Mr President, the world today is more interdependent than ever before. Problems are shared problems: poverty, hunger, military conflict, immigration, transmissible diseases, ecological disasters and the like. Efforts to solve them must be coordinated and shared by all. Here the question of development aid has become more important than ever. Now is exactly the right moment, to my mind, for the Commission to have produced its communication to the Council and to Parliament, which we are debating today. The report I am presenting today, on behalf of the Committee on Development and Cooperation, is the fruit of work and contributions from political groups and from my fellow Members, for which I am particularly grateful and appreciative. As we know, the European Union and its Member States constitute the world’s leading donors of government development aid. The traditional mechanisms of the European model have not, however, allowed the desired aims of cooperation to be achieved with complete success. It is difficult for us to ensure that the results are monitored or to assess them accurately, because the implementation of the programmes and projects is dispersed among both national cooperation agencies and fixed procedures which tie the receipt of aid in different ways to the acquisition of goods and services obtained by means of that aid in the donor countries. According the World Bank’s figures, released here in this Chamber during a speech by the bank’s President, Mr Wolfensohn, the untying of aid would result in a reduction of transaction costs by up to 25%. We therefore welcome the Commission’s initiative, which may help to enliven the debate on this issue. That debate is currently being conducted among Member States and multilateral organisations. They are far from reaching an agreement which would be binding on all parties, and on the main donors in particular. I am convinced of the need, in this debate, to uphold the idea that aid priorities should suit the interests of recipient countries. That idea would seem almost too obvious to any observer, but it is not currently being put into practice. As a result, some European countries play a significant part in cooperation as official aid donors, but the money they make in return for delivering that aid exceeds their own contributions to the aid programmes, sometimes by a long way. This practice is known to all of us, I believe, and it is clear proof of a degree of cynicism among the donor countries – in other words, our own countries. We must make an effort, therefore, to try and remedy this state of affairs. Of course, events do not take this kind of turn through a deliberate and evil desire for them to turn out badly, but for a whole range of reasons which cannot be gone into here. The main thing is that we use the experience we have acquired to push for these ideas to be implemented, bearing in mind certain considerations, such as those mentioned in paragraph 4 of our report, in order to ensure that our objectives are achieved and certain undesirable effects avoided. In other words, for example, it would be helpful if the Commission were to bear in mind the need for horizontal and geographical or regional budget lines to be treated equally, so as to introduce and guarantee open, transparent calls for tender, which do not always come about. These calls for tender will apply to all Member States and candidate countries, all developing countries and all developed countries, on condition that they are reciprocated by third countries and approved by the recipient countries. I will conclude by making express mention of a request made by many developing countries and NGOs. That request is that priority be given to the award of contracts to local suppliers or service providers in both the recipient country and neighbouring countries in the same region, on condition that provision is made for sufficient training to ensure that the projects are brought to a satisfactory conclusion rather than left frustratingly unfinished. The reasons for this are many and plain to see; it would be almost too obvious to list them, but they can be summed up by evoking the desirability of contributing to the development of local markets in those countries.

Political group: PPE-DE