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EUROPE: Most Countries Fail to Increase Aid

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, May 22 2008 (IPS) - Over half of the European Union’s 27 governments failed to increase the amount of aid they gave to poor countries between 2006 and last year, according to a new report.

Despite promises made in 2005 to ratchet up their assistance to the world’s poor, the proportion of the EU’s collective income allocated to development aid fell from 0.41 percent in 2006 to 0.38 percent in 2007. Eighteen EU countries decreased their aid levels: by 10 to 30 percent in the cases of France, Britain and Belgium.

Concord, an alliance of 1,600 anti-poverty groups, has estimated that if present trends persist, the EU will dole out 75 billion euros (118 billion euros) less in aid to the poor than it had promised by 2010. In a study published May 22, it warned that the slump in aid could imperil the realisation of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals of drastically reducing the most extreme forms of hardship by 2015.

“Broken promises cost lives,” says Moussa Faye, direction of the Senegalese branch of ActionAid. “If you live in Senegal, where one in eight children dies before reaching his or her fifth birthday, aid means the difference between life and death.”

The report urges that when the EU’s foreign and development aid ministers meet next week (May 27) they should sign up to a legally binding timetable, committing each of them to specific aid increases.

Britain, the Nordic countries, Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands have indicated that they would be in favour of such an idea. But most of the remaining EU governments are against it. The latter include France, which will hold the EU’s rotating presidency in the second half of this year, and the bloc’s most populous nation, Germany.

The Concord report finds that many EU governments are “distorting” their donations to the poor by including forms of assistance that most anti-poverty activists do not regard as genuine development aid in their official statistics.

Some 5 billion euros of the 46 billion euros that the EU gave in development aid last year went on cancelling debts incurred by poor countries. Although Concord argues that debt relief is an essential tool in fighting poverty, it claims that it should be additional to development aid.

In some instances, Spain and the Netherlands included transfers designed to benefit their own firms as debt relief. Both governments count the cancellation of export credit debts as development aid. Such credits were granted to companies as a kind of insurance against the risk that they would not receive payments owed as a result of their investments in poor countries.

The aid statistics were also “inflated”, the report says, by including 1.8 billion euros spent on educating foreign students in Europe in them. For France and Germany, such expenditure constituted about one-tenth of their declared development aid.

According to Concord, such aid can often bring greater benefits to the wealthy than to poor countries as a large number of foreign students work in Europe after graduating.

A further 850 million euros spent on asylum-seekers in Europe was included in the aid data, too.

“Flying (out) refugees that have been in European detention centres home cannot be considered aid,” said Núria Molina from the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad). “This is not what European citizens expect.”

Molina also expressed concern about how as much as 40 percent of EU development aid may be used in technical assistance such as fees for consultants, training or research.

“Technical assistance is not bad in itself,” she said. “But it is overpriced, and most of the time it responds to the political priorities of donor countries.”

The Concord paper notes that technical assistance contracts tend to be awarded to European firms, rather than being used to support those from poor countries. The U.K. government, for example, has granted 80 percent of all such contracts to British firms in recent years.

Justin Kilcullen, Concord president and director of the Irish organisation Trócaire, said: “We want to see our governments recommit to our promises and lead the world’s donors in terms of delivering to the world’s poorest. This is not just about targets. It is about real people. It is a matter of life and death, and there is no time to waste.”

He argued that gender inequality “cannot be allowed to become the forgotten issue” in poverty alleviation.

While more than 180 governments worldwide have made various commitments to addressing discriminations faced by women, many development aid strategies drawn up by EU governments lack a gender focus, the report says. Only seven EU countries – Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Spain, Sweden and Britain – are found to have “serious and meaningful” policies on addressing the links between gender discrimination and poverty.