The Courier

A young girl learning the Koran in Freetown, 12 August 2004.

© IRIN

José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, has called on EU Member States to up their respective Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) if the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are to be met. They include halving extreme global poverty by 2015.

Barroso told a Brussels press conference 9 April: “We are doing well on aid effectiveness but we have to be honest and admit that our 2007 aid volume performance is simply not good enough.”

The call for more aid is contained in part an EU paper, ‘EU as a global partner for development’ released by Barroso 9 April  to get talks started on a common EU position for the High Level Forum of Aid Effectiveness in Accra, Ghana in September and the Doha Financing for Development Conference in December.

For the first time since 2000 the combined overseas aid from 27 EU Member States to all developing nations fell to €46.1 billion in 2007 compared with €47.7 billion in 2006.

Recent figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reveal that aid fell in 2007 from the following states who are traditionally large contributors by volume: Belgium (-11.2 per cent), France (-15.9 per cent), Italy (-3.6 per cent), Portugal (-9.4 per cent), Sweden (-2.6 per cent) and the United Kingdom (-29.1 per cent).

The following states gave more in 2007: Germany (+5.9 per cent), Ireland (+4.6 per cent), Luxembourg (+11.7 per cent), Spain (+33.8 per cent), Austria (+7.6 per cent), Denmark (+2.9 per cent), Finland (+5.5 per cent), Greece (+5.3 per cent) and the Netherlands (+3.1 per cent).

President Barroso said the European Commission had a leadership role in meeting the MDGs and asked Member States to specify annual development spending up to 2015. This message would be taken to the June meeting of EU Heads of State in Slovenia and the group of eight most industrialised nations (G8) in July in Japan, he said.

Member States were also asked to contribute to a new annual European Commission annual budget line of €2 billion for ‘Aid for Trade’ up to 2010, half of which will come from the Commission and the rest from EU Member States. It will finance such as infrastructure to boost regional trade in developing nations and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states are expected to be big beneficiaries.

Larger amounts of aid are just one part of the ‘global partner’ paper which also stresses improved aid effectiveness. Here a lot of progress had been made with EU Member States taking joint planning decisions, Louis Michel, EU Commissioner for Development, told journalists on 9 April. In Somalia six EU countries and Norway coordinate aid. Michel also gave his backing to budget support which created, “a relationship of confidence between equals.” Forty-seven per cent of the €22.6 billion 10th EDF (2008-2013) is earmarked for budget aid in ACP nations.

And the paper urges more synergy between development and other EU policies to avoid situations where they are at odds with eachother, a case in point being biofuels.  (See article on biofuels in trade rubric).

GEEREF against climate change

GEEREF stands for the Global Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Fund. It is a new EU fund set up for small-scale projects that improve energy efficiency or promote renewable energy in developing countries and economies in transition, reducing climate change. The EU Commission is to put in €80M over the next four years to kick-start the fund and trigger private investment. Projects using environmentally sound technology that has a proven track record will be given priority. ACP nationals are eligible.