Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-10-24-Speech-1-262-000"
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"en.20111024.23.1-262-000"2
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"Madam President, I think I need to start by thanking the rapporteur, Mr Preda, for his excellent report, even if he did not have a very broad audience tonight to discuss these issues. There is definitely convergence between the EU institutions on the issue, but still a lot of work needs to be done. We are well prepared for the Busan conference.
First of all, I welcome the fact that there will be three Members of the European Parliament in the EU delegation, which will definitely make it much stronger.
As regards challenges, we need one outcome document at the end of the day, because there are a couple of challenges to tackle. One challenge is to reflect on the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action and what we have achieved. As the rapporteur mentioned, as a donor community, we have not actually achieved today what we should have done according to the indicators. So that means that we need to confirm the Paris Declaration in a way that gives us many more assurances that credible development plans will be followed as regards the necessary support for aid effectiveness. As Ms Záborská said, our goal is to help people to help themselves. That is why the aid effectiveness agenda is so crucial, because it gives the decisive push towards the MDGs.
I think that is the first block. In way it is clear; in theory, everybody agrees. But what we need to look at is how to formulate it in such a way that, in the years to come, we do not fail on these indicators and in the process. That is crucial.
The second issue is related to the new donors. The landscape has changed. Looking at it from my point of view as Development Commissioner, China, India and other actors are coming into development aid, and not disclosing to the aid effectiveness agenda as the traditional donor countries do. So in a way, it is a contradictory situation. We try to help, whilst not knowing exactly what the other partners are doing. A part of the aid effectiveness agenda should be that everybody follows the same process, perhaps not at the same pace, but we are all transparent. If we are not transparent, then the risk is that we do not actually support the countries sufficiently in fighting poverty. I think it is very crucial to find a good way of involving new donors in the aid effectiveness agenda.
The third issue that is very crucial is increasing transparency. As there is an economic crisis in the European Union, people are increasingly asking what results have been achieved in development. The best answer is definitely to give full transparency as to how the resources are being used. I definitely could give this House assurances that the money has not been wasted. It has definitely helped millions of people move out of poverty, and more kids to get to school and to survive in very difficult conditions. But still the public at large expects even more transparency as regards the money that is being used for development aid.
That also leads us to ask for some commitments. On the EU side, we are looking for two particular deliverables before Busan: transparency – guarantees that basically all EU-funded support for development policies is fully transparent – and the joint programme, which we are about to discuss with member countries at the end of October. We have moved quite a lot with regard to coordination on the spot, but the weakness of coordination is that you know, but you do not change. It means that you need to establish cycles that follow each other, and fit in with the development plan of a particular country.
It seems that coordination is not enough, so basically, the answer is joint programming exercises in the EU. We held out with this in the Haiti case and South Sudan; now it is a time to be more ambitious. Only in this way, going in step with respective countries’ development plans, can we really make the necessary synergies and save the EUR 5 to 6 billion that the rapporteur mentioned in his presentation. We know full well that if we use joint programming, we actually get more money for development, at the same time not taxing anybody.
I believe Busan will be an extremely interesting conference. It is a bit different from the MDG conference last year, and the Istanbul conference, so it will be rather challenging to get everybody involved, including developing countries and new donors. But it should be a success; it is a main development not only this year, but before the MDG deadline in 2015. It is quite a commitment and I am grateful for this excellent report that gives guarantees that the EU will again be the leader as it was also in Accra."@en1
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