Debate: year anniversary of the Barcelona Process and the Southern Neighbourhood
Date: TUESDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2020
Speaker: Josep Borrell Fontelles
Language: EN

Well, I don’t want to be gloomy today, but I have to say that the situation in our southern neighbourhood has in some aspects worsened. We haven’t achieved some of our objectives, and the challenges have been growing faster than our collective response to them. Let’s face reality. The challenges have been growing faster than our capacity to respond to them.  In defining our response, we are not starting from scratch. We have a vast array of political dialogues and grassroots work undertaken over the last 25 years with the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean, which you are now chairing. It was created during my mandate as President of this House and is an extremely valuable institutional framework, but we have to seize the new opportunities, the need to build more resilience and to fight the pandemic, and to increase trade and boost development. We had a ministerial meeting with our southern neighbours in Barcelona last November and this discussion gave us some ideas that I would like to convey to you. First, we need to have an inclusive approach as we develop greater economic autonomy. Some prefer to say sovereignty. I don’t mind what it is, but it needs to be more engaging on climate change and digitalisation. We use these two words so much that we are going to lose them. Second, we need an investment plan, building on the success of the External Investment Plan, but the needs are so big that we cannot expect to fulfil all of them with public money. We need private engagement to create jobs, especially for youth.  We should answer the calls of these countries. It’s time to act. We need to speak with one voice. Often we don’t do that and we pay the price of our divisions. I want to stress the need to focus our help on their youth. They need a peaceful and prosperous future. The demographic trends show them becoming younger and younger at the same time that we are becoming older and older, and this is going to create a gap that will push migration. The only way of facing that is to boost development at the same pace. But we don’t have adequate funding. We must admit that we don’t have enough resources from the national budgets. We absolutely need to develop private investment.  Finally, most of the regions cannot be addressed only bilaterally. They have to increase their regional and subregional cooperation. Only 5% of the trade among the countries of North Africa is trade among themselves. They don’t trade among themselves. At the same time, the gap in revenue per head is increasing. I think it’s now ten times higher in the north than in the south. If you compare both trends – the trends on revenue per head and the trend on demography – it is clear that we are going to create a big incentive for migration that, I repeat, can only be faced by increasing massively investment in the region. Then there is more bad news. The price of oil has been decreasing, and for some countries which depend a lot on oil exports this has created a big structural deficit on their public accounts. If it is just a matter of the conjuncture – a couple of years – they can resist, but if it becomes a structural issue and the price of oil remains low for a long period of time then the economic situation will be unsustainable. This is one of the consequences of the big shift that climate change policies will create on the wealth of nations. The stock of oil is a wealth that depends on its price, and its price depends on demand, and demand depends on the climate policy that we are going to follow. So we have to be ready to help diversify the economies of some of these countries and so they are not strongly dependent on oil exports, as is the case for some of them.  In any case, we have to be more committed to our partnership with the Mediterranean. It has to be stronger than ever because it is needed more than ever and, 25 years after the Barcelona Declaration, in Barcelona in November, all the states from the northern and the southern Mediterranean represented there reaffirmed this commitment. I am sure it will have the help and the support of the European Parliament.