Memorandum from Christian Aid
THE FUTURE OF RELATIONS BETWEEN THE EUROPEAN
UNION AND THE ACP COUNTRIES
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Successor arrangements to the Lomé Convention
should have the objectives of poverty eradication and sustainable
development. Economic integration is a means to these ends.
All policies and instruments should be judged by how they affect
the poor. The nine Least Developed Countries which are
not yet members of the ACP Group should be offered full membership
or equivalent treatment.
The trend towards increased EU aid allocation
to middle income regions should be reversed; priority in aid
resources should go to the poorest countries. Aid should be
based on an anti-poverty plan, mainstreaming gender, drawn up
by each ACP country. EU aid to social development should increase
from 12 to at least 20 per cent and the new agreement should embrace
the OECD DAC anti-poverty targets. To enhance recipient ownership,
the ACP Group should define performance criteria. Each ACP country's
anti-poverty plan should receive 70 per cent of national aid funds,
with 15 per cent for trade development and 15 per cent for civil
society initiatives.
Civil society and the private sector
should have greater access to policy dialogue and aid funds, with
aid disbursed through the EU delegation or the NGO division in
Brussels. The focus of support to the private sector should be
smallholder agriculture and small and medium-size local and regional
enterprises, rather than the corporate sector which displaces
local companies. The non-state actors should complement the role
of the state, strengthened to maintain the provision of basic
services.
Globalisation and trade liberalisation have
marginalised many of the poor, especially in Africa. Increased
international trade does not automatically lead to poverty reduction.
The challenge is to develop a trade and investment régime
which benefits the poor. The package should: offer every ACP country
market access no less favourable than now; seek a WTO waiver to
extend non-reciprocity until 2010; target market access and trade
development measures (to improve supply-side response) at the
poorest producers and traders; simplify the rules of origin; reduce
tariffs on CAP products; review all financial flows including
measures to relieve debt; promote investment in human capital
and institution building; include an EU/ACP investment code; and
envisage an expanded role for the EIB in microcredit, especially
for women.
The instruments of political co-operation
should be strengthened and widened to embrace civil society.
The EU operates a range of policies with the
potential to undermine its development objectives. To improve
policy coherence and provide redress for affected groups,
the EU should provide a complaints mechanism (perhaps an ombudsman
under the ACP/EU Joint Assembly), a single annual report on EU
co-operation with developing countries, an ACP/EU committee to
negotiate fisheries agreements and a unified aid administration
in the Commission.
THE FUTURE OF RELATIONS BETWEEN THE EUROPEAN
UNION AND THE ACP COUNTRIES
1. Christian Aid is the official development
agency of 40 churches in the UK and Ireland. In common with other
agencies in Europe related to the World Council of Churches, it
has closely followed the debate on the future of the EU's partnership
with African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries and has prepared
this response to the European Commission's Green Paper of November
1996. It has also participated in the discussions leading up to,
and fully supports, the forthcoming response of the EU-NGDO Liaison
Committee to the Green Paper. The comments here should be seen
as complementary to the Liaison Committee document.
The key questions which will face EU and ACP
governments when their negotiations are launched in September
1998 include: the geographical scope of the Convention, aid programmes
and instruments, the actors, trade and investment, the political
dimension and policy coherence. All these questions should be
judged from the perspective of how they affect the poor. To give
effect to this conviction, all development programmes and trade
policies should be subject to poverty and gender appraisal equal
in rigour with the EU's procedure for environmental impact assessment.
The Lomé Convention was founded on the
principle of partnership, which has implications for the policies
and behaviour of both partners. It should be enhanced in any new
agreement. Conditionality can play a legitimate role in the concept
of partnership provided that it applies to both parties and is
the result of a mutual agreement reached without the application
of undue force. In particular, the EU and ACP are bound by the
conclusions of the major UN conferences in which they reached
agreement with a global range of partners: the conferences on
children (1990), environment and development (1992), nutrition
(1992), human rights (1993), population (1994), social development
(1995), women (1995) and food security (1996). These conferences
have emphasised the value of people's participation and particularly
the central role of women in human development.
The EU mandate will need to be based on the
development objectives stated in the Maastricht Treaty (Article
130u): sustainable economic and social development, smooth and
gradual integration of developing countries into the world economy,
and the campaign against poverty. The emphasis which we place
on economic growth aimed at self-reliance and basic needs leads
us to question the equal place given to the objective of economic
integration. The present processes of integration and globalisation
are accompanied throughout the world by polarisation and exclusion.
Economic growth alone does not guarantee human development. Nor
does more (international) trade necessarily improve the position
of the poor. Economic integration and trade promotion cannot be
goals in themselves; they are only means to the achievement
of sustainable human development. The Maastricht objectives of
poverty eradication and sustainable development need to be seen
as occupying a higher rank in the hierarchy of objectives. The
primary question for the negotiation of a new agreement is how,
and under what circumstances, the instruments of economic growth
and integration can be used to reduce poverty.
2. Geographical scope of a new agreement
The Commission's Green Paper puts forward four
options for the scope of a new agreement:
— the status quo (i.e., the present
71 ACP countries);
— an overall agreement supplemented
by bilateral agreements (with the main detailed provisions in
the latter);
— splitting up the Lomé Convention
into regional agreements (separate agreements with the Caribbean,
the Pacific and sub-Saharan Africa, with the further option of
sub-regional agreements);
— an agreement with the least developed
of the ACP countries, possibly open to other least development
countries (LLDCs).
Only the last of these options begins to face
up to the EU's main challenge: to produce an agreement whose focus
is poverty eradication. There have been calls for the EU to replace
the current composition of the Convention, based on former colonial
ties, with a uniform global policy towards developing countries
in which the poorest countries would obtain the greatest benefits.
Even such a policy would not adequately respond to the large numbers
of poor people who live in middle income countries. It is unlikely
that a single aid and trade agreement can be shaped to meet the
needs of both the poorest countries and the many poor people in
India and Brazil, and the EU's aid arrangements for such countries
also need to be guided by a poverty focus.
The Commission itself finds problems with the
last of its options (an agreement with the LLDCs alone), partly
because it has always had a regional approach to the ACP. The
two strongest reasons against the exclusion of the middle income
ACPs from a new agreement are that it would severely weaken the
Group's solidarity and bargaining power, and that many of the
middle income members are vulnerable small island states whose
reliance on the Lomé trade provisions is at least as much
a lifeline as are the aid programmes for the poorest members.
Moreover, the ACP Group has an existence separate from the Convention
and cannot be deconstructed by decision of the EU.
None of the Commission's four options provides
a convincing solution. If a fresh start based on levels of development
is politically unfeasible, Christian Aid would favour the unstated
"option five", that the ACP Group simply be extended
to include the nine least developed countries which are not yet
members (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, Laos,
the Maldives, Nepal and Yemen). This suggestion would reinforce
the poverty focus and move the Convention one step nearer to compatibility
with World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, which require the same
commercial treatment of all countries at the same level of development.
If their admission to the ACP Group were considered problematic,
a variant on the proposal would be to offer the nine countries
equivalent treatment (the same trade preferences, aid allocations
calculated on the same criteria, as ACP countries) without formal
admission.
As the fear of dilution has been a traditional
response to such suggestions for expansion of the ACP Group, it
would be important to cost the idea in aid and trade terms. Bangladesh
already receives more EU aid (from the Community budget) than
all but five of the ACP countries; the other Asian LLDCs in total
receive less than Bangladesh. A transfer of aid from one EU source
to another in the year 2000, of around one billion Ecus over a
five-year term, would be a sufficient adjustment. The trade effects
require more investigation but, again, Bangladesh is the only
major player. Two of the nine (Burma and Afghanistan, on human
and gender rights grounds) would not currently qualify for EU
development aid.
In this way a new agreement could embrace all
the least developed countries and help to maintain the political
integrity of the ACP Group, while still allowing scope for some
differentiation of aid and trade arrangements within the Group
according to poverty eradication criteria.
3. Aid programmes and instruments
The proportion of EU aid going to the poorest
countries is falling—from a half to a third of the total
between 1990 and 1995. The reason is that the EU is giving increasing
resources to its "near neighbours" in Central and Eastern
Europe and in the Mediterranean, mostly middle income countries.
Aid to the 70 countries of the ACP also fell from a half to a
third of the EC total between 1990 and 1995. Sub-Saharan Africa
still receives the highest share of EC aid (US$ 2.5 billion in
1995), followed now by Eastern Europe/Former Soviet Union (US$
1.4 billion) and the Mediterranean and Middle East (UK$ 1 billion).
South and Central Asia, containing nearly half the world's poor,
received only US$ 0.4 billion.
The EU must take its commitment towards the
poor seriously and reverse this trend. The priority in aid resources
should go to the poorest countries and the small number of least
developed countries outside the ACP. In its worldwide aid allocations,
the EU might consider establishing a maximum GDP limit, so that
aid to countries above that limit should be targeted exclusively
to very poor areas and disadvantaged population groups (poverty
pockets). Reforms in the instruments and administration of aid
both in the EU and in recipient countries are needed to ensure
that it is the poor who benefit, and to make EU aid less cumbersome
and more user-friendly. The Lomé Convention has developed
into an accumulation of aid instruments, with new ones being added
at every renegotiation. A new agreement should aim to simplify
and to change the focus to development strategy rather than aid
instruments.
For Christian Aid, the primary objectives of
a new agreement are poverty eradication and social development.
The first step in aid programming should be for every ACP country
to develop an anti-poverty plan with precise objectives, timetable,
instruments and monitoring mechanisms. The plan should include
macro-aspects of development policy based on a model of economic
growth which is labour-intensive and equitable, protecting and
improving the basic rights of the poor. Civil society must be
involved in the development of such a plan.
One effect of such country-level plans would
be sharply to increase the proportion of aid to the social sectors
(primary education, basic health, nutrition, water and sanitation)
from the EU's present level of 12 to a minimum 20 per cent, in
keeping with the 20:20 compact agreed at the Social Summit in
1995. A new Lomé agreement could also become the first
multilateral agreement to commit itself formally to achieve the
six social, social, economic and environmental targets adopted
by OECD in Shaping the 21st century (1996), foremost among
which is the target to reduce the proportion of people living
in extreme poverty by one-half by 2015.
The Commission's Green Paper proposed an increased
focus on budgetary and sector support as an alternative to isolated
projects. The impact of aid can be enhanced if it is "mainstreamed"
in a whole sector or sub-sector. This would be an acceptable move
if the aid is earmarked to poverty eradication and social development,
and if the policy dialogue includes civil society and the affected
target groups.
Most evaluations of Lomé aid have found
that STABEX (compensation for losses in commodity export earnings)
has had only marginal effects on poverty alleviation, while reducing
the pressure on countries to restructure and diversity their exports.
STABEX, and its mineral counterpart SYSMIN, should therefore be
ended and their resources transferred into country programming.
The Green Paper's discussion of aid provisions
fails to take account of gender disparities. Gender analysis should
be mainstreamed as a central dimension of the anti-poverty plan
and all government policies. There is a need for gender training
both in the European Commission and in ACP governments and in
many NGOs. A programme aimed at poverty eradication need to build
its analysis on gender-disaggregated data and to focus on the
protection and promotion of the rights of women, especially through
their access to resources such as land and water.
The Lomé aid programme originally offered
contractual, multiannual aid based on needs and national ownership.
In successive Conventions aid programming has seen a strong shift
towards donor objectives and recipient performance. Some would
argue that the EU has moved to the opposite extreme, awarding
aid on the basis of merit, defined as performance in managing
aid, sound macroeconomic policies and good governance. The problem
is how to encourage local ownership by avoiding undue donor conditionality.
There may be ways to define transparent and objective criteria
within the Convention based, for example, on observance of human
rights or on rewarding countries which allocate high proportions
of expenditure to their social sectors. Another option might be
to minimise the mixed motives of the EU by entrusting the ACP
group, during negotiation of the Convention, with the responsibility
for defining performance criteria. The goal of good governance
can indeed be attained only if the model of donor-recipient relations
is based on recipient ownership at all levels of society.
Greater quality and simplicity of aid could
be achieved not only through the reduction of Lomé's budget
lines but also by giving greater decision-making power to overseas
delegations, and recruiting qualified local staff to work in them
alongside EC advisers. The Commission's problem of fewer staff
per unit of aid than other donors and its particular deficit in
specialist staff in the social sectors could be overcome by harnessing
the skills of more experts from national aid administrations and
NGOs and by recruiting more local professionals. To enhance local
ownership, the Commission should provide assistance to ACP states
to develop their own monitoring and evaluation systems, involving
target populations and civil society actors. To tackle Lomé's
problems of complexity and bureaucracy, why not a joint NGO/private
sector management review (and jointly ACP and EU) aimed at simplifying
instruments and procedures? The Lomé system of co-management
(the joint responsibility of the Commission delegate and the national
authorising officer) has often been judged a failure in both well
functioning and non-functioning ACP states; the new agreement
should provide for flexible and country-specific management approaches.
In Christian Aid's view the large majority of
aid allocation should be through national programmes with a small
allocation to maintain and revive regional co-operation. Even
disaster relief can be removed from the Convention, now that ECHO
(European Community Humanitarian Office) makes adequate provisions.
Each ACP country's anti-poverty plan should receive around 70
per cent of national programme funds, including sectoral and programme
aid. The remainder of the national programme should be allocated
15 per cent to trade development measures and 15 per cent to civil
society initiatives. Civil society actors could where appropriate
also access funds from the other allocations. The building of
local capacities should be a priority throughout these allocations.
4. Widening the actors: civil society and the
private sector
Until now, even with Lomé's provision
for "decentralised co-operation" since 1990, aid has
been predominantly a government-to-government transaction. There
is growing recognition of the need to involve civil society
and the private sector more fully in the Convention both in
the dialogue on priorities and in access to funding. A revised
partnership framework needs clear mechanisms for informing and
consulting civil society, at national and then at ACP level.
The means for opening policy dialogue to non-state
actors might vary from country to country. Some countries might
wish to introduce a high-status Economic and Social Council, as
a forum in which government ministers could meet representatives
of civil society and the private sector. Some countries have already
experimented with food security councils. Such mechanisms would
need reserved places for women and should take account of the
fact that youth represents 60 per cent of the population of ACP
countries. In many ACP countries churches and other religious
organisations are heavily involved in service delivery and enjoy
a local outreach surpassing other civil society organisations.
The Convention will need to establish the principle that participation
is a pre-requisite of sustainable development. Its aid provisions
might reward governments which give meaningful participation to
civil society or which encourage their local private sector by
regulating the activities of external economic actors. Government
administrations have much to learn from the experiences of NGOs
and other aid providers in involving and empowering the beneficiaries.
At the ACP/EU level, institutions need to be strengthened by the
inclusion of non-state actors, either through widening the Joint
Assembly or by creating a specific joint Economic and Social Council.
There has been little consistent progress on
the ground in the implementation of the decentralised co-operation
provision introduced in 1990. This is mainly because the extent
of implementation has always been discretionary for ACP governments
and because projects run by other actors have been in effective
competition for funds with government priorities. A share of aid
funds, either within the Convention or, more probably, in each
country programme, should be set aside for civil society organisations.
Part should be targeted towards the capacity building of such
organisations, supporting not only their service provision but
also information work and journalism to strengthen public debate.
Further consideration will be needed of the administration of
a development support fund for civil society; many ACP NGOs would
see the involvement of European NGO partners as more appropriate
than sponsorship by their own governments. This might in turn
influence whether aid was disbursed through the EU delegation
or the NGO division in Brussels. At the same time, perhaps alongside
funding for civil society, decentralised co-operation could still
have a value in maintaining linkages and promoting public/private
partnerships.
A consensus is also emerging on the need for
increased indigenous private sector participation in promoting
economic growth and development. In many of the poorest countries
the corporate/formal private sector accounts for only a fraction
of economic activity and employment, while the informal sector,
including farmers (many of whom are women), form the majority
of private entrepreneurs. Investment in support to smallholder
agriculture is often the best focus of aid to the private sector.
In the formal sector, the focus should be on developing the capacity
of small and medium-sized local and regional enterprises, rather
than foreign-owned actors who displace local companies. There
could be collaboration between government and private sector actors
in intermediary bodies to manage the Convention's funding of trade
development measures.
Increased emphasis on the strengthening of the
private sector and civil society should not imply any weakening
of the public sector. The non-state actors should complement the
role of a redefined and strengthened state. The state should retain
its responsibility for providing basic services such as education,
sanitation and health to the population. In many countries the
state also needs a strengthened capacity for regulation and support
of the private sector (in infrastructure, research and training).
Large parts of the population of ACP countries
currently have little access to Lomé funds because they
live in countries where the government is not functioning or where
EU aid has been withdrawn because of violations of human rights.
The EU has some experience (e.g., in Somalia and apartheid South
Africa) of channelling funds through civil society organisations
but under previous Conventions it has not always been easy to
obtain the release of funds through such channels. The new Convention
should make such funding easier, but within the recognition that
civil society funding is not simply a substitute for an oppressive
or non-functioning state. It is a normal alternative in a healthy
democracy.
5. Trade and investment
The Green Paper places its faith in the ability
of economic growth and trade liberalisation to bring about development
in the ACP countries. It does not analyse what consequences these
processes have already had for the poor. Christian Aid and its
partners have found that closer integration into the world economy
through trade, while generating wealth and opportunity for some,
has marginalised many people in developing countries, especially
in Africa. The process of globalisation, which for nearly two
decades has promised benefits for all, has instead left the poor
with unemployment and reduced access to services, escalating income
inequalities and growing poverty levels. While in some countries
both men and women have gained from new opportunities in manufacturing
and export agriculture, women usually suffer the greater costs
as they lose control of household food security and find their
position in the informal economy undermined by cheap imports.
Economic growth is a necessary but not sufficient condition for
equitable and sustainable development, and greater involvement
in international trade does not automatically lead to poverty
reduction. The challenge for the EU and the ACP is to develop
a trade and investment régime in which the benefits reach
the poor.
The Commission acknowledges that the existing
Lomé trade régime has failed to yield results, even
at a macro level. The ACP's share of EU imports stood at 6.7 per
cent in 1976, 6.7 per cent again in 1985 and slumped to 2.8 per
cent by 1994. Although the Lomé Convention began with the
best set of EU trade preferences on offer to any region, their
value has been partially eroded by the EU's extension of preferences
to other regions and by global trade liberalisation. Most ACP
countries have failed to take full advantage of their preferences
owing to supply-side constraints and since 1994 the Lomé
trade régime has been judged incompatible with WTO rules;
the WTO has granted it a waiver until 2000.
The Green Paper proposes four options to deal
with these problems but, as with the scope of the Convention,
they are not exhaustive:
— the status quo (the present non-reciprocal
preferences);
— application of the EU's Generalised
System of preferences (GDP);
— uniform reciprocity (all ACP countries
extending reciprocal trade access to EU exporters);
— differential reciprocity (reciprocal
preferences between the EU and different groups of countries or
individual countries).
The second option has been criticised because
it abandons the contractual nature of the Lomé preferences
and places ACP countries under the unilateral decision of the
GSP régime: it also implies that some middle income countries
would be graduated out of preferences. Uniform reciprocity is
considered by many as unsuitable for North-South trade agreements
between unequal economies. Some observers have linked the fourth
option (differentiated reciprocity) with the phased attainment
of development targets (i.e., countries would not have to offer
the EU reciprocal access until their Human Development Index improved).
There has also been discussion of an "á la carte"
approach, whereby groups of countries would choose from a menu
of the different options; this would not only produce a more complex
trade régime but suggests that some countries would lose
market access which they now enjoy, contrary to the logic of liberalisation.
A number of countries have obtained greater
benefits from Lomé's four commodity protocols (sugar, beef,
bananas and rum) than from the preferences. In sugar and beef,
the EU has granted access to quotas of ACP produce in competition
with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and at the same price
levels enjoyed by EU producers. The EU's banana régime,
which protects among others the vulnerable Windward Islands producers,
has come under heavy challenge in the WTO.
Reliance on Lomé-type preferences and
commodity protocols is unsustainable in the long term; they should
be seen as a medium-term option allowing ACP countries time to
diversify and restructure their economies. However, none of the
Green Paper's alternative options offers ACP countries a better
deal than now and all are in some way incompatible with WTO rules.
Whatever trade régime is agreed between the EU and the
ACP will have to be "sold" to the WTO. ACP countries
should be wary of proposals for an early move to reciprocity if
the EU's model for this is the unequal terms which it proposed
for a Free Trade Agreement with South Africa. FTA-reciprocity
is not the right approach to a trade relationship between unequals
and should not be demanded of developing countries which have
failed to register either an improving trade performance or an
improved Human Development Index.
In order to redirect the benefits towards the
poor, Christian Aid would like to see the EU propose a trade and
investment package which:
(1) offers every ACP, and other LLDC, country
an overall level of access to EU markets no less favourable than
now. Any reduced access in one sector should be compensated by
new access in another;
(2) is based on an extended period of non-reciprocity
lasting until at least 2010. Such a date would e consistent with
the OECD development targets, which fix 2005 or 2015 as the year
by which to achieve improvements in human development. The period
could be used by donors to intensify assistance to ACP/LLDC economies
to restructure and to cost alternatives to the present régime;
(3) is supported by a joint ACP/EU request
to the WTO for a waiver or for rule changes. Current WTO rules
need not mean the end of non-reciprocal preferences. For the EU
the seeking of a new waiver is a matter of political will. There
is every prospect that the 15 member states and a 70-80 strong
ACP Group will command enough votes in the WTO. In the longer
term there should be planning for stronger joint action by the
EU and the ACP in the WTO. Fifty-one ACP countries participated
in the WTO Ministerial Conference in Singapore, and the EU/ACP
should work hard for the remainder to become WTO members
(4) targets market access and trade development
measures at the poorest producers and traders, so that trade contributes
not only to growth but also to development. The Lomé Convention
is uniquely placed to support trade development measures through
its aid instruments in order to improve supply-side response.
Measures should include market information and assistance to meet
international product standards, as well as positive action to
encourage fairly traded products;
(5) simplifies the rules of origin criteria
and raises the ceilings for import content.
(6) Reduces tariffs on CAP agricultural products
as part of the EU's next CAP reform.
(7) Approaches trade as part of a more comprehensive
review of all financial flows between the EU and ACP/LLDC countries
(tram, aid, investment, debt). A new agreement to be signed in
the year 2000 would be incomplete unless it contained new mechanisms
to relieve and reduce the ACP/LLDC countries' burden of international
debt.
(8) Promotes investment in human capital
and institution-building of state and non-state capacities. Incentives
should be provided for investment in small and medium enterprises,
co-operatives and agricultural smallholdings. Adequate resources
should be made available for microcredit, particularly targeted
at women's enterprises.
(9) Includes an EU/ACP investment code to
reduce the risk for European investors but also to regulate their
activities so that they complement and encourage, rather than
displace, the indigenous private sector. The Green Paper limits
its concern to host country obligations to investors and does
not deal adequately with investor responsibility. The EU could
use its considerable expertise to help ACP regions develop regional
competition policies.
(10) Foresees an expanded role for the European
Investment Bank (EIB) in spreading the risk to investors and in
supporting microcredit. The lending and advisory services of the
EIB and the Centre for Development of Industry (CDI) need functional
counterparts in ACP countries, which should be jointly managed
by EU and ACP entrepreneurs.
The political dimension
Lomé has not yet caught up with developments
in the EU towards political union (not to mention monetary union).
The original description of Lomé as a "partnership
between equals" was never realistic but it did give rise
to some worthwhile mechanisms which a new agreement should try
to improve. The Green Paper fails to mention the instruments of
political co-operation (the EU-ACP Council of Ministers,
the Committee of Ambassadors and the Joint Assembly), which deserve
a fresh look in the light of the evolution of the Common Foreign
and Security Policy (CFSP) and the need to widen them to include
non-state actors.
A new agreement should include strengthened
provision for conflict prevention and resolution, providing for
enhanced co-operation with the Organisation for African Unity.
This should give a new impetus to the introduction of a code of
conduct for EU arms exports. The agreement should also seek, with
EU support, to increase the political leverage of ACP countries
in international fora.
Policy coherence
While the EU is a major provider of development
aid, and the Lomé Convention has been a unique co-operation
with many of the poorest countries, the benefits which it brings
are often diminished by the effects of other EU policies on developing
countries. In the last year renewed dumping of EU beef, this time
in South Africa, has threatened the livelihoods of stockbreeders
in the region, undermining the objectives of EU development policy.
Fisheries agreements, such as the agreement with Senegal which
gives EU industrial fishing vessels access to Senegalese fishing
banks, continue to endanger the livelihoods of poor coastal communities
and deplete Southern fish stocks. There is a wider range of actual
and potential policy incoherence than these two well-known examples.
EU policies on the environment, trade and investment, industry,
macroeconomics and finance (including debt relief), the CFSP and
conflict prevention, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and
the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) all impinge on developing countries
in ways which may conflict with EU development objectives.
The Maastricht Treaty of 1991 took a step forward
in what has become known as the "coherence" article;
Article 130v states that the Community shall take account of its
development co-operation objectives in the policies that it implements
which are likely to affect developing countries. The Commission
has been slow to establish procedures to implement this Article.
European NGOs have repeatedly criticised its reactive case-by-case
approach and have urged it to take a preventive and proactive
approach, which would minimise the incidence of cases of incoherence
before they arise. In 1997, with the question again before the
Development Council, NGOs called for:
— an interservice working group within
the Commission;
— an annual report on cases of incoherence;
— a complaints mechanism for affected
parties.
At the Development Council meeting of 5 June,
ministers adopted a more modest resolution, which failed to offer
any participation or redress for civil society and the groups
affected by incoherence. There is a case for relating coherence
procedures to the principle of partnership and the institutional
arrangements of future EU-ACP co-operation.
1. A complaints procedure is needed which is
open to civil society organisations and local communities affected
by the impact of EU or member state policies. One way of providing
this mechanism would be the appointment of an ombudsman under
the authority of the ACP-EU Joint Assembly.
2. The (preferably annual) report to the Council
on coherence, expected to be introduced during 1998, can be seen
as a microcosm of something more comprehensive which is lacking
in EU development policy: a single annual report on EU co-operation
with developing countries, structured according to the objectives
and requirements of Articles 130u-130y of the Maastricht Treaty.
This would require more objective-based consultation among Commission
directorates.
3. A new Convention could improve the arrangements
for fisheries agreements (currently bilateral) by constituting
a joint EU-ACP committee to negotiate agreements with ACP countries.
This would enable experience of advances in sustainable development
to be passed from one country to another and enhance the bargaining
power of ACP countries.
4. An improvement more internal to the Commission
would be the unification of the Commission's fragmented aid administration.
Four different Commissioners, and two directorates, are responsible
for aid to different parts of the world, and fifth Commissioner
runs ECHO. Such unification would facilitate aid effectiveness
and the establishment of effective machinery to promote policy
coherence with other directorates.
Clive Robinson
Head of Europe and Global Team
Christian Aid
17 September 1997
| 
