EUROPE: Poor Need More Than a Declaration

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Mar 27 2007 (IPS) - The 50th anniversary of the European Union has been marked by a declaration committing the 27-country bloc to “drive back poverty, hunger and disease” throughout the world.

But will this statement in the two-page Berlin Declaration, signed by German Chancellor and head of the Union’s rotating presidency Angela Merkel, usher in a set of new EU policies that displays a genuine desire to further the interests of the poor?

The 1957 Treaty of Rome, which led to the EU’s foundation, was drawn up at a time when Europe’s colonial powers faced a changing relationship with the territories they controlled. Some 23 countries in sub-Saharan Africa won independence in 1956-60.

Against this backdrop, the treaty contains a pledge to pursuing a development policy.

Before long, however, it would become apparent that any good which the EU’s development aid activities did could be undermined by how some of its other policies were inimical to poor countries.

The lavish subsidies paid out under the Common Agricultural Policy have been blamed for imperiling the livelihoods of farmers in poor countries by flooding their markets with cheap imports. The fisheries agreements signed between the EU and Africa have been accused of plundering a key source of protein in many coastal countries and threatening the local fisheries sector on which many communities rely for employment.

And EU officials continue to face allegations that they are using aggressive tactics in trade negotiations with a range of developing countries.

To address claims that the Union is giving with one hand and stealing from poor countries with the other, the EU’s main institutions approved a new ‘consensus for development’ in 2005. It undertook to iron out the so-called incoherence between the EU’s development policy on one side and its economic policies on the other.

Rob van Drimmelen from Aprodev, a network of anti-poverty groups linked to Protestant churches, says the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, deserves credit for putting the coherence question under scrutiny. But he said that the commitment is not being reflected in the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) which the Commission is negotiating with 75 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries.

EU trade officials are using these talks to seek that ACP tariffs on a large number of imports be scrapped, leading to fears that they could reduce the countries’ scope for economic development.

“The EU can make lofty statements but it is discouraging and disappointing that the Commission is not paying more attention to the development dimension in the EPA talks,” van Drimmelen told IPS.

The EU Civil Society Contact Group, which bands together environmental, anti-poverty, human rights, trade union and public health activists, had urged that the Berlin Declaration should bind the Union to several concrete measures. In particular, it asked that the EU’s trade and agriculture policies should be reformed by 2009.

Ten years ago, the Commission issued a publication boasting that Europe’s colonial era is “behind us”.

Marjorie Lister, a lecturer in European studies in Britain’s University of Bradford, regards that statement as misleading. She points out that several European countries still have ‘dependent’ territories outside their own borders.

Twenty such territories are covered by the Cotonou Agreement.

Signed in Benin, west Africa, in 2000, this accord underpins relations between the EU and the ACP grouping. It replaced the Yaounde and Lomé conventions, which, according to many EU officials, kept Europe’s relations with Africa to the purely economic.

“Links between Europe and the ACP were always post-colonial and political links, despite the convenient fictions often invoked by the European Commission that the conventions were solely economic, neutral or non-political,” said Lister.

Andrew Mold, an economist with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, says the effects of colonialism can still be seen from East Timor to Darfur. Although colonialism has hampered economic development in poor countries and created a legacy of failed states and horrific conflicts, “there is no objective reason why the EU as an institution should feel prisoner to the history of its member states,” he added.

In his new book ‘EU Development Policy in a Changing World’, Mold notes that the Union has tended to see its links with poor countries as “more enlightened” than the foreign policy of the United States.

“One particularly revealing fact is that while the EU spends the equivalent of 20 percent of its combined defence budgets on development aid, the equivalent figure for the U.S. is only 3.5 percent,” he said.

Nonetheless, he warns that this should not give the EU any grounds for complacency.

“The damage done through policy coherence in other areas – such as requesting excessively onerous concessions in trade deals or condoning abusive fishing policies of member states – can potentially far outweigh the benefits accruing from development aid,” Mold added. “The first development rule should be ‘do no harm’. And, regrettably, on a number of scores, the EU does not currently pass this test.”

Whereas development was for decades the EU’s main policy towards the wider world, the Union’s decision-makers have spent much time since the end of the Cold War considering how they can have more far-reaching foreign policies, with a strong security dimension.

These policies have led to the Union commanding peacekeeping missions in Congo and the Balkans. Yet they have not yet enabled it to apply effective pressure against mass violators of human rights.

Some commentators have noted how a European community formed in response to the carnage the continent witnessed in the 1940s is today failing to take robust action against the alleged genocide being carried out in Sudan.

Although the EU’s foreign ministers have expressed concern about events in the west Sudanese province of Darfur more than 50 times since 2004, they have not imposed tough sanctions against the Khartoum government such as an oil embargo or asset freezing. This is despite how at least 200,000 people have been killed and more than two million uprooted, largely because of outrages perpetrated by government forces and the Janjaweed militia, which Khartoum has reportedly assisted.

“While the 50th anniversary is surely a time for celebration, it is also a time to reflect on one of the underlying reasons for the formation of the EU: the commitment of the nations of Europe to the prevention of genocide and crimes against humanity,” said Lotte Leicht, the EU director with Human Rights Watch.

“After the horrific crimes of the Holocaust, the world vowed ‘never again’. But that vow seems terribly empty in view of what is happening today in Darfur.”