On Thursday 1 June, the European Parliament endorsed the new European Consensus on Development which sets the framework and the priorities of EU development policy to 2030, aligned with the 17 universal sustainable development goals (SDGs) (see EUROPE 17798).
The text negotiated between the Parliament, the Council and the Commission was passed by 405 votes to 70, with 159 abstentions.
It restates that eradication of poverty will remain the number one priority of this policy while seeking more effectively to address the challenges of climate change, migration and security.
This, for the two joint rapporteurs, Bogdan Wenta (EPP, Poland) and Norbert Neuser (S&D, Germany), is an achievement that is to be welcomed.
The number of abstentions was high, however, with MEPs from the ALDE, Greens/EFA, GUE/NGL and EFDD Groups declining to vote. Disappointed by the text, they had tabled alternative resolutions but were unsuccessful in having them passed. While this new Consensus is supposed to provide fresh impetus to development policy, they feel it is more a catalogue of pious intentions than a founding text that can provide the EU with the means to achieve its ambitions and that it carries a risk that development policy might be exploited for other ends.
“Laudable goals but no method”. Charles Goerens (ALDE, Luxembourg), who is a former development minister, spoke of a “missed opportunity”. The problem is that there is no effective method in the document that will make it possible to achieve the very laudable goals set out, he told the European press. Policy coherence, for example, is needed but no rules are included for mediating disputes between Commission departments or within the member states, he said.
The same applies, in his view, to the objective of allocating 0.7% of GDP to official development assistance – a commitment made almost 50 years ago and repeated in the European Consensus, but one that will not be achieved by 2030 unless Parliament is given a central role in making sure that this responsibility is adhered to, he argued. He was critical, too, of the intransigence of some member states in the inter-institutional negotiations that will mean, for example, that the one making the lowest budgetary contribution will be able to make the others yield to its will. He said that he could understand that development policy was being seen as becoming ever more “utilitarist”.
Making development policy dependent on short-term considerations is, he opined, the start of the end of the policy. Rather than rush so that the Consensus can be signed on 7 June during the European Development Days, Goerens would have preferred a better worked-out document that could have been put to a vote at a later date.
Greens/EFA and GUE/NGL MEPs similarly warned of a real risk that the EU’s future development policy might be used for the purposes of security, trade and control of migration, when, they argue, international commitments and preserving human dignity must remain vital components of this policy.
Maria Heubuch (Greens/EFA, Germany) stated: “We don’t want any conditions attached between aid and migration. Development policy should not seek to manage migration”.
Criticising a move towards privatisation of development policy, Lola Sanchez Caldentey (GUE/NGL, Spain) took the view that, with free trade and multinationals, “we are taking back with one hand the little that we give (in development aid) with the other”. She lambasted the trend towards “privatisation of development policy to provide access to markets for multinationals and European migration policy which addresses only symptoms, not causes”. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)