Brussels, 01/04/2014 (Agence Europe) - A number of external aid programmes will experience payment problems sometime this year, particularly in the humanitarian aid field, warned European Commission officials during the budgets committee meeting on Monday 31 March.
The budgets committee had a discussion as part of the external action follow-up group and in this connection the rapporteur for the 2014 budget, Anne Jensen (ALDE, Denmark) explained that “we have a snowball of unpaid bills in the humanitarian aid field, commitments for which are continuously growing. We even have to pay interest on late payments to NGOs which help to deliver our aid promises. This is exactly what we wanted to avoid politically”. She was referring to the legitimate payment claims rolled over from last year and the lack of willingness on the side of the Council to assure sufficient funding.
The budgetary shortfall in 2014 is “unprecedented”, said DG Budget's director-general Hervé Jouanjean. He also pointed out that the humanitarian aid budget for 2013 had been increased by €410 million in commitments and payments but described this year's budgetary situation as “very tense”, even though this did not come as any surprise. Jouanjean explained that for cohesion policy alone, the amount of unpaid invoices had risen to €23.4 billion and said that, “a number of external aid programmes will experience payment problems sometime this year, particularly in the humanitarian aid field”. He outlined some of the actions the Commission had taken to tackle these problems: - better use of available commitments and reducing the level of pre-financing applied to international organisations; - set up transfers (€150 million) for humanitarian aid (to be reimbursed at a later date through an amending budget); - the use, if necessary, of the reserve for emergency aid; - the comprehensive transfer and redistribution of funding and payment appropriations that have not been used; - requesting earmarking of the available margins under the payment ceiling (€711 million); - use of available flexibility mechanisms, particularly if it is necessary to use the “contingency margin” (Article 13 of the regulation on the Multiannual Financial Framework). The president of the EP budgets committee, Alain Lamassoure (EPP, France) said that payment appropriation problems involved all budget lines and not just those to do with external action. He added that the committee wants all procedures to be implemented to reduce indeed, eradicate, the consequences stemming from the period of the electoral pause towards the end of spring.
Claus Sörensen from the Commission's humanitarian aid and civil protection department, DG ECHO, said “we started the year with a backlog of €160 million and even had to negotiate with NGOs to accept a lower sum upfront, because we did not have the money to pay them”. He thanked the Commission's enlargement and development and cooperation departments, “which helped us out by transferring €150 million to ECHO”, but added that “we need at least €250 million extra to meet our 2014 obligations. That will be enough to muddle through, but by the end of the year we shall again face a backlog of €160 million”.
Aid to Syrian refugees and Palestine. Michael Koehler, representing the Commission's development and co-operation directorate-general, DEVCO, reported that it had been obliged to postpone 2013 payments amounting to €300 million to this year, also due to the mismatch between the budgets for commitments and those for payments. For aid to Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria proper and aid to Palestine, DEVCO is running €100 million short, he added.
Koehler also pointed to “the other elephant in the room”, namely the €11 billion promised to Ukraine (€3 billion of which will come from the EU budget). “These transfers have to be made quickly, not in 5 or 6 years' time. This will eat up a lot of our funding for the EU neighbourhood policy”, he concluded. (LC)