ITALY: New Govt Asked to Deliver on Development

By Sabina Zaccaro Reprint | | Print |

Sabina Zaccaro

ROME, Apr 14 2008 (IPS) - Civil society groups are asking the new Italian leadership to prioritise official development aid. Italy&#39s credibility is at stake, they say.

Assistance from European industrialised countries to developing countries dropped from about 48 billion euros in 2006 to 46 billion euros in 2007. The aid from Italy declined 3.6 percent from 2006 to last year.

The 3.93 million dollars in Italian aid in 2007 amounted to 0.19 percent of its gross national income – well below the promise of 0.51 percent by 2010 and 0.7 percent by 2015, according to data released Apr. 9 by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

But within the statistical decline there is an improvement that has been welcomed.

"If we don&#39t consider debt cancellation (which in Italy is required by a law on bilateral debt cancellation since 2000), the resources allocated by Italy to official development aid (ODA) have risen in real terms by 46.7 percent since 2007; a growth that places Italy immediately after Spain – which is at 47.6 percent," Raffaella Chiodo, coordinator of the campaign for debt cancellation Sdebitarsi, told IPS.

One of the long-time battles of this campaign is to make a clear separation in accounting between resources for dropping the debt of poor countries, and those for aid.

According to the group Sdebitarsi, part of a wider civil society group working for development cooperation, the Stati Generali della Solidarietà e della Cooperazione, this increase "represents a turning point, and is due to the commitment of Romano Prodi&#39s centre-left government towards poverty reduction and international cooperation, and the reform of the current structure of aid pledges."

Before Prodi, the government had steadily reduced the development aid budget to 0.13 percent of the gross national income (GNI) in the five years from 2002 to 2006. The development budget had been set to 0.20 percent of GNI when Silvio Berlusconi became prime minister in 2002.

Patrizia Sentinelli, who handled aid finance during the 20 months of Romano Prodi&#39s government, told IPS that in 2007 her ministry had to allocate "910 million euros only to cover Italy&#39s previous debts as donor to international institutions, left unpaid by Berlusconi&#39s government."

The money went to The World Bank (410 million), the Global Fund for Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria (130 million), international humanitarian organisations (225 million), U.N agencies (140 million) and a European development programme (five million).

"Of course, 0.19 percent allocated to ODA is so little, and so far from our target," Sentinelli told IPS. Italy&#39s funding for international military operations is roughly 2.0 percent of the GNI, according to official figures.

"What the new government should bear in mind is the necessity of coherence between all the policies related to development aid, something we often miss, and that the quality of aid is important as much as the quantity," Sentinelli said.

"We ask the new government to follow this virtuous trend," Chiodo said, "and to increase the volume of aid and strengthen other related policies, such as trade, in line with the U.N. millennium development goals."

Pointing out the strong electoral weight of development aid issues, the Italian office of Oxfam International argued in a note last week that the new government must give clear-cut indications of a regular increase of resources for aid to achieve the promised 0.7 percent.

The Berlusconi camp does not see it quite that way. "Development aid and cooperation are key instruments of foreign policy, but we do have to overcome the logic of assistance that is typical of the centre-left culture," Alfredo Mantica from Alleanza Nazionale, a party allied with Berlusconi told IPS.

"Aid is intended to drive the economic and social development of the countries we are helping, and this is a long-term process that cannot be linked to contingencies," he said. "If we consider that development is linked with the internal political stability of a country, all the peacekeeping activities that contribute to stability must be considered cooperation activities as well, even from the point of view of funding," Mantica said.

"Development aid is a form of &#39investment&#39, it is not simple aid," he added. "And like every investment, it takes time to analyse each aspect."