Brussels, 29/01/2014 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 30 January, Andris Piebalgs, European Commissioner for Development, will represent the European Union at the 22nd Summit of the African Union (AU), which will be held in Addis Ababa on 30 and 31 January, following the green light given by the UN Security Council for the deployment of a European force in the Central African Republic (EUFOR CAR) and on the eve of the conference of the donors for MISCA (Addis Abeba, 1 February). Officially dedicated to the African Year for Agriculture and Food Security, this summit of the heads of state of 54 African countries will take place against the backdrop of major crises in CAR, the Great Lakes region and South Sudan, which have been experiencing armed conflict, and chaos in Libya, highlighting the African Union's inability to fulfil its integration and peacekeeping mission for the African continent.
This summit, which will be extremely important for the ambitions of the African Union for the next 50 years, will give Piebalgs the opportunity of bilateral talks on all of these crises, on the global development framework post-2015 and on preparations for the fourth EU-Africa summit, to be held in Brussels on 2 and 3 April of this year on the theme “Investing in People, Prosperity and Peace”. (AN/transl.fl)