Brussels, 15/05/2001 (Agence Europe) - Other than the progress achieved in the assessment of their trade cooperation, the Development Ministers from the ACP States and the Union, gathered last week in Brussels (see EUROPE of 12 May, p.9), had a heated exchange of views over the implementation of the Cotonou Agreement, over cooperation for the financing of development and over other issue of common interest, such as the international negotiations on climatic change.
The adopting of joint declarations on the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol was qualified as "very important" by Mrs Maj Inger Klingvall, Swedish Development Minister and co-President of the session, as she confirmed the firm undertaking by the two parties in favour of the Protocol, their desire to increase the pressure on the governments for them to act, and underlined the importance of enhanced EU-ACP cooperation in terms of climatic change in the framework of the Cotonou Agreement. Raising the debate on the political dialogue, the co-President felt that this new aspect of the Cotonou Agreement could mark a turning point if we use it properly and in a positive manner.
For Commissioner Poul Nielson, this "very positive" meeting allowed to discuss their cooperation "at the technical and political level, one year after the singing of the Cotonou Agreement". He notably welcomed the opportunity offered to the two parties to mutually inform each other of their preparations on the eve of two important deadlines: a) the meeting of the first mixed trade committee, the body responsible for negotiating future ACP/EU economic partnership agreements (EUROPE will return to this body's inaugural works), and the third United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries (presently underway at the European Parliament). Questioned over the criticisms formulated by the ACP towards the Union, accused of seeing the political dialogue as a unilateral way of imposing its way of seeing things, without consulting their partners, the Commissioner answered: problems such as the suspending of the dialogue with Haiti are cases of a problematic for both parties. What to do, how to tackle these cases, will never be a routine question.
Mr Yao Osafo-Mmafo, Finance Minister for Ghana and ACP co-President (replacing the acting President Hidipo Hamutenya), made the observation that various provisions of the agreement on this issue are not sufficiently precise to provide a framework for the dialogue needed and that in the absence of an identification of "points for dialogue", the spirit of partnership will not be respected.
Below are the results obtained over the non-commercial issues:
Political dialogue: speaking on behalf of the ACP Group, Ms. Billie Miller, Deputy Prime Minister of Barbados, stressed that a partnership agreement presupposed a political dialogue in good faith between partners and severely criticized the weakness of the dialogue as conceived by the Europeans in joint meetings (ACP ministers would like to meet their counterparts and not ambassadors), the exclusion of the ACP States from the process of drawing up ACP-EU cooperation programmes, the lack of consultations on implementing cooperation. According to ACP States, the effect of the implementation of the provisions of the Cotonou Agreement leave much to be desired in many ways. Article 12, for example, explicitly stipulates that the Europeans must ensure consistency in their policies and that the Commission must inform ACP States of any measure that could have an impact on them. Yet, Ms. Miller stressed, ACP States only learnt incidentally of the "All except weapons" initiative, publicly announced by the Union without prior consultation of the ACP States. "The North is not the only depository of wisdom. We can also speak of what concerns us. We want an open, frank and full dialogue, based on genuine consultations and the respect of consistency", Ms. Miller hammered home.
Delegation of powers to the ACP/EU Committee of Ambassadors: the Council has delegated its powers for: a) the adoption of the internal regulations of the ACP/EU Committee for funding development; b) procedure applicable to contracts funded from resources from the European Development Fund; c) rules for allocating markets funded by the Edf. Regarding this, the ACP group called for a fairer distribution of markets between the ACP States and the Union; d) the drawing up of amending proposals to provide to the Annex of the Cotonou Agreement; e) authorization to decide on the use of non-allocated resources of the 8th Edf.
Ratification of the Cotonou Agreement: noting that at least fifteen ACP States had ratified the agreement, whereas no European country had done so, the Council stressed the need to speed-up the procedure.