DEVELOPMENT-GERMANY: Bringing Rich and Poor Countries Closer

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Jun 12 1999 (IPS) - Germany’s technical cooperation is now aiming at bringing poor and rich countries closer, says Erich Stather, a state secretary (deputy minister) in the federal ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, reflecting on the effec ts of globalisation.

A reorientation of technical aid is necessitated by the fact that globalisation holds out both risks and new opportunities, he said.

While some countries have benefited from globalisation and made rapid progress, others are at the losing end. “At the same time, the gap between the poor and rich countries has widened. Bridging this gulf presents a great challenge which can be confro nted by strengthening international cooperation,” argues Stather.

This, in turn, calls for using development policy in general and technical cooperation in particular as an instrument of a global structural transformation.

Such a change must promote sustainable development and ensure international peace, adds Stather, who also heads the board of directors of the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), based in Eschborn, near Frankfurt, which employs more than 10,000 people and operates in 130 countries.

According to the agency’s annual report released end of May, GTZ received an equivalent of some 805 million dollars last year from the government budget, or nearly 20 percent of Germany’s official development assistance (ODA), both bilateral and multilateral.

German ODA has however been declining over the past years. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Germany’s ODA comprised 0.26 percent of the country’s gross national product (GNP) in 1998 and 0.27 percent the year before.

“It is unacceptable that a country economically as robust as Germany should be spending only 0.26 percent of its gross national income on official development assistance – in stark contrast to the target of 0.7 percent recommended by the United Nations,” said Bernd Dunnzlaff, spokesman of the Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development.

“The level we have reached now is the lowest since 1982, when ODA amounted to 0.48 percent,” he added. The European Union’s average is equivalent to 0.36 percent of its 15 members’ combined GNP.

Dunnzlaff blamed the centre-right government of chancellor Helmut Kohl (1982-98) for this decline.

Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, minister of economic cooperation in the new Social-democratic-Green government, is keen not only to halt the decline in ODA but also to provide more funds for ensuring sustainable development and peace – which he says is also for the benefit of Germany.

Indeed, according to a report by a Munich-based independent Institute for Economic Research, bilateral and multilateral official development assistance helped secure 240,000 jobs in Germany.

It is against the backdrop of the Development Cooperation ministry’s new credo that Gerold Dieke, one of the three managing directors of the GTZ, says: “Our job has acquired more of a political dimension.”

Subsequently, more than 50 percent of some 2,730 GTZ projects worldwide focus on providing consultancy to governments and semi- official institutions and organisations.

“The state plays an indispensable role in shaping the framework conditions conducive to development-friendly structural transformation,” adds Dieke, explaining the rationale behind cooperation with government and semi-governmental institutions.

This, he says, would help prepare the terrain for NGOs to launch successful projects.

This view is challenged by the Association of German Development NGOs (VENRO), an apex body of some 90 major voluntary agencies, set up four years ago.

“There are several areas in which actually the GTZ does not have to be involved, areas encompassing sustainable development, clean environment and democratisation,” VENRO chairman Peter Molt says.

GTZ’s activities listed in its annual report are wide. Four examples: consultancy on administrative reform to Benin, support to Sri Lanka in implementing programmes aimed at boosting private entrepreneurship, assistance to Venezuela and Bolivia in reforming their criminal laws, and advice to the Czech Republic to pave the way for its entry into the European Union.

GTZ has also evolved “development partnerships with business and industry” to make up for declining ODA which, in terms of aggregate assistance provided by all donor countries, amounted to 51,648 million dollars last year.

The new partnership, says Dieke, has encouraged private investments in developmental sectors and facilitated flanking measures of technical cooperation.

Another new dimension technical cooperation has acquired relates to crisis prevention and resolution, which involves emergency aid to those immediately affected, without however losing sight of sustainable development objectives.

Dieke lists the assistance provided by GTZ last year to the victims of hurricane ‘Mitch’ in Central America as an example of the agency’s capacity to help effectively in case of need.

GTZ is also involved in relief aid to the refugees from Kosovo. In addition to setting up camps, greater emphasis is being placed on organising and coordinating aid measures for the entire Balkan region.

According to Dirk-H. Hoppe, head of the GTZ’s South-Eastern Europe Division, the work done by the agency from Tirana “essentially involves coordinating available human resource capacities and incoming aid.”

In other words, GTZ sorts out customs, storage and distribution hurdles while building waste-disposal systems and a field hospital for refugees.

GTZ experts also helped in the disposal of some 250 tonnes of highly toxic pesticides stocked in Namibia for more than 10 years. This was part of a cooperation scheme that involved unprecedented financial contributions from South Africa, which had acknowledged its responsibility for a transaction in the 1980s that l ed to the problem in Namibia. END/IPS/raj/ak/99)