Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-28-Speech-4-037"
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"en.20060928.5.4-037"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, the report I hope we are going to vote in favour of today follows directly on from the three Commission communications that constitute what is referred to as ‘the 2006 aid effectiveness package’ and the report is therefore more broadly about pursuing the objective of improving European development cooperation. So much for the context.
As we know - because it is regularly talked about - boats continue, every day and even as we talk, to reach the Spanish coasts – which is to say our own coasts - with hundreds of people on board attempting to flee a fate that they have decided to reject at peril of their lives. This situation obviously raises issues about border controls, the management of migratory flows and policy on integrating immigrant populations. In addition, it strikingly raises the issue of how effective our cooperation policy is, as well as the issue of how well that policy ties in with our other policies.
I do not wish to descend into caricature, but what kind of cooperation is it – and one lasting more than 40 years – at the end of which the populations that we were claiming to help have only one aspiration: to flee the conditions under which they live at any price? Let us not mince our words. To me, this situation sounds like failure. What, indeed, can the countries of the South make of a cooperation policy through which a sum of EUR 50 billion per year is granted when it is combined with a policy requiring them to honour a debt whose annual reimbursement represents four times that sum?
How can we continue to state in every possible way our determination to facilitate the development of the countries of the South while, at the same time, we continue to foist on them the free-trade rules that they are incapable of obeying under the conditions we impose on them? How can we agree to combating poverty when, at the same time, nothing is done to fight against the structural causes of that poverty?
The truth is that, however effective it might be, development cooperation policy will never by itself succeed in responding to the many challenges posed in the countries of the South. It is with precisely that thought in mind that there is a need to improve development cooperation, as such cooperation will be more effective in proportion to the degree to which it succeeds in making Europe aware of the need to conduct an overall policy focused entirely on the pursuit of a common priority objective: the emergence of a fairer world characterised by greater solidarity.
As for what is at stake here – or even, I might say, constitutes the challenge – this could not be clearer: how are we Europeans significantly to improve the actual aid we provide to the countries of the South? In other words, how are we to set about ensuring that the aid we grant to the countries of the South is converted much more systematically into practical progress such as will genuinely change the lives of millions of people living in humanly unacceptable conditions?
There is now a collective awareness of the fact that we could provide better aid, and political commitments have been made enabling us to give this issue priority status in our development cooperation policy. We have a European consensus on development and also a new strategy for Africa. That is excellent. Moreover, the legislative and technical arrangements are being put in place. If I may say so, all that remains for us to do is to give practical expression to all this.
The many issues that we have dealt with in this report include the following: the actual definition of development cooperation and, therefore, of what each Member State is legitimately entitled to include under public development aid; the minimum level of aid to be obtained if our commitments are to be honoured; the untying of aid, a process that Member States – a number of them, in any case – are clearly reluctant to apply; the absence of indicators enabling real progress in improving European aid to be assessed; or, again, the concern of actors on the ground who note a certain reluctance to involve beneficiary countries in the strategies and programmes intended for those countries.
In addition to these specific issues that give us some grasp of how far we still have to go in improving our aid in practical terms, the three Cs – complementarity of actions, coordination of programmes and coherence of policies - also constitute a framework within which to work and a particularly important template for interpreting the action that we shall have to take over the next few years where cooperation is concerned.
When it comes to complementarity of actions, whether these be taken on a sectoral or geographical basis, the fact is that distribution of the work gives rise to some resistance and a number of difficulties. By adopting an open and bold approach, we should be able to overcome these problems. The debate cannot be reduced to a clash between Member State protectionism and Brussels centralism, useful though it undoubtedly is to guard against excessive centralism. This is characterised by a top-down approach to programming and, in particular, by reduced participation by the partner countries and by civil society in defining strategies and priorities.
The fact remains that centralised coordination between Member States and the Commission would offer undoubted advantages and would, in particular, make it possible to avoid the present situation in which a multitude of different actors do the same thing in the same country or region. For example, the atlas of donors clearly shows the existence of forgotten crises or of what are known as orphan countries, together with post-tsunami-type situations in which the beneficiary countries are incapable of absorbing a huge quantity of aid provided on a one-off basis.
Although coordination has been talked about for years, huge challenges remain when it comes to harmonising procedures and doing a better job of coordinating the EU’s various cooperation programmes. What is more, not only do the various Community policies themselves need to be internally coherent, but there also needs to be a coherent approach to policy-making in the various geographical areas in which our development policy applies. This precise point appears on the agenda of the Finnish Presidency, which has decided to devote a large part of its work to the matter.
If, therefore, we thought it wiser to confine ourselves in our report to emphasising the importance of this aspect while waiting to see what the near future holds for us, I should like to take this opportunity to raise this issue which I think is vital and ultimately has bearing on the very basis of any cooperative initiative or even, indeed, of any political project."@en1
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