28/11/2011

Empowering EU anti-poverty measures
A financing instrument for development cooperation

By Cliona Connolly, Irish Press Adviser

925 million people are undernourished, or every 1 in 7 people, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation's 2010 statistics. Poor nutrition is blamed for at least half of the 10.9 million child deaths each year - or five million deaths.

Europe has committed to eradicating extreme poverty and promoting sustainable economic growth in its development cooperation policy and guided by the Millennium Development Goals.

The EU manages its distribution of aid in the developing world through its financing instrument for development cooperation (DCI). The financial framework over the period 2007-2013 is €16.897bn: €10.057bn for the geographic programmes, €5.596bn for the thematic programmes and €1.244bn for the ACP Sugar Protocol countries.

Implementation of Development Cooperation Policy

The European Commission monitors and reviews the implementation of its programmes and submits an annual report on the results of this regulation to the European Parliament and the Council.

Co-decision powers granted to the Parliament under the Lisbon Treaty were further enhanced earlier this year in relation to DCI, due to successful amendments proposed by the EPP Group's Joint Coordinator of the Development Committee and Parliament's Rapporteur for the DCI, Gay Mitchell MEP.

Parliament adopted Mr Mitchell's report on 3 February 2011. In doing so, MEPs supported the strengthening of Parliament's role as a co-legislator in relation to strategic decisions on the spending of development aid.

At the time, Mr Mitchell commented: "One of the main intentions of the Lisbon Treaty was to enhance the democratic legitimacy and accountability towards the European citizens of our institutions. Today’s decision will help to further shrink the democratic deficit in the institutional decision-making processes, by giving the Parliament the same legislative and control powers that the Council already enjoys.”

"This particular report is based on the financing instruments for aid distribution in the promotion of democracy and human rights in the developing world. Of the 2.2 billion children in the world, 600 million are victims of extreme poverty. We must not forget our goal to eradicate poverty," Mr Mitchell added.

A new legislative package of four reports on financing instruments relating to development cooperation comes before MEPs during the November II plenary session, 30 November - 1 December 2011.

The four-pack includes a further report authored by Mr Mitchell, Financing instrument for development cooperation. This particular text focuses on the conciliation process between Council and Parliament. It expresses regret that it was not possible to further improve a text on a support package for banana exporters, in particular in relation to the role of Parliament in making strategic decisions with co-legislators. However, the report underlines that this result does not set a precedent for future negotiations on the post-2013 external financing instruments.