Brussels, 21/09/2004 (Agence Europe) - "Trade and Development" is the title of a brochure published by the European Commission, as a first stock-take of the concrete actions funded by the EU with a view to making trade into a lever and an instrument for development in the poorest countries of the world. Pascal Lamy, the European Commissioner for Trade, and Poul Nielson, the Development Commissioner, presented this to the press on Tuesday, to try to demonstrate that since its 2002 communication on the links between trade and development, the EU has followed up its words with actions, with results to match. Between 2001 and 2004, the European Commission spend 2.8 billion EUR on helping developing countries to profit from international trade, and 121 new projects were launched in the year 2003 alone. These covered assistance in multilateral negotiations at the WTO, support for reforms of customs procedures, aid to improve infrastructure, training programmes for safer products or support to businesses for access to export markets.
"The hypothesis which we have defended over the past few years is that we must promote the synergies between trade and development, because trade has a substantial contribution to make to the reduction of poverty. The first thing to do is to open our markets in the framework of international rules. We have done this, including last July in Geneva. The results of this round of negotiations will fall against the backdrop of the concept that developing countries will benefit from increased market access, without reciprocity", said Pascal Lamy. In practice, the EU is by far the largest trade partner of the developing countries. In 2002, we imported three times more than the United States, he added, specifying that the opportunities extended to the DCs would only lead to tangible results if the DCs are capable of using them to plug their information gap, and to make up for their lack of capabilities in terms of tariff, fiscal, sanitary and phytosanitary provisions. "The objective of this brochure is to show what we have done to tackle these problems in certain countries, and how this has led to increases in trade flows, be these Kenyan vegetables, the development of a new fairly-traded brand of Mexican coffee, or the training of public or private administrators in Bangladesh, within a multilateral trade context. A proportion of development aid was diverted to trade assistance". The Commissioner also welcomed the positive results achieved by the Commission's on-line assistance service, which was set up last February to facilitate access to the European market to exporters from developing countries (see EUROPE of 3 February 2004). The key information on customs duty, how customs work, rules of origin and trade statistics it makes available free of charge has been consulted over 323,000 times, with around 1,400 queries a day. The Commission has dealt with over 600 detailed requests for information (from the following countries: China, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Morocco, India, Chile, Colombia and Egypt), and by February 2005, the range of information available in the technical database will be extended to non-tariff barriers, announced Pascal Lamy.
Poul Nielson pointed out that "it is no accident that trade and development are on of the priority sectors of the EU's development policy as written in 2000", and spoke at length about success stories. He spoke about assistance given to Mongolia for approval of its cattle abattoirs ("which bears witness to the role of our standards at global level"), the beneficial re-launch of trade in Lake Victoria perch (Nile perch) from Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, fishing products having been formerly subject to EU sanitary standards. This opening was due to the "creation of a project to boost laboratory capacities, train inspector-experts and bring installations up to date", which was a success first of all in Tanzania, and was then extended to all countries which border the Lake.
The opening of negotiations between the EU and the various regions of the ACP (Africa/Caribbean/Pacific) region, to conclude regional economic partnership agreements, is another example the Commission gave as an illustration of the EU's willingness to put trade to work in service of development.