Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-04-Speech-4-226"
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"en.20030904.8.4-226"2
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".
The communication about the untying of aid dates back to 18 November 2002 and we still have quite some work to do, even though we have made good political progress on the issue since last year.
The Commission is complying, and in fact over-achieving, in relation to what it has to do in order to carry out this agreement. But we take a different view: one reason being that we do not want to discriminate between least developed countries and the rest. We are ready to untie all aid and we have legal obligations vis-à-vis the ACP countries, for instance, which means that as a group, they have access to bid on everything relating to all seventy-eight countries.
In preparation for the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development, the Member States committed themselves to continue discussions on the further untying of bilateral aid. The Commission recognises that we need both to increase the volume of aid and its effectiveness through measures like those we are discussing today. I am really pleased to have the signal from Parliament and I look forward to moving this forward.
It is true that we have to insist on some reciprocity, because this issue is also about taking care of trade interests opening up on our part, if, for instance, the United States is not doing the same thing. It is clearly not something we have a mandate to do. Our policy is now clear we want to go for the big solution on this issue.
This issue may appear to be very technical and difficult to address, but it can have quite an impact in the field concerning the effectiveness, the value for money of our aid and also the dynamics of the cooperation with our partner countries – exactly in the way Mr Fernández Martin has made clear.
I am grateful for the work he has done on this subject. His report reflects broad agreement between us. We have achieved consensus in Council on the untying of Community aid, and with the resolution on the table now in Parliament we can start working on implementation.
We will focus on concrete proposals to change the different relevant legal instruments. The proposal to implement changes in the existing regulations will fall under the co-decision procedure and therefore Parliament's role in moving this forward will be fundamental. I look forward to discussing it with Parliament during the course of this coming year.
We will continue our work on establishing the facts relating to untying. One of the problems is that it is very difficult to find concrete, reliable data on the impact of untying. We will begin a study on this before the end of the year.
We will try to convince other donors who are still reluctant to join us, particularly through the work of the OECD ’s Development Assistance Committee and its new Working Group on Aid Effectiveness.
While welcoming the Council’s agreement on the untying of Community aid, I would like to express disappointment at the reluctance of some Member States – and especially that of one Member State – to commit themselves to untying bilateral aid. This has two dimensions; one is the well-established discussion as to whether or not official development assistance and the procurement there is part of the Single Market. This is an internal EU discussion. In the Commission's view the answer is clearly 'yes', the public procurement directive does indeed cover development aid.
Some countries that have been doubting this over the years, including my own, clearly no longer doubt this. However, one Member State still maintains a different view. My reply would be 'okay, we will meet in Court'.
The other element where a discussion is more open and more legitimate is what Member States do in the broader global discussion in the framework of OECD about the untying of aid. There we have an agreement to untie aid to the group of least developed countries. The volume of what has been agreed on corresponds to about 2% of global ODA – not a big deal."@en1
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