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DEVELOPMENT: Major Donors Cut Assistance
By Mattias Creffier
PARIS, Apr 3 (IPS) - Official development assistance from the world's
major donors fell 5.1 percent in 2006
compared to 2005, the OECD said Tuesday.
With fewer debt relief operations scheduled for 2007, donor countries
should start looking
for significant other means of development assistance if they want to keep
their promises
towards poor countries, the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and
Development
(OECD), a grouping of 30 rich nations said in a preliminary report.
The drop in official development assistance (ODA) to 103.9 billion dollars
in 2006 had
been predicted by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD.
In 2005,
debt relief operations for Iraq and Nigeria boosted ODA artificially to
its highest level ever
at 106.6 billion dollars. Under OECD rules, donor countries can count
cancelled debts as
development assistance.
In 2006, donors wrote off a little over 3 billion dollars for Iraq and
nearly 11 billion dollars
for Nigeria.
Aid to sub-Saharan Africa increased only 2 percent, excluding debt relief
for Nigeria. At
the 2005 summit of G8 leaders in Gleneagles in Scotland, the leaders of
the world's largest
economies and the EU committed themselves to doubling their aid to Africa
between 2004
and 2010. The G8 is a group of the eight most industrialised countries
(the United States,
Canada, Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Japan and Russia).
Other forms of aid fell 1.8 percent last year.
"The general picture is broadly static at a time one would hope to see a
move forward,"
DAC chairman Richard Manning said at a press conference Tuesday.
Manning said debt cancellations in 2007, notably for the Democratic
Republic of Congo
and Liberia, are unlikely to have the same impact as the relief operations
in 2005 and
2006.
"If the EU and the G8 are going to be successful, they will have to
replace debt relief by
other very significant means of ODA," Manning said. "The DAC members must
start
investing now to realise a smooth progression to 2008 and 2009."
In 2006, the net ODA by the United States was 22.7 billion dollars, a fall
of 20 percent
mainly due to the fact that in 2005 the United States forgave all its
outstanding debt with
Iraq.
The 15 'old' EU countries accounted for 59 billion dollars in aid. This
amount represented
0.43 percent of the EU-15 Gross National Income (GNI), surpassing the 0.39
percent target
the EU had set itself for 2006 at the 2002 UN conference on Financing for
Development in
Monterrey, Mexico.
Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain failed to meet the target of 0.33
percent GNI set for
individual countries.
The 2.7 percent increase in EU-15 ODA is again mainly due to debt relief
grants.
Discounting debt operations, the EU aid effort represents only 0.36
percent of GNI,
Manning said.
CONCORD, the European NGO confederation for relief and development, says
ODA from
the EU is inflated by 11 billion euros (14.7 billion dollars) of debt
relief, and also by
expenses for educating foreign students in Europe (1.6 billion dollars)
and housing
refugees in Europe (1.3 billion dollars). All these expenses detract from
the aid resources
intended to be available for developing countries, Concord said in a press
release.
According to the NGO confederation, only 0.3 percent of EU GNI has been
spent on
genuine aid. The worst culprits for blowing up aid figures in 2006 were
Austria and France
(57 and 52 percent respectively), followed by Italy (44 percent), Germany
(35 percent),
Britain (28 percent) and Belgium (25 percent), Lucy Hayes from the
European NGO network
Eurostep told IPS.
Manning told journalists that given the relatively low amount of debt
relief scheduled, the
discussion on whether or not it should be included in ODA figures is no
longer on top of
the agenda. "The countries who have set themselves targets did so on the
basis of existing
conditions," Manning said. "It will be extremely difficult to change those
rules now." (END/2007)
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