Britain raise MEPs’ hope for poverty-focused aid reform

By David Cronin

Date: 24/11/05

The European Parliament has won concessions from the UK presidency of the EU over a key proposal for reforming aid to foreign countries.

For the past eight months, the Parliament's development committee has refused to approve a European Commission proposal for merging 16 external assistance programmes in a bid to improve the efficiency of aid management.

The committee has argued that the blueprint, known as the financing instrument for development co-operation and economic co-operation, did not focus adequately on poverty alleviation.

Yet it has now agreed that the matter should be placed on the agenda of next week's plenary session (30 November-1 December).

Gay Mitchell, an Irish member of the centre-right European People's Party (EPP-ED) and the committee's rapporteur on the proposal, said the British presidency had suggested "much better wording" than the Commission.

The original blueprint covered both rich and poor countries outside the EU, raising fears that efforts to end hardship would lose out to more strategic policy goals. Forming part of the Commission's suggestions for the EU's spending plans in 2007-13, it extends to all countries except those accepted as candidates for EU membership and those part of the European Neighbourhood Programme (like Israel, Ukraine, the Palestinian territories and Morocco). A second concern was that "money spent on migration control could in future be described as development spending", said Mitchell.

He added that the British appeared open to splitting the instrument in two, so that developing countries will be treated separately from industrialised ones.

However, Mitchell said that differences remained over what role the Parliament will have in setting the policies for the use of funds. While he said that MEPs did not wish to "micro-manage" EU aid, he added that they should nonetheless be able to jointly decide with EU governments the terms of references on thematic issues like health and human rights. But the Commission has not recommended granting such co-decision powers to Parliament. "I will not be giving ground on this," he said.

A spokesman for Louis Michel, the commissioner for development and humanitarian aid, said that he always took the Parliament's views into consideration. "We always work with the Parliament, not only because we like it but because it is very useful in persuading member states to do more and co-ordinate better."

Article reports that the European Parliament had won concessions from the UK presidency of the EU over a key proposal for reforming aid to foreign countries. After refusing for eight months to approve a European Commission proposal for merging 16 external assistance programmes in a bid to improve the efficiency of aid management the Development Committee now agreed that the matter should be placed on the agenda of the European Parliament's upcoming plenary session, 30 November-1 December 2005.

European Commission: Prelex: Communication […] On the Instruments for External Assistance under the Future Financial Perspective 2007-2013 http://ec.europa.eu/prelex/detail_dossier.cfm?CL=en&ReqId=0&DocType=COM&DocYear=2004&DocNum=626

---