By IPS Correspondents
ROME, Jul 13 2000 (IPS)

Italy’s development aid to countries of the South has climbed to 2.35 billion dollars, or 0.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to the government’s latest official report.

From 1997 to 1998, development aid increased 0.09 percent, which brought it back up to the 1996 proportion of GDP, according to the development aid office of Italy’s foreign relations ministry.

Official development aid (ODA) should remain high over the next few years, due to an initiative announced by the government to cancel the foreign debt of developing nations with an annual per capita income of 300 dollars or less.

Of the total 2.35 billion dollars in ODA, 67.6 percent was shelled out through multilateral bodies and the remaining 32.4 percent bilaterally — similar to proportions seen in previous years.

Unlike Italy, the majority of donor countries channel most of their development aid nation to nation, rather than through international bodies like the United Nations.

Of the funds Italy channelled through multilateral entities, 45 percent went through the European Union (EU), 43 percent through the World Bank and regional development banks, and 12 percent through United Nations agencies and other international bodies.

With respect to bilateral aid, the first 20 beneficiaries were China, Malta, Ecuador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Mozambique, Honduras, Argentina, Senegal, Egypt, Somalia, Albania, Lebanon, Angola, Zimbabwe, Tunisia, Jordan, Algeria and Kenya.

The central aims of Italy’s development aid policy are the fight against poverty, defence of human rights and conflict prevention. Of total ODA, 87 percent was earmarked for Mediterranean nations and sub-Saharan Africa.

Italy’s development aid policy has set an agenda guided by the targets of sustainable human development set by world summits organised under United Nations auspices.

For example, in the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, the world’s governments committed themselves to cutting poverty and malnutrition in half, reducing infant mortality by two-thirds and guaranteeing universal access to clean water and primary school education by the year 2015.

The top priorities of Italy’s ODA are poverty elimination, social development, protection of minors, demographic policies, women’s rights, human resources development, humanitarian aid and anti-drug controls.

But the chief objective is slashing extreme poverty in developing countries, which brings in its wake socioeconomic destabilisation, often the origin of, or an important factor in, civil strife.

The UN system mobilises more than five billion dollars a year, mainly to the world’s poorest countries.

Italy’s network of development aid offices abroad include 19 tecnical teams in Albania, Angola, Argentina, Bolivia, Bosnia- Hercegovina, China, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Mozambique, Senegal, Palestine, Tunisia, Uganda and Vietnam.

In the 1980s, Italy earmarked around 0.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to development aid, compared to the commitment by industrialised countries to the UN General Assembly to reach a target of 0.7 percent of GDP.

Among EU member countries, development aid as a proportion of GDP fell from an average of 0.45 percent in 1984-85 to 0.38 percent in 1995, according to non-governmental organisations in London.

Today, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden are the only countries of the industrialised North that allocate a greater proportion of GDP to development aid than the UN target of 0.7 percent.

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