development was to mobilise the financial resources required in order for the Millennium Summit's development policy objectives to be achieved. This meant that the conference could pursue a clearer and better-defined objective.
The events of 11 September had a far-reaching influence on the way the international community saw and understood this conference, bringing as they did in a tragic way the extent to which we depend on each other to the attention of a vast public quite apart from those who concern themselves with issues of development policy.
It is against this backdrop that what is no doubt the conference's most important and most visible outcome should be seen – the simultaneous commitments by the European Union and the USA to increase their public-sector development aid by a further USD 20 billion and USD 10 billion respectively. President Bush's announcement of the allocation of USD 5 billion, a sum then further increased in the course of the week in order to catch the EU up, is also evidence of a change in thinking by the USA on its development policy, the estimates for which have been subject to continuous cutbacks over the past 20 years. It is no presumption to say that we, the European Union, are in a leadership role, in which we can also, accordingly, present ourselves to the world.
These commitments were widely welcomed and were the inevitable response to the declared willingness of most of the developing countries to mobilise their own resources and accept the imposition of good domestic governance. They can thus be seen as a partial implementation of the statements contained in the Monterrey Consensus, and accord with the European Union's concept of development policy as a global agreement also including Dohar, Monterrey and Johannesburg.
A few aspects of Monterrey did not meet expectations, and I will list three of them: Problems inherent in systems, innovative sources of finance for development, and global public goods. As regards problems inherent in systems, the Monterrey Consensus limits itself to underlining the importance of paying greater attention, in the international financial architecture, to the voice of the developing countries. There are, though, no concrete proposals on this.
The document contains nothing more on innovative sources of finance for development than a general statement of the need to examine these questions more thoroughly.
Global public goods are not mentioned at all, so the Johannesburg Conference offers a second opportunity to address these aspects, one that, I believe, we must make use of."@en1
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