At the third regional forum on Monday 8 October, the 43 members of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) renewed their political commitment to the UfM, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year.
"We reaffirmed their strong political commitment to promote regional cooperation and recognised the UfM as a unique, action-driven platform to intensify joint efforts to address common challenges and create common opportunities in the Euro-Mediterranean region, placing the people of the region, and their legitimate demands, at the centre of the cooperation and working together to address the serious challenges that undermine prosperity and stability in the region", states the conclusions document of the UfM co-presidencies, the EU and Jordan. The document stressed the strategic link between European and the Mediterranean as a solid basis for making progress in halving the UfM’s aims and objectives.
At a press conference, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini noted the organisation’s successes over the past ten years, saying it had given opportunities and training courses to more than 100,000 young people and that they had decided to continue down this road. The UfM has supported the development of more than 8,000 SMEs and here too they have decided to continue. It has launched two EuroMed universities and in ten years the UfM member states have endorsed 54 regional cooperation projects to the tune of €5.6 billion, ranging from sustainable development initiatives and urban infrastructure to programmes encouraging the strengthening of multi-sector capacities, sexual equality, entrepreneurship and job creation, explains a press release published at the end of the forum.
This year, the organisation has focused on women and young people, organising the first Stakeholder Dialogue on the Mediterranean Imitative for Jobs (Med4Jobs). Recent studies show that the region’s GDP could rise by €20 billion if unemployment among young people is halved.
Over and above the projects, the Mogherini said that the UfM was a unique space of dialogue among players who sometimes have no other opportunity to discuss their common interests and objective with one another. She said the UfM members share a common vision of the need to promote stainable security deal with the terror and extremism threat, which can only be done together and across the Mediterranean.
The Jordanian minister, Ayman Safadi, said the organisation was a reaffirmation of the fact they had understood the importance of working together to create regional peace and stability, of which they needed not only to overcome the crises that were hindering the achievement of their full potential, but were also standing in the way of opportunities.
Safadi recognised that the situation in the Mediterranean had worsened since the creation of the UfM, being much worse than ten years ago. He also said the political crises were still deteriorating and the UfM had failed to deal with persistent crises. The minister pointed out that economic projects and efforts were not an alternative to finding a political solution to crises. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)