Brussels, 12/02/2002 (Agence Europe) - In the form of a generalised political response to the challenges of globalisation, on Wednesday the European Commission presented a package of three Communications on three dates in the multilateral negotiating agenda that it sees as crucial, namely globalisation post-Doha, the United Nations conference on funding development in Monterrey (Mexico) on 18-22 March and the World Sustainable Development Summit in Johannesburg (South Africa) in September 2002. In the Communications, the Commission assesses the challenges and outlines ways in which it feels the EU should play a leading role in multilateral forums, suggesting measures to ensure that globalisation helps contribute to the sustainable development of the planet.
The Communication on sustainable development (on global partnership for sustainable development) was drawn up on the initiative of Romano Prodi to deal exclusively with external aspects of sustainable development. It notes that much progress remains to be made in order to strike a fair balance at global level between economic, social and environmental objectives to guarantee the well-being of present and future generations. It recommends integrating markets, internal policies and governance through a global partnership and sets out priority targets to ensure the EU contributes to global sustainable development (beyond the internal strategy set at the Gothenburg European Council), namely ensuring that developing countries are integrated into the global economy and helping them reap the benefits of liberalisation of trade and investment, providing incentives to encourage sustainable production and commerce from the social and environmental viewpoints, strengthening the international financial and monetary framework to promoting more transparent ways of regulating the market to reduce financial volatility and abuse of the system at global level, getting higher quality development co-operation to combat poverty and promote social development in developing countries, making sure the European Union's policies are more coherent, increasing governance at all levels and increasing financial resources to match.
The Communication on funding development that was drafted on the initiative of Commissioner Poul Nielson set outs initiatives that the Community and its Member States could take to ensure the Monterrey conference ends up increasing official development aid (ODA) - a significant instrument for implementing Doha's development agenda to achieve fair and sustainable development since this cannot be achieved by liberalising the markets alone. The Commission calls on Member States that do not yet contribute the UN required 0.7% of GDP to development aid to either individually or collectively commit themselves to substantially increase their ODA so that by 2006, the average ODA in the EU is 0.39 of GDP (as against 0.33 in 2000). The Commission also recommends higher quality ODA by separating off aid from the harmonisation of public tendering procedures, and recommends that progress is made in searching forms of finance for services of general interest. The Communication is accompanied by a report from the Council with statistics, requested of the Commission by the EU's development ministers on 8 November 2001, with a view to preparing for the Monterrey conference.
Prepared on the initiative of Commissioner Solbes (with the agreement of Messrs Prodi, Lamy, Neilson and Bolkestein), the lengthy report on responses to the challenges of globalisation rounds off the other two documents. The Commission puts forward draft conclusions (rather than concrete proposals) on changing the international monetary and financial system to cater with economic crises; and funding and furthering development. A number of real or potential inherent shortfalls are noted in the financial and monetary system which lead to practices such as money laundering, the funding of illegal activity and tax evasion. The document pits the advantages and disadvantages of various proposals against one another and divides its ideas up into four categories: 1) how to prevent crises and manage them (setting up a surveillance agency for international debt, a prudential agency or a tax on monetary transactions); 2) action to reduce abuse of the system for criminal purposes like terrorism (better co-ordination of the activity of existing institutions and a more coherent and sustainable approach to development); 3) regional and global co-operation to increase the stability of the system (coordinating monetary policy, more coherence between the exchange rates of the three main global currencies);and 4) reforming the institutions (changes to the IMF and the creation of higher bodies, like a global governance group or a UN economic security council). In terms of development, the Commission discusses existing instruments and alternative sources of finance like taxation (on financial deals, CO2 emissions, kerosene consumption by airplanes or on arms exports) and a voluntary scheme for a 1% levy on sales prices (with the advantage that it could be introduced unilaterally) or the granting of special rights for loans at specific interest rates.