Brussels, 27/04/2004 (Agence Europe) - EU Development Ministers meeting on Tuesday in Luxembourg under the chairmanship of Irish minister Tom Kitt all recognised, during the public debate on the follow up to the Monterrey commitments on public development aid, that there was still at lot to do to improve in the coordination of development policies and procedures between Member States, as well as with other international donors to increase effectiveness of aid to developing countries. This aid, they supported the conclusion that the European Commission draws on its second annual follow up report, entitled, "Putting the Monterrey Consensus into Practice" (EUROPE 12 March p 6). The Commission is in effect convinced that the absence of progress on this affairs is the priority that needs to be dealt with, given that the enlarged EU is sure of keeping its promise in terms of increasing the average level of public development aid up to 2006. This applies as long as the adoption of practical measures for coordinating and harmonising aid before the end of 2004 figure in the commitments made at the European Summit of Barcelona (March 2002, just before the UN Conference on Development Finance in Monterrey in Mexico).
The Council has therefore decided to create an ad hoc group of experts to carry out a detailed examination of the Commission's recommendations and to report to the Commission on the results of its work by November 2004 at the latest in order to allow an action plan to be adopted. The action plan will be submitted by the EU to the second high level forum on harmonisation for aid effectiveness, to be held in Paris in 2005. In conclusions adopted in this connection, the Council insists that the working group should above all look at: - the establishment of an action plan for coordinating programmes and projects and harmonising procedures in pilot countries with a view to extending this practice to all developing countries where one or several EU donors implement a cooperation programme; - the opening of any international donor initiative involving a Member State to all EU partners present in this country; - the fine-tuning of a strategy and a timetable for applying guidelines and themes decided at EU scale and at bilateral level, and using them as a common platform for dialogue with partner counrtries and the donor community; - finalisation of a strategy so that the EU can implement a multi-annual programme geared to a national budgetary and political framework of each pilot country; - and the development of a common framework for implementing aid procedure.
During the debate, Portugal was the only delegation that felt the EU had been "too optimistic" at the Barcelona summit by committing itself in favour of concrete coordination and harmonisation measures before end 2004. "Portugal hopes to have a closer look at what was done in Mozambique. It is perhaps too soon to extend the pilot experiment to other countries", the Portuguese representative said, urging for information to be exchanged.
Many ministers also pressed for the World Bank/IMF inititiave in favour of debt relief for the highly indebted poor countries to be continued and extended (HIPC initiative) beyond December 2004, when it should expire. The 11 countries have not been able to use the initiative to their advantage for internal reasons that prevented them from waiting for the threshold of eleigibility to be achieved.
As the debate opened, Commissioner Poul Nielson had told miisters that the creation of an ad hoc group of experts with a view to an action plan in November was "acceptable" on condition that it is not a "stalling measure" and that this body truly does have a mandate. "A 25-member Union makes it all the more necessary to have an agreement on the way we should proceed", he said. Sceptical about extending the HIPC initiative, the Commission had said that "it is not up to the Commission to deal with this". His suggestion to tackle the debt problem with an informal debate within a special group, "for a joint approach given the expectations of the IMF and the World Bank" deserves to be adopted, the Council President said.