Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-02-28-Speech-3-176"
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". – I could be tempted to start an information campaign here and now in the light of Mr Imbeni’s remarks about only Sweden being at 0.7% or above the ODA. In fact, there is a group of countries which actually are above 0.7%. Sweden is about 0.8%, as is the Netherlands. Luxembourg has just made it above 0.7%. Denmark is at 1.0%; Norway, not a Member, but still the closest competitor to Denmark. Norway is around 0.9%.
There is a misunderstanding, and I noted Mr Belder’s remarks here, that this is about abortion programmes. The reality is that the work of UNFPA, and of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, even looked at in a very narrow, yes or no perspective, is clearly a part of the solution and not part of the problem. They are reducing the number of dangerous and illegal abortions carried out in this world and not the other way around.
To Mrs Maes, I would say you are right that the battle against poverty is not over and has not been won. One of the reasons why development assistance has not worked is, quite simply, because there has not been enough of it. Some of it has not been good and the crazy conflicts, the problem of corruption, all these problems are there. But we are in a situation where, for once, it is reasonable to say that more of the same is part of the answer. We know what good development cooperation is and the sigh of relief, the sense of getting things in order now for the EU, reflects that fact that there is a global consensus to relate to. Otherwise we would have invented something very new and exciting which we could choose to call a wheel or whatever, but the interesting thing is that there is not really much new in what we have done. But we have become mainstream. We are hooking into the priorities and the ways of working which reflect best practice in the understanding among donors and partner countries in the south.
This is why I feel so confident that the priorities that we have listed, the policy paper and the support it has got is strong, real stuff that we can use. Getting it done will be quite a challenge but we will face up to it.
To Mr Howitt and Mr van den Berg I would say, on the issue of priorities, that it is pretty well established that we agree on the aims of actually being able to deliver something that more than lives up to the 20-20 principles from the Social Summit in Copenhagen for instance. Giving priority to health and education agreed and so on. But our problem, and this also comes back to what Mr Imbeni said, is strangely enough the fact that we do not know what we are doing. To some extent we do know what we are doing but we have no record of the composition of the different activities. We are not able to say how much we are doing on environment because the labelling of our different projects was never organised in such a way that we can take out the files and say, “Well, this is it”.
We are not able, as of now, to say how many kilometres of roadway we built last year. This is something I am trying desperately to produce – clear, tangible, real, down-to-earth statistics, telling people what we are doing. But it is all obscured by commitments and long-term programmes etc. and there is no link between the spending and the commitment. This is where we are now. So delivering, technically, in the manner that Parliament would like will require more homework than we are able to perform in a very short time. This is the core of the discussion that is still outstanding, not an issue of substantial disagreement.
Honestly, at the beginning I myself had some doubt as to the importance of writing the overall policy statement for development cooperation because in my view it was not really that new. Today, almost a year after we did it, I am of a different opinion because first of all the actual process of writing it and having it accepted showed that it was definitely worth the trouble and that debate was necessary to create real ownership in the Commission throughout the different services with regard to these principles. The next thing was that Member States were much more enthusiastic about having one paper covering the whole geography saying what our policy is. We never had that before. So, even if it is not revolutionary, I see a strong meaningful value in having it and certainly, as I sense in our discussions over the months between the Commission and Parliament in this field, we have real value in having this shared framework of what it is that we think about when we talk about the development policy paper. So it is valuable.
The next thing now is that we are going to use it and the moment is important because together with the launching of the Cotonou Agreement, the hammering out of country strategy papers for each and every one of the 77 ACP countries, we are in business, and we are going to use these principles. For the rest of the geography we are going to move from country to country applying the same rules. This is where we will be calling the bluff on the reality of the acceptance of focusing on poverty when we come to middle-income non-ACP countries and start looking at the real distribution of what we are spending our money on in these countries.
So, we will have tons and tons of work and a lot of political challenges to correct the course of what we are doing in the coming months and years in this area.
Another big drama will be the actual delivery. I will continue being very open and frank with Parliament, not to reduce our own responsibility for executing the budget but rather to make sure that there are no misunderstandings as to the size of the challenge and its nature. We now have a good policy and we are fortunate to have the backing of this House for that policy. The next thing is to move forward hand-in-hand and implement it and make sure, as I have said before in this Parliament, that we change the situation from what it is today, where we can say that as Europeans we are proud that we do this, to some years from now when we should also be proud as to how we have done it.
So it is fine that we have the G7. Fortunately for development cooperation we also have the G0.7. Ireland has decided to reach 0.7 at the latest in 2007 so things are moving and some of the bigger countries are, in fact, also trying to increase the level.
To add one more remark on this quantitative aspect: working at European level we should recognise the fact that Member States have accepted that the Commission can continue working at the level of ambition that has been defined. For the ACP countries we have the money promised for the ninth European Development Fund and for the rest of the world we also have, as part of the Financial Perspective, clarity and certainty as to the budget level for development cooperation. This is quite important, when we look around the world, that we have the availability of resources. One big element in the complex equation of what we do is to be considered stable. Member States have said that they are giving the Commission the benefit of the doubt to see if we can do this better than we used to and they are not squeezing us on funding. We have to be quite humble against that background and it is a challenge to live up to this.
To Mrs Sauquillo, I would just give the information that on 9 February we had a very good meeting with a whole range of different development NGO networks in Europe and at that meeting they asked us about how to organise future discussions. I can tell Parliament that I immediately accepted the idea of regular meetings on substance with the different development NGOs and this will be very useful.
However, I find it more important to have a substantial debate, an ongoing discussion, with Parliament than with anybody else. One does not exclude the other but it should be remembered in any discussion about the role of NGOs that this House has the legitimacy and representation which gives any opinion from here a somewhat bigger weight than any from anywhere else. This is also part of my approach in dealing with these issues.
Mr Rod pointed out the problem of whether we or our partners are deciding what we are supposed to do. This is in any case a complex issue. We can only offer to do those things in the developing countries that we know how to do. We have had to limit ourselves to some extent because there are many things we do not know enough about to be delivering good assistance in those fields. There are some limits to what we can make our obligation and we also have to ensure that it fits in with what other donors can offer. It is not correct to say that we have designed our priorities by thinking how we could help ourselves by doing these things in the developing countries. This is simply not fair, especially when we look at the new policy and the very strong focus on poverty.
Mr Rod also mentioned access to medicines. It should be noted that the Commission has recently taken a number of steps in the follow-up to its communication on AIDS, malaria, TB. We decided two weeks ago in the Commission on a programme of action which follows up what we did in the autumn. This actually includes some very strong ideas on opening up for a more focused attention on tier pricing and also opening up for bidding and becoming a supplier across the geography for non-OECD companies from, for instance, Brazil, India, South Africa, China which should have access to bids on all our agendas relating to malaria, TB and AIDS.
Mrs Sandbaek, the opening up for exports from LDCs has been an issue which I assume everybody is well informed about now. I listened carefully to the different evaluations concerning how Member States finally decided on Monday. There was very little doubt as to the Commission’s views and its original proposal. The Member States have now decided. I take some relative satisfaction in looking at comments from everybody outside the EU, as well as comments from Third World representatives, that they now sincerely hope that other big trading partners and players in the global trade policy discussions will now do something as good or comparable to what Europe has done. There is absolutely no doubt that Europe is now in a better position than before the LDC conference and in the effort of creating a basis for a new global round in the WTO framework. We can always discuss whether we have done our part and whether it is good enough. But what we have done is something which the others now have to match. Relatively speaking, this is very good at this time.
Mrs Sandbaek also questioned what Europe is going to do in view of President Bush’s announcement of cutting US support for organisations involved in family planning activities. We are strongly engaged in this area and the relationship between poverty, conflict, AIDS and gender equality is so strong that we have absolutely no doubt in our mind as to the need to react strongly and immediately to the threat coming from the US Administration in this field. I announced in the UN in New York in January that Europe is able and willing to fill the decency gap and we will do that."@en1
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