Britain’s International Development Secretary, Clare Short, has warned the European Union that she is considering seizing back control of the country’s £700-million contribution to Europe’s international aid budget, in protest at the squandering of money on wasteful, politically driven projects.
Unless the EU focuses its £3-billion aid budget on tackling global poverty, Short wrote in The Guardian, Britain and other member states can spend the money more effectively independently of Brussels.
”The European Commission’s development programme has the potential to be an enormous force for good,” she argued. ”Instead it is an embarrassment.”
Short believes that Europe is wasting its aid budget forging political alliances with middle-income countries in the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe.
”Too often the political consensus reached by the council [EU Council of Ministers] and the European Parliament is to maintain spending at historical levels on regions simply because the EU has a general political interest there.”
Short believes some member states regard the aid budget as a source of political patronage rather than a force for achieving internationally agreed anti-poverty goals.
Europe spends just 38% of its aid in the world’s poorest countries in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, down from 70% 10 years ago. Short says if the decline is not reversed, she will pull Britain’s money out.
”My personal view is that we should demand a massive improvement in European Commission programmes and a return to at least 70% of resources spent for low-income countries,” she says. ”If this is not achieved, we should demand renationalisation of the aid programme. If the European Commission can’t add value to the work of member states then this is what the principle of subsidiarity dictates.”
Aid campaigners have singled out Europe for being one of the slowest of major donors to respond to crises such as the famine developing in Southern Africa.
Despite attempts by Chris Patten, Europe’s external affairs commissioner, and Poul Nielson, the development commissioner, to streamline Europe’s aid programme, Short says its procedures are ”too slow and too complex” and EU development legislation is ”Byzantine”.
Earlier this year Short told MPs on the House of Commons international development committee how she had met a local government official in Tanzania who begged her not to seek EU support for his water project. ”He told me that if he was promised money from the EU, no other donor would support his project, but the money from Brussels would never arrive.”
A reformed EU aid programme should be focused on the internationally agreed anti-poverty goals of halving poverty, getting all children into school and reducing child and maternal mortality, Short says. — (c) Guardian Newspapers